Today I had the great pleasure of teaching again at Gibson Mill, Hardcastle Crags; a National Trust property in a beautiful setting near Hebden Bridge. So, not far from my beloved Brighouse. 🙂
I love teaching. There are very particular things in the way I teach that I get great pleasure from. A key pleasure is creating a warm and friendly atmosphere in class. I do my best to quickly learn the names of my students, so that I can address them personally throughout the class, and name them as I talk about their progress to the rest of the class. That's a key strategy in how I teach; warmly acknowledging each student's success in mastering the skills at hand. I want my students to leave class knowing that they succeeded, and feeling good about it, so that they have the confidence to continue to use their new skills on their own.
Today's class was about stranded knitting, aka 'fair isle knitting', although that term only truly belongs to the traditional knitting patterns of Fair Isle. Most of my students had never attempted stranded knitting before, and certainly not with carrying both yarns at the same time. All were English knitters, and had never used a continental yarn hold.
Due to a little lapse in communication, all had brought straight single-point needles and no yarn to class. Luckily, I had brought plenty of spare circulars, and lots of oddments of Shetland yarn. But they were nearly all long circulars. So, as well as continental yarn hold, two-handed stranded knitting, spit-splicing, wrapping floats, and Russian join, today's students also learned magic loop. Not bad for a 3-hour class?
I left Gibson Mill with that bounce in my step that comes from knowing I have achieved something special. Just as it did when I was a schoolteacher, this matters much more to me than the pay!
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