I Am This Woman

The above phrase is a medical school rubric for simple procedures, such as starting an IV, doing IM injections and other technical work, up to and including invasive surgical procedures. While this model is sometimes disputed for safety and confidence issues, in non-invasive procedures and operations, such as knitting, painting, sewing, baking bread and embroidery, it is in fact an excellent way to learn.

“See one” involves having a role model, preferably in person, to show you what they are doing. In a really good scenario, this person will break down their process into repeatable steps. “I start by measuring the flour/holding the yarn this way/cutting the pattern out.” Etc. Being able to observe someone with competence in the particular skill is important, in a dynamic way, because the brain is going to register a “moving demonstration” much more readily than static images in a book.

There are some folks who are wired in such a way that they CAN pick up knitting or sewing from a book, and there are some books which are excellent for teaching this. But with the proliferation of videos and blogs on knitting, cooking, sewing, it is easy to find a demo that’s easy to follow. Good books for beginners: Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook
and Mason-Dixon Knitting Outside the Lines: Patterns, Stories, Pictures, True Confessions, Tricky Bits, Whole New Worlds, and Familiar Ones, Too.

“Do one” is where the rubber meets the road. Just do it. Pick up the yarn, get your hands into the bread dough, or figure out how you hold the embroidery hoop and just start it. Never mind that you get flour under your nails or prick your finger with the needle. Just get in and do it. In knitting, it’s very instructive to make a mistake and then figure out what you did. Split the yarn and it looks like that… OH! Solution: don’t split the yarn!

“Teach one” is a bit trickier. Not to be elitist, but I think one needs a certain fluidity to the action before you can teach it. So maybe it should be “do a few.” Do a couple of bread loaves — cooled and out of the pans, taste-tested — before you decide you can teach breadmaking. Correct a few mistakes, achieve even the barest mastery of the basics. With knitting, get all the way through a swatch or five, in several different types of yarn. Set a minor goal: I’m going to make something 5×5 inches. I’m going to make a basket weave dishcloth.

Graduating to “teach one” requires that you have the basic muscle memory to hold the needle(s) or knead the dough. Once there, you can turn to someone else in the room and teach them what you are doing.

But that’s really all there is to starting a new thing: observing, trying, practicing, demonstrating. In this model, you are analyzing the actions, doing a hands-on practice, and then articulating what/how to do verbally, which uses several different brain processes that all dovetail into one spanky new skill.

Putting my money where my mouth is, I am going to learn to juggle in 2009. My friend’s husband J claims that I can learn before 2008 is over. We’ll see, but I have my role model, I have a juggling set from a Christmas present, and I have my son to whom I can teach what I’ve learned… so… stay tuned for results of the Great Juggling Project.

I am also teaching my friend and her daughter to knit — though they seem to have some deep dark memory of how to do it because both of them were K’ing down the row in a matter of minutes. My friend’s son is going to teach me to loom-knit, so the learning agenda is full this week. Juggling, loom-knitting, knitting… I wonder what the learning curve on Rock Band is like?