Practice

I've been pondering this for a while now, usually while cleaning stalls because there's not a lot else to do while one is cleaning stalls except think about things. Over the past months, as I've been falling down the various rabbit holes of natural dying (this is on my to do list for summer when the weather is better), weaving, and spinning, I have come across the phrases, "you're dyeing practice" or "you're weaving practice" or "your spinning practice" often enough that I started to pay attention. And once I started to pay attention, I became intrigued.

In this instance, the term "practice" is used in the context of continuing to learn and try things and get better at what you're doing. There is also the element of experiment in there as well. It is a given assumption that the way to learn these crafts is just to try things, to make mistakes (and possibly some ugly items), think about those things you made (both beautiful and ugly), and then try something new again. The idea that you will make something ugly every now and then is a given. It does not mean that you are not a good dyer, weaver, or spinner, it merely means that a particular experiment taught you things but perhaps different things than you initially imagined. What to do with ugly products appears in nearly every book about these crafts. They are a fact of fiber life. Practice doesn't mean perfect, but means more knowledge, always with the assumption that not every attempt at making something is going to go well. 

This all fits so nicely with a book I am currently reading, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. 

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scale and weigh the work of the 'quantity' group; fifty pounds of pots rated an 'A', forty pounds a 'B', and so on. Those being graded on 'quality', however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an 'A'. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the 'quality' group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay." (p. 29)

It seems to me that so much of our current educational thought focuses on the wrong thing. Graded homework and tests encourage a quality mindset; a mindset which is paralyzing. I've seen this in my children. The second any one of them becomes more focused on getting the right answer instead of focusing on the act of figuring something out. they become unable to think, eventually descending into giving totally random answers as their thinking brains shut down and the more reactionary parts of their brains take over. 

Yet real learning requires quantity... experiments, repetition, failure, recovery, and quite a bit of play in the mix to make the whole process enjoyable. Real, deep, honest learning takes place without exams or worksheets created by some outside authority. Instead it might look like building the city of Rome in blocks in the play room followed by creating the Colosseum in Minecraft a little later on. It might mean writing pages and pages and pages of your own work without having to worry about a teacher telling you everything that is wrong with it. It might mean checking out every book on Chinese history because it has caught your interest, though whether you read all the words in those books is entirely up to. 

We spend far too much time worrying about whether a student is doing something right all the time instead of allowing them to figure out things for themselves. We do not allow children the ability to have their own practice of learning. I'm also pretty sure that most adults do not allow themselves to have a practice of something, either.