The More You Know, the More There Is to Learn

The More You Know, the More There Is to Learn

I've just come back from Poland, where I've been on a knitting retreat with six other women, so seven of us altogether, and three of us were there as teachers.

Each of us taught a session, but we also took part in the others, which meant that sometimes I was the teacher and sometimes I was sitting there learning alongside everybody else. And I absolutely loved that.

There was never really a point where the three of us were The Teachers, sitting at one end dispensing our "great knitting wisdom" while everybody else listened and did what they were told. Thank goodness, because I don't think I would have enjoyed that half as much.

Instead, as the days went on, we all learned from each other. Someone knew a clever way of doing something, someone did something differently, and there were tips and tricks being passed around all over the place. When someone couldn't quite get something, someone else would help, show them what they'd done, explain it another way or just sit alongside them while they had another go.

And the sessions started to build on each other too.

They were three separate workshops, taught by three different people, but what we'd learned didn't stay neatly in its own workshop, which I think is where it started to get really interesting. We carried things into the next session, combined ideas and experimented with them.

For me, that's one of the very best bits of teaching.

In my session I showed everyone how to add beads to their knitting. I could have taught them the technique, everyone could have made the thing I'd planned in the way I'd demonstrated it, and I suppose I could have gone home thinking, excellent, I've successfully taught a beaded knitting workshop.

But they didn't. They ran with it.

Carol took what she'd learned and added beads to her granny square. She then decided she didn't actually like them and planned to take them out again, which I loved just as much. She'd learned the technique, tried it in her own work and made her own decision about whether she wanted to use it.

Jenny added beads to her Tunisian crochet. The technique I'd shown them suddenly wasn't just something that belonged in my workshop anymore, they were using it in their own work, in ways I hadn't told them to.

And that is what I want when I teach.

I don't really want somebody to leave thinking, I can make the thing Nessa showed me how to make. I want them to leave thinking, Oh! I know how to do this now. What else could I do with it?

Because that's when it becomes theirs, and that's where it gets interesting.

There were other sorts of discoveries happening as well. Shirley discovered that she could crochet better than she'd imagined she could, which might sound like a fairly small thing amongst everything else we did, but actually I don't think it is.

Sometimes learning isn't about adding another technique to your list of Things I Can Do. Sometimes it's finding out that the story you've been telling yourself about something you can't do isn't actually true.

And after everything I've been writing about recently, I couldn't exactly miss that one, could I? We stamped on quite a lot of those thoughts in Poland.

I can't do this. Stamp.

I'm no good at this. Stamp.

Everyone else can do it. Stamp.

Not in a false, jolly, “Of course you can!” sort of way, because sometimes things ARE difficult. Sometimes you don't get it the first time. Sometimes it takes somebody explaining it differently, showing it again, helping with the fiddly bit or just encouraging you to have another go.

But struggling with something doesn't mean you're incapable of learning it, and I don't think anyone was allowed to sit with that thought for too long before somebody else challenged it.

And while all this knitting and crochet and learning was happening, something else was happening too. We were becoming friends. We laughed together, we cried together, we had so much fun, we talked about things that had absolutely nothing to do with yarn and, knowing us, probably talked about yarn when we were supposed to be doing other things.

By the end of those few days we felt safe with each other. And I don't think we talk enough about how important that is when we're learning something.

Because learning does make you vulnerable. You have to be prepared to say, “I don't know”, or “I don't understand”, or the one I think adults sometimes find particularly difficult, “Can you show me again?”

It's much easier to say those things when you know nobody in the room is going to think you're stupid for asking. It's easier to experiment when getting it wrong isn't embarrassing, and it's easier to try the thing you already think you can't do when there are people around you who will help if it all goes horribly wrong.

It's easier to be a beginner when being a beginner is safe.

And that applied to the teachers just as much as everybody else. Being a knitting teacher doesn't mean you've finished learning to knit. There isn't a finishing line, or a final level where a little bell rings and somebody presents you with your Proper Knitter certificate and from that point onwards you know everything there is to know.

The more I learn about knitting, the more knitting there seems to be. There are techniques I've never tried, traditions I know very little about, different ways of constructing things, holding yarn, making stitches, shaping fabric and fixing mistakes. Even things I've done hundreds of times can be done differently, and somebody somewhere will almost certainly have a way of doing it that I've never seen before.

There was definitely a time when saying “I don't know” felt much harder to me than it does now, particularly when I'm supposed to be the teacher, because surely I'm meant to know?

But actually I think one of the loveliest things that experience gives us is being comfortable enough to say:

I don't know. Show me.

Not knowing something doesn't wipe out all the things you do know. Learning from somebody else doesn't make you less knowledgeable, changing your mind because you've discovered another way doesn't mean you were doing it wrong before, and being the learner for a while doesn't take away your right to be the teacher later.

In Poland I was both. So were the other teachers. Actually, so was everybody, because you don't need the word teacher in your job title to know something that somebody else doesn't.

The knowledge didn't travel neatly from teacher to student. It went backwards and forwards across the room, and I think that's part of the reason we all grew so much over those few days. Yes, we learned actual skills, plenty of them, but there was also confidence growing, curiosity, and a willingness to have a go and see what happened.

And I grew too.

I didn't have to prove that I deserved to be one of the teachers by knowing everything. I could teach the things I knew, learn the things I didn't, ask questions, change my mind and be interested in what everybody else brought to the room.

Perhaps that's one of the things I've come home with. Being a good teacher isn't about being the person who knows the most. I think it's much more about giving somebody enough to start with and then being genuinely delighted when they take it somewhere you hadn't thought of.

And the same is probably true of being a confident knitter.

You don't have to know everything. You don't even have to want to learn everything. You can try something and decide you don't like it. You can learn from somebody who has been knitting for fifty years or somebody who learned last Tuesday. You can know an enormous amount about one thing and absolutely nothing about another.

There is always more to learn.

We came away from Poland with new skills, new ideas and plans for the future, but we also came away even greater friends, and I think that's probably what I've loved most about the whole thing.

Seven people arrived with different skills, different experiences and different things to teach each other, and none of us left knowing everything.

Thank goodness.

Where would be the fun in that?

Nessa

Terms of Use