I started teaching summer quarter yesterday. I’ve redone assignments for one of my classes in an effort to adopt new strategies that better communicate the concepts I teach to students who are very different from me in experiences and how they interact with the world.
I only adopted using a smart phone in December. Although I completely get the efficacy, I don’t feel a lot of need to use mine. I am as likely to forget to throw it in my purse when I leave the house as I am to forget to charge it when I return. But I like having it, I just don’t use it a lot; the things I use it for help me understand why others are so addicted to theirs, but for me it is mostly a tool. All this is my way of saying that I get why things change, and I also get why things don’t.
I have been actively trying to change my ways about many things lately.
Successful New Strategies
- I am regularly doing my hamstring stretches,
- I am consulting my calendar and planning my days,
- I am scheduling my time to make sure I make the time to do things I need and want to do,
- I am not starting too many new things,
- I am scheduling project deadlines,
- I am mapping out major steps in projects,
- I am reading books that have information I want, and
- I am looking at my list of things to do and choosing what is realistic to accomplish.
Not Quite Successful New Strategies
- I am not practicing drawing and/or hand stitching,
- I rarely knit during the day, I still mostly do it at night,
- I often fail to tackle things I don’t want to do,
- I constantly forget to work from my marketing calendar and just do whatever occurs to me (like this blog post),
- I continue to hang onto good intentions,
- I am not consistent about blogging and doing social media, and
- I resist plotting realistic strategies to get or keep projects on track.
I’m sure there are other things in both categories, but you get the idea.
I wrote my newsletter today and it made me think about why we resist change–even good change. Below are two knitting things I think we should think about changing, but likely we won’t. I changed them in my work, but I am likely to remain fairly unique in my approach, because there are so many reasons why not:
New Strategies for Writing Stitch Pattern Directions
You know how stitch patterns worked flat often have extra stitches? This one here is a multiple of 10 sts + 4. The extra stitches act to even out the pattern. I think that the extra stitches should be treated the same on every row so when a chart is made all the stitches are in a vertical repeat. Stitch patterns are not always (or very often) written out with that consideration of stacking the pattern. This can make using stitch markers irrelevant as stitches shift from row to row. To my mind this makes no sense because a “repeat” should always be the same stitches–and markers! I rewrite every stitch pattern I use so that you can use markers and your stitch repeats will stack.
New Strategies for Charts
While I was writing my class materials for my Craftsy class the Content Editor coined the term “Action” charts to describe my charts. Thanks Kim! It beautifully describes what my charts are–descriptions of the action you are taking. So we had to have a name for the other charts and so used Standard charts. Standard charts effectively show you what your final fabric looks like. This is a great feature, but I find it difficult to knit from, so I came up with Action charts. Wendy and I worked to come up with a few refinements which are easier to see than to explain.
Okay, I’ll just work on my own New Strategies. Have a wonderful weekend.
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