Put the Pencil in Your Other Hand

I want to start with a story.

Not a framework. Not a statistic. Not a history lesson. A story about a classroom, a crayon, and the most important ten minutes of my education.

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I was in my elementary education program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our professor, Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, a scholar whose work on culturally relevant pedagogy has shaped how educators think about teaching and belonging for decades, taught us in the Teach for Diversity Program. I did not fully understand yet what a gift it was to be in her classroom. I was about to find out.

She told us we were going to do a writing exercise.

We got out our pencils. We were also given crayons. And we were handed those pieces of paper that children get in kindergarten — the ones with a big rectangle saved for illustrations at the top and five lines at the bottom for writing. The topic was something we remembered from kindergarten. Simple enough. I wrote my name at the top and prepared to begin.

Then Dr. Ladson-Billings interrupted us.

We will have ten minutes, she said.

Okay. Ten minutes. I can do that.

We started to write.

She interrupted us again.

Take your pencil. Place it in your other hand. That is the hand you will be writing and illustrating with today.

I want you to feel what happened in that room for a moment.

I am left-handed. My right hand was there to throw frisbees and hold things steady while my left hand did the actual work. Writing with my right hand was not a skill I possessed. It was not even a skill I had considered possessing. And now I was being asked to write a story and illustrate it — in ten minutes — and be graded on my penmanship.

The panic was immediate. Physical. A ripple went through the room. I can’t do this. Frustration. Disbelief. And then ten minutes of the most humbling effort I can remember — ending with a stick figure and one barely legible sentence about what I had intended to write.

But here is what I did not say out loud in that classroom and have never forgotten: in my mind, a whole story was waiting to be shared.

The kindergarten memory was so vivid that, before the instructions, I knew the details I would share and the adjectives I would use to bring everyone into the experience. The story existed completely inside me. (If interested in reading the entire story, I will put it at the end of the newsletter.)

The crayon in the wrong hand was the only thing standing between that story and the page.

And then Dr. Ladson-Billings told us why she had done this.

She had done this exercise to show us — future teachers, credentialed educators, people who would stand in front of classrooms full of children, the ones who would hold power — what it felt like to be a kindergartener. To be handed instructions one by one, without anyone acknowledging the pressure accumulating with each one. To be expected to perform in conditions that made performance nearly impossible. To be graded on something you were never given the proper tools or time to develop. And the burden of proof would somehow land right in that 5-year-old’s lap.

I have never forgotten that exercise. Thirty years later, I can still feel the crayon in my right hand.

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings gave me that lesson in a single classroom session, and I have been teaching from it ever since. This issue is one more place it needed to land.

The Feeling in the Wrong Hand

I think about that classroom exercise a lot when I think about who may be reading this.

The person reading this who wants to do better but doesn’t know where to start. Who has something whole and real inside them — genuine values, genuine care, genuine desire to be part of the solution — and keeps finding that the conditions don’t quite match what they’re carrying.

You have been in the meeting where something happened, and you felt it — a comment, a decision, a silence that landed wrong — and you didn’t know what to say. The words were somewhere inside you, but they wouldn’t come out right. Or they came out wrong. Or they didn’t come out at all, and you drove home replaying it, wondering what you should have done differently.

You have watched a colleague say something and felt the concern bubble up in your bones. Should I have said something? And then said nothing because you weren’t sure enough. Weren’t prepared enough. Didn’t have the right language. Didn’t want to make it worse.

You genuinely wanted to be part of the solution and felt immediately incompetent the moment you tried. Like the crayon is in the wrong hand. Like the instructions keep coming. Like the ten minutes are already running out, and what you’ve produced so far is nowhere near the story you meant to tell.

That feeling is not weakness. That feeling is the accurate response to conditions that were never designed to make this easy.

Nobody handed you a complete picture. Nobody showed you the full history of how the systems around you were built or why they work the way they do. Nobody sat you down before you walked into that meeting and said: Here is what you are about to encounter, here is why it exists, here is what it will feel like in your body, and here is what doing better actually looks like in practice.

You were handed the crayon in the wrong hand and told to perform. And then graded on the penmanship.

That is not a personal failure. That is a gap that was engineered.

And you are not alone in it.

You Are Not Alone in the Not Knowing

Here is something I need you to hear before we go any further.

The discomfort you feel when these conversations come up — the not knowing, the fear of getting it wrong, the sense that everyone else in the room seems to understand something you don’t — that is not evidence that you are a bad person. It is evidence that you were not taught what you needed to be taught.

None of us was given the full picture. We were all handed incomplete versions of history — versions that left out entire civilizations, erased entire peoples, sanitized entire centuries of harm. We absorbed those incomplete versions as truth because they were all we were given. And we built our understanding of the world — of each other, of who belongs where, of what is normal and what is other — from that incomplete foundation.

That is not an excuse. It is a starting point.

Because here is what is also true: you are reading this. Which means something in you already knows the picture is incomplete. Something in you has already felt the gap between what you were taught and what you are witnessing. Something in you wants to understand more fully, see more clearly, and do better more consistently.

That something is the whole story wanting to reach the page. It has always been in there. The conditions just haven’t always been right for it to come out.

