Following the Thread

Last Wednesday, I visited Julie upstate. We’re hoping to make it an annual thing. Her house is one of the most beautiful homes I know — filled with colorful, eclectic artwork, yet simple, modern, open, and bright. Their deck looks out onto their huge field, where the two German Shepherds enjoy running. It’s the perfect knitting/reading/tea-sipping spot in the mornings and early evenings, and their pool invites you in for the hotter hours of the day.

Of course I brought a knitting project, and Julie had hers. I finished the baby bear bonnet for Elena, something I’d been meaning to knit for months (sorry, Ana!). I love baby knits because they knit up so quickly! And this one is just so cute.

As I was knitting, though, I stumbled a few times — there were a couple of abbreviations that weren’t in the pattern’s glossary, a few instructions that were unclear. I was very attuned to it because my first night there, Julie and I had watched a podcast where the designers of this pattern explain how, when they began translating their patterns from Danish to English, a knitter gave them some feedback about how their American customers would need far more information than their Danish customers ever would! So it was funny that, even as an experienced knitter, I found the pattern wanting.

“Just do what the pattern says,” Julie told me, repeating the words her knitting teacher says whenever she gets stuck at a particular part.

So that’s what I did, asking her advice whenever I stumbled across another part. By Friday morning, the bonnet was complete!

On Sunday morning, back in my bed at my parents’ apartment, I was struck again with some mid-morning insomnia, and started scrolling through knitting patterns on PetiteKnit’s website to distract myself, thinking about what I will knit for my niece this fall, and my best friend’s baby due in early September.

As I fell into a “scroll hole” on her website, I came across her About Me page. There, she explains how studying medicine for 10 years impacted her work as a knitwear designer: “The scientific method of writing an article is in many ways the same as that of writing a pattern. My supervisor at university told me that a methodology section should be written so that anyone else would be able to do the same. The level of information should neither be too high so as to interfere with the meaning, or too low so as not to be adequate. In many ways writing a pattern is exactly the same. I write down each step in a way that anyone with a knowledge of the techniques should be able to arrive at the same result.”

I couldn’t help connecting her philosophy of pattern-writing to teaching, a career in which we are constantly writing patterns (our lesson plans/projections) and giving instructions.

I started to ask myself: How clear are we making the instructions that we give students? As a former dual language teacher, I often think about instructions, both verbal and written — it’s important to use simple language, give clear and concise steps, provide visuals. I am often hyper-aware of when I and other teachers falter here. It’s necessary to pre-plan so you can really think about the task and any materials students may need. But it doesn’t always pan out that way!

My insomnia brain started ruminating further.

Okay, clear instructions, yes, but what should we be giving these clear instructions about? What tasks should we leave up to the students? I started thinking about interactive modeling with Responsive Classroom and the start of the school year. The routines that we teachers decide on and the ones we co-create with the students.

And what should students themselves be able to write instructions for? Routines? After completing a project or solving a complicated math problem, shouldn’t students be able to explain what they did in a clear way? And if they can’t, why not? Is it something related to them not exactly understanding what it is they did, or is it more about the act of writing instructions (recipes, patterns) that they need more work on? We all have those students who, when explaining what they did, give you a simple, vague sentence, and then those students who explain what they did with far too much detail!

I don’t exactly have the answers to my many questions, but I found it interesting following the thread from knitting patterns to classroom instructions.