Teaching Thoughts.

I've been thinking about teaching again recently - because of teaching some more again, in different settings, and because of an upcoming conference where I will do and give a short presentation about the topic.

Teaching is fun, and fascinating, and has its own special challenges and rewards. There are some things that are easier to teach and some that are harder. Personally, I find that the hardest technique to teach from the many textile techniques that I have on offer is filet netting. The knot, once you have it in your muscle memory, is not hard to do. It's a nice, fluid set of motions resulting in a nice tight knot that has the correct size every time.

However... there is no good way to split up that set of motions, at least I have not found any way to do that yet. To form the knot, you have to do all the motions and all the passes over and under the different threads, and you have to do all of them correctly. So learning that knot requires you to memorise the whole sequence in one go, which, according to my experience teaching this, is a significant challenge.

I remember learning how to do that knot myself; I used the instructions provided by Therèse de Dillmont in her book, the Encyclopaedia of Needlework, and I read them bit by bit following the sequence for many, many times until the whole process had settled in my brain. 

So - teaching long, complex (sort of) sequences that have to be done in one block is definitely a challenge - but it is something that can be taught. Other things just cannot be taught (as in directly giving instructions or passing on sequences of movements) at all. In some cases, the difference between individual bodies means that every body needs an appropriate solution for a given problem; one may work for many or most of them, but not for all. In these cases, you can only assist. 

My favourite example for this is tensioning the yarn when knitting Continental style. For most knitters (according to my own anecdotal evidence of looking on hands), wrapping the yarn around the left forefinger works very well. Many knitters wrap twice, some once, some even three times, and the number of wraps may also depend on the yarn. So this is the way how to tension yarn that most people get shown and taught when they start out knitting. 

However... for some people, it does not work. That includes me - if I wrap the yarn around my forefinger, it just won't slide at all, and I get higher tension all the time, or if I jerk more of the thread loose, uneven tension. For me, it works wonderfully to just weave the working yarn through the fingers of my left hand: over the ring finger, under the middle finger, and over the forefinger. When I was learning how to knit, finding my personal way for tensioning the working yarn was actually one of the biggest challenges, because nobody showed me that method; I stumbled across it when trying out different possibilities.

So as a teacher, you can be aware of the possibility that a given method or process might not work for everybody because of physical reasons - and then you can, if you know of alternatives and options, tell about the other possibilities that the student could try. But of course you cannot slip into their skin and try out the options yourself to see which one feels best, and you might not be able to demonstrate the other options well as they might not work well, or at all, for you. In the end, they will have to find their own solution by trying out things. 

Have you come across similar things - in learning a skill, or in teaching? I'd love to know!