Welp, here goes - how to teach people stuff

[kitewithfish]

I volunteered to give a couple of my co workers a basic "intro to knitting" lesson today over lunch and help establish a group hang out with crafters who nibble at lunch once a week. So I have some plans and some hopes and also some concerns!  

Have you ever taught someone something? were you super prepared about it beforehand or just relying on your own expertise to carry you thru?

Comments

[recently_folded]

I've taught people to knit informally in the course of a yarn bombing project. One thing that I found was very individual is which learners felt more assured with straight vs circular needles. For full novices, I offered them each to hold and then they chose which felt more secure and easy to manipulate. That seemed to reduce the confusion and insecurity once yarn was added. Which is best kept to the larger sizes, worsted being, I feel, best because it's large enough to grasp without being unwieldy, and if knit on a slightly-too-large gauge needle, easy to see mistakes in.

One thing that I learned from teaching was that new knitters often want to get a death grip on the yarn and tie their fingers up in knots trying to tension the yarn. I learnt many years ago from some writing by Elizabeth Zimmerman to let go of my tensioning and just direct the yarn with my yarn-holding hand, relying upon the needles to impart needed size to my stitches. By encouraging new knitters to ease up, I think that they fight their knitting a lot less and drop fewer stitches while struggling to get a needle into them. Even if it's sloppy-loose, that's more helpful for learning the moves and they will find their own tension with time.

Beyond that, I think that knitting is fairly easy to convey because there are few set initial skills (CO, knit, purl) and then it's practice, which permits more individualized help in the form of troubleshooting. So really, it was a fairly organic process of letting the ultimate skill, knitting, as well as the comfort of the student guide the process rather than trying to shape the content beforehand.

That's pretty much in contrast to more formal instructing I've done, that did take the kind of prep you're contrasting.

[kitewithfish]

You know, I think you're right - in the end it was only two people (another two had threatened to come) and there was a good deal of yarn strangulation going on. I ended up doing exactly that - teaching a cast on, teaching knitting, and then correcting and helping folks just hold the yarn and turn their work. We didn't even get to purling XD - Maybe next week!