Handy Dandy!

When I was teaching in public school we had to participate yearly in the dreaded 'in-service' meetings, most of which are now but a vague memory involving massive printed handouts, overhead projections, and uncomfortable seats. However one or two points managed to stick to some surface of my brain while doodling in the margins of my lesson plan notebook wondering when snack time was. I do remember a certain session involving learning styles: how we each learn in our own unique ways but that we don't often encounter teachers who realize or understand that, or who teach to those various learning styles, with a variety of teaching approaches. We all then took a psychological test to see what our particular learning style was, because however we learn information is usually the way we teach it. I'm sure it's way more complex than this but the three basic learning styles are Audio, Visual, and Kinesthetic. In the simplest of terms that means: Tell me, Show me, or let me Do it. Whenever you listened to a lecture in college, along with 200 other sleepy/hungover students, and copiously scribbled down the pithy wisdom or soul-deadening facts from whatever professor was assigned that unhappy crowd, you were demonstrating audio learning, unless you were already asleep. If the professor suddenly turned on a slide show or a movie, say of some epic historical battle, it might become a little more interesting to those visual learners, and if you had a really ambitious instructor who would divide you into armies and stage a mock battle then most likely the Kinesthetic learners were having a jolly old time. (See any Harry Potter film for a demonstration of these styles). So when we, as teachers, took this test, some results were entirely predictable. The orchestra and choir teachers tended to be Audio learners, the Art teachers were Visual learners, and the P.E. teachers were Kinesthetic learners. I, on the other hand, was a bit of all three, but mainly Visual and Kinesthetic, which considering my background in Art and Dance isn't really headline news. I like moving. I like doing things with my hands. I was raised by parents who never did much with their hands or had much interest in athletics. No hobbies or crafts going on. No tossing the ball with Dad or doing activity games with Mom. My Dad was not the go-to guy for home repair and my mother never learned to sew or engage in crafty hobbies. I, on the other hand, couldn't get enough of the so-called feminine crafts. I learned sewing, then knitting, crocheting, needlework, cross-stitch, even macrame. Anything remotely artsy fartsy I jumped in to try it. I made paper dolls, sewed Barbie clothes, constructed shoebox houses, embroidered pillow cases, and  illustrated diaries. After the Seventies, among feminists, these skills fell out of favor for awhile, considered old-fashioned and oriented towards keeping women as happy homemakers. But my hands never listened to what I was 'supposed' to be doing. Neither did my brain. My hands wanted to make things. I took pride in making things. And recently, there has been a whole upsurge in these skills again. Quilting, knitting, crochet, and sewing, with newer, hipper yarns and fabrics, and clever, modern designs, have taught a new generation how satisfying the hand made object can be. It's a nice balance to technology. My fingers know their way around a Google search or a digitally altered photo, but they can also whip out a scarf in an evening and wear it the next day. And then I can dance a little jig. Kinesthetic me.