Sunday, May 1, 2005
Talking isn't always communicating
This could be a huge topic. A blog subject, even. The whole blog. Nothing else. My dip into these waters comes from botching a simple topic in a crochet class I taught yesterday. In the continuing although perhaps futile and maybe even foolish effort to maintain a degree of anonymity for myself and those I mention, I won't tell you the topic itself, but suffice it to say that it isn't particularly difficult and is in fact much simpler than what the same group caught onto immediately a week ago. I don't know if it was the rain or the recent full moon or what, but boyoboy did it not work. Part of the problem was that I tried to address each student separately; that meant that others heard what I said and tried to absorb that information on top of his/her own . . . and it didn't work at all. "Don't add any chains" just isn't the same as "chain five", you know what I mean? Course, one is perfect for one place and one is perfect another. "Fifteen stitches" does summarize three singles, three chains, three doubles, three chains and three singles - and doesn't mean "fifteen doubles", but maybe chain stitches seem like they don't even exist. I started my class prep thinking that the group had been so quick the previous week that I didn't need to do my usual almost verbatim topic-sentence outline. I could just talk and everything would be communicated perfectly. I was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. Let that be a lesson to me.
Labels: people, reflections
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