Tuesday, June 30, 2009

And now for something completely different.

I have run away from home for a week, and I'm having a marvellous time! I enrolled in a class at Olds College, and I'm spending five days learning how to turn wool into yarn. It's the first time I've taken this much time away from home and family responsbilities in at least the last ten years.

About a year ago, my husband found a spinning wheel at a garage sale and came home to ask me if he should buy it. We went back to check it out and I became the woner of a spinning wheel that I knew absolutely nothing about. A friend gave me some indroductory lessons, and I have been spinning in my spare time since then, but I knew that to get really good at this, I needed more focused instruction. When I found out about these classes, I knew it would be a wonderful chance to learn morte about spinning, and to enjoy a break.

Learning a new skill (or improving an existing one) is a challenge. Often as a home educating mom, I have been exasperated with a child who isn't getting the lesson, because it seems simple to me. Going into a setting where I'm struggling to put together skills and information and achieve the correct result puts me where my child usually sits. It's not easy for the learner. It's not straight-forward to take yesterday's knowledge, and add a couple more bits, and do a new thing with that. And it's good to sit in the other chair and relive those feelings of frustration and realiuze that the way I'm feeling about trying to make fluffier yarn is exactly how my daughter is feeling about fractions. That's one of the extra lessons I'm learning this week.

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