There is a surefire way to teach a 7-year-old kid a lesson that lasts a lifetime.

Take a metal yard stick and whack him across the back of his left hand while he is using scissors to cut out a shape on light blue construction paper for a classroom art assignment.

Be sure to look at him sternly as you state out loud so everyone in the class can here that “only stupid people use their left hand.”

What did I learn in that first grade classroom at Cirby School in Roseville back in 1963? If you guessed I forced myself to be right-handed when I wasn’t, that would be a correct answer, but not the only answer.

Fast forward three years after we moved to Lincoln and my mom took me to the doctors for a reason I can’t recall. But I do remember the question Dr. Cy Serna asked my mom after he had me lift up my left hand. “Verna, have you or anyone ever hit your son on the back of his hand?”

She was a bit taken aback given she had never struck me or knew anyone who had. The doctor then asked me the same question.

I was more than a bit uneasy about answering, but I did at my mother’s insistence.

I said it was my first grade teacher.

She asked how it happened.

I explained it was on the day right before the photographer from The Press-Tribune came to shoot photos in the classroom.

My teacher was retiring and the accelerated reading group, of which I was part of, was going to be in a picture while she taught us.

She was well-known. Not only was she the California Teacher of the Year in the 1950s but she was known for her reading teaching techniques.

Mom asked why I didn’t tell her.

My answer was essentially because she had told me as we checked the classroom assignments for first-graders posted on the window of the office on the Friday before Labor Day — the day before school used to start in California — how lucky I was to have the teacher whose class I would be in.

Mom made it clear if anyone ever hit me again, regardless of who it was, to tell her.

The final verdict from the doctor was I apparently received a fractured bone from it all but it seemed to have healed.

The lesson, or should I say lessons, I learned?

 • Don’t assume everything you are told is 100 percent true even it is from someone in a position of authority.

 • Don’t make snap judgments of others you barely know based on personal biases or assumptions that may not be correct.

• Even experts schooled in “research” et al can get it wrong as “facts” unfold.

The last point first.

The teacher who was retiring was almost 70. She was raised in a time and era where some in professional positions in education and human behavior believed those who were left-handed were not as smart.

Today, you read the opposite is supposedly true.

Against all that, there are studies that basically conclude there is no automatic advantages either which way.

My first grade teacher believed what she wanted.

And despite a small cottage industry today trying to establish left-handed people are somehow smarter, I believe it is far from being a factor either which way.

The snap judgment of that one moment in time in the first grade was ludicrous on the part of my teacher on several levels as she wasn’t being consistent with her own actions. After all, she was the one who determined I belonged in accelerated reading. I am sure a heck of a lot of the kids in the class who weren’t in accelerated reading had more right-handers among their ranks than left-handers.

As for the first point, I was taught before I even started school to listen to teachers, period. An extension of such sentiment is that teachers must be 100 percent right. No one is infallible or perfect. You have to weigh what you are told. It doesn’t mean manning the ramparts every time something doesn’t sound quite right.

Rote learning may work with basic math, the alphabet, and such but get much beyond that and shades of gray start popping up in a perceived world of black and white.

If you thing that is hogwash, almost all the great minds for centuries — and everyone else for that matter — thought the world was flat.

Allegiance to 100 percent rote learning would never have led to the Industrial Revolution let alone the Space Age.

Making assumption someone is dumb because they are blonde or nerdy because they wear glasses is in the same category of passing judgment on others based on whether they write — remember that quaint thing done with primitive objects known as pencils and pens — with left or right hand. Stereotypes and such are just that, stereotypes.

To be clear, I had a lot of teachers that were major influences. But we are the sum total of the good, the bad, and the ugly in our lives when it comes to what we experience. You can learn just as much from the bad as the good.

That said, nothing comes as close as being hammered into my brain in my first seven years of public schooling than the second or so it took my first-grade teacher to swat me with a metal yardstick and essentially tell me I was stupid in front of my classmates.

It didn’t define me.

But it certainly drove home the point that trust needs to be earned and that the world isn’t seen the same by those convinced left-handed people are different and those who are left-handed who know that is not the case.

—  This column is the opinion of Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Courier or 209 Multimedia. He may be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com