Agreement Was the Point

I don’t remember the first time I held a crayon. I don’t even remember the first time I held a pencil. But I have early memories of learning to write. We didn’t have preschools back then, at least not in our town. So, it must’ve been in kindergarten when I grappled with a thick, wooden, heavy barrel the size of my favorite Lincoln Log. I tapped into an ancestral caveman instinct to grasp it with my fist—wrapping all five fingers around the black-lacquered finish that accentuated teeth marks and signs of wear and tear.

The thick, blunt black tip looked massive, promising bold, giant lines before it even touched the paper. The intoxicating scent of mimeographed worksheets, still damp from the reproduction process, thrilled the nostrils and forged a tight association between that aroma and achievement. I approached the challenges head-on, tracing dotted lines, circles, and curves alongside familiar objects like houses, oranges, and cats.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to grip the pencil properly. We were taught to pick up the pencil as it lay on the table, with the writing tip pointed at us, by pinching it near the tip with our thumb and our “pointer” and then flipping it back into the web of our hand. It was then that I discovered that the weight and length shifted the center of gravity away from my fingers, causing the top of the pencil to wobble wildly in the air. A few of my peers were taught the proper grip by tucking a cotton ball under their pinky and ring fingers, which forced them to focus on the tripod.

I dragged the instrument across the paper, creating broad, dark, smoky streaks resembling charcoal sketches. The pencil’s large size prompted me to make large, sweeping strokes. My “wrong-handed” friends accidentally smeared their efforts as their fleshy hands blurred their hard work into silvery smudges—a poll tax levied by a right-handed world. Poor chumps.

By the time I’d mastered the “jumbo” pencil, I’d already been eyeing the pencil older kids used—a sleeker, golden-yellow lacquered, hexagonal beauty that stayed put when you laid it down. It was capped with a ferrule, a metal band that clamped the salmon pink eraser, which rubbed out your mistakes better than a Mafia Laundryman.

These were the holy grail of writing instruments for a grammar school kid. And teachers hailed their superiority, instructing parents to “be sure to get #2 lead pencils” because of the steady stream of standardized tests in our future. The grading sheet scanners worked by shining light through the paper or reflecting light off it. It looked for dark marks that would block or absorb the light.

#1 pencils were too soft and smudged too easily. #3 and #4 pencils were much harder and held sharper points, but they produced a very light gray. The early machines couldn’t see their faint marks, defaulting the answer to blank and fueling mountains of student frustration. But the #2 pencil sat precisely in the sweet spot. Goldilocks would’ve been thrilled.

I’ll admit that I found it more than a little unsettling to think that the domain with the greatest influence on my intellectual development—the one that preached meritocracy—rewarded compromise. Not excellence. Not superiority. Not even specialization. Just… balance.

The system didn’t reward the darkest mark or the sharpest precision—it rewarded the one that bowed to the machine. The one that wouldn’t smudge, that wouldn’t disappear. The one that was, in every way, safely in the middle. Not too bold, not too faint—just right. A governing apparatus of stern evaluation built on a nursery rhyme about a spoiled little girl’s sense of entitlement.

It was an arbitrary standard that ruled with an iron fist, as though it had descended from a royal line, or thought it was Nick Saban.

But the fiction ran deeper than finicky machines and institutionally structured grading sheets. Even the tool itself carried a quiet fiction. We called them “lead” pencils, though no one alive at the time—or since—had ever used one containing lead. It was graphite—always had been. We’d been told that pencils contained the one element every kid knew could thwart Superman’s X-ray vision, while all along it was a meager misnomer that simply stuck—familiar enough not to fix, and useful enough to get by. No wonder they snapped so easily.

It stemmed from an honest mistake centuries earlier, but even after the discovery, the error was allowed to stand. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be: Meh, who cares?

The name had become familiar. Textbooks used it. Teachers repeated it. Manufacturers printed it on packages. Correcting it offered little practical benefit, while changing it required effort. So, the mistake survived—not because it was true, but because it was convenient.

Because accuracy wasn’t the point. Agreement was.

In allegiance to the system, everyone used the same words, followed the same rules, and trusted the same unseen mechanisms, like members of a chamber orchestra politely accommodating an accordion. If everyone agreed to call it lead, then it was lead. If everyone agreed that #2 was optimal, then it was optimal. The religion of consensus discouraged anyone from asking whether the standard made any sense beyond the machines that required it. And once applied, the “Heretic” label is hard to shake.

The longer I’ve lived, the more familiar that pattern has become—standards built not on reality, but on compatibility. Not on what is true, but on what is easiest to process, easiest to measure, easiest to scan.

And the modern Church has its own quiet gallery of such fictions—odd traditions no one quite remembers starting, yet they soldier on anyway because the mistake was familiar enough not to fix and useful enough to get by. We pretend that the frequency of Communion observance was copied from an unearthed 1^st-century church calendar titled “Corinth Overcomers Fellowship Connections.” We still follow the same printed order of service in the bulletin week after week, though the reasons for half the items were lost in some long-forgotten committee vote no one bothered to record. The prevailing sentiment continued across time: Meh, who cares?

We still pass the peace with those stiff handshakes, awkward side-hugs, and the defensive “I’m-not-gay” three-slap-and-release back pat that men deploy during a greeting, even though the early church greeted one another with the holy kiss the New Testament commands—a real kiss. On the cheek? On the lips? No one can say for sure. So, we laundered the bold original into something safely middle-of-the-road. You know—so Goldilocks won’t feel uncomfortable.

If everyone agrees to call it tradition, then it’s tradition. Accuracy was never the point. Agreement was. And agreement, once consecrated, rarely needs defending—it does so on its own.

I still check pencils for the #2 out of reflex. They’re familiar. They pass through the scanners without complaint. They earn the quiet approval of the machines. But every so often, I remember the wild, unwieldy weight of that first thick pencil in my small hand—how it wobbled and demanded something bolder than balance.

And I can’t help but wonder what we lost when we decided that “just right” was good enough. Or worse, that it was true.

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This post was previously published on Dan McAnally’s blog.

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