This newsletter exists to help create the right conditions.

Not by overwhelming you with everything you don’t know. Not by adding more instructions to an already impossible stack. But by doing what Dr. Ladson-Billings did in that classroom thirty years ago — acknowledging the pressure first, before the performance. Naming what it feels like to hold the crayon in the wrong hand before asking you to write with it.

You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not too late.

You are a person with a whole story inside you, trying to find the conditions for it to reach the page.

That is enough to start.

The Danger of the Single Story

There is a concept I want to leave you with. Not a framework. Not a seven-step process. One idea that has the power to change how you move through every room you walk into for the rest of your life.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls it the danger of a single story.

The consequence of hearing only one version of who someone is, one sentence about a continent, one image of a community, one story about a people, and letting that single, incomplete fragment become the whole truth in your mind. Not because you are malicious. Because it was the only story you were given. Because the conditions never offered you the full novel. Because you read the one sentence at the bottom of the kindergarten paper and thought you understood the illustration.

We do this constantly. To communities. To countries. To the person sitting across from us in a meeting, whose neighborhood or religion or politics or race became the single sentence we applied to the whole of who they are.

It is not that the sentence is false. It is that it is one sentence. Of what could be an entire novel.

And we have been making decisions about children, about communities, about who belongs and who doesn’t, about whose potential is visible and whose is invisible, based on one sentence. For a very long time. While the novel sat unread inside every person, we thought we already understood.

Inside every person is a whole story dying to be shared. Vivid. Full. Real. Waiting.

The story of how they got here. What they were taught and what was kept from them. What they wanted to say and what the conditions never allowed them to put on the page. What they are capable of when someone finally slows down enough to say — I want to hear all of it. Not just the sentence. The whole thing.

We, as a society, tend to move too fast. To make quick assessments. To sort people into categories based on the first line we read about them, and move on. It is efficient. It is also devastating. Because the category is never the person. The sentence is never in the novel. The stick figure is never the story the child was trying to tell.

Doing better starts here. Not with a policy. Not with a training. Not with the perfect words in the perfect meeting delivered with perfect confidence.

It starts with the decision to move on from the single sentence and ask about the novel.

To slow down enough to consider. To hear. To understand. To listen NOT to react, but to learn the whole story.

To recognize that the person in front of you — whoever they are, wherever they come from, whatever single story you have been handed about them — has a whole novel inside them that the conditions have never quite allowed to reach the page.

And that your willingness to make space for that novel — to sit with the discomfort of not already knowing, to hold the crayon in the wrong hand long enough to learn something new — is one of the most powerful things you can do.

Not because it fixes everything. It doesn’t.

But because it is where everything that fixes something has to start.

I have been teaching from Dr. Ladson-Billings’ crayon exercise for thirty years. I have handed it to teachers, to practitioners, to anyone who has ever sat across from me and said, “I want to do better, but I don’t know where to start.”

And every time I tell it, I think about what she gave us in that classroom. Not just the discomfort of the wrong hand. The recognition of the whole story inside. The understanding that the stick figure on the page was never the measure of what the child — or the student, or the colleague, or the community — was actually carrying.

That recognition is the beginning of everything.

You picked this up. You read this far. Something in you was already ready for it — already knew that the single sentence wasn’t enough, already felt the gap between what you were taught and what you are witnessing, already wanted to hold the crayon in the other hand long enough to learn something true.

That is not nothing. That is the whole story, trying to reach the page.

If this resonated — if something shifted while you were reading — there is more. The next issue goes deeper. The community is forming. The full field manual is being built, issue by issue, for practitioners and change agents who are ready to go further.

You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to already know the language. You don’t have to be further along than you are.

You just have to be willing to stay in the room.

You belong here. And so does their story.

The whole story: Laura’s Sparkly Plastic Purple Toy

I remember this like it was yesterday. During the day in kindergarten, I found a wonderful purple object on the floor. It was so pretty and purple that I decided to take it back into the classroom and use it for our art projects that would be taking place as soon as I came back from the restroom.

My new tool was perfect! It created perfectly shaped circles in my clay project and then gave me little circles to add to the plate for more dimension. Other classmates wanted to try it. And the joy that we had at the table, making those small circles, was something I will always remember.

Once art time was over, I put my new tool in my coat pocket to take home and see what else I could do with it. I was so excited for dismissal! My mother picked me up first and then went to my sister’s nursery school to pick her up. I sat in the back with her and showed her my new tool. I told her where I found it, and immediately, my sister yelled out – “Mom! Laura found something on the bathroom floor and brought it home!” Tattle tale… My mom immediately asked to see it, so I reluctantly handed it over to her. She gasped so loudly I thought she was going to pass out!

When we got home, she immediately took me into the kitchen and started washing my hands for what seemed like hours. Once I finally got away from the sink, I learned that my mother had thrown away my new toy. I was so angry with my sister for tattling on me. But, in the end, my sister was the smart one. Because years later, when I asked what had happened to that toy, my mother rolled her eyes and told me the reality of what I had been playing with that day. The fun clay tool I had found turned out to be the discarded end of a tampon.