Students don’t just learn from their teachers. They also learn about their teachers. After all, sitting together in a confined space makes it possible to pick up on habits, mannerisms, and little quirks that others might never notice. And it can happen surprisingly quickly, too.
Teacher and TikToker @megmelonsdiary recently uploaded a video explaining how one of her students was able to tell she has ADHD almost immediately.
The clue? How she holds her pen—a detail that sparked a much bigger conversation online about neurodivergence and the way it manifests.
Holding a pen is something you normally do without thinking
Image credits: Hannah Olinger / Unsplash (not the actual photo)
But this teacher learned that there might be more to it than meets the eye
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Image credits: megmelonsdiary
Her video has been viewed more than 2 million times
Many people said they hold their pen the exact same way
So far, science hasn’t proven a direct or universal link between specific pen grips and ADHD
The girl who noticed her teacher’s unusual pen grip likely heard about its supposed link to ADHD online, since people have been talking about it for at least a year.
Dr. Sermed Mezher is a doctor (GP) from the United Kingdom and a popular medical educator and social media content creator.
He has addressed these claims in a video of his own, saying, “We do know that ADHD can affect your motor skills, and one study showed that 59% of people with ADHD have something called dysgraphia.”
Dysgraphia is a learning disorder that affects a person’s writing. It can make it hard for someone to write clearly by hand. Depending on the specific case, it can also make it difficult to spell. It’s a neurological (nervous system) disorder that affects the fine motor skills needed for writing or spelling and can impair the ability to do math.
People with dysgraphia may also write slowly and use an uncomfortable grip that can cause hand cramps, and have a hard time spacing things out on paper.
“One sign of this can be an abnormal pen, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Dr. Mezher adds.
“Sometimes, people struggle to translate their thoughts to actual words to put on ... [a] page, and sometimes they just struggle with the fine motor grasp of holding a pen, as we know that the last stage of it is usually this tripod grasp.”
“So ... it’s plausible ADHD could make you hold a pen in weird and wonderful ways, but there’s no established ‘ADHD grip,’ and there [are] more pieces to the puzzle to get a diagnosis.”
But there’s been quite a discussion in the comments
And there’s always that one person
