Metacognition

I am in the middle of making a simple little toddler-sized sweater for one of the little guys, and I have found a book that claims to guide the process for you. While the designs are cute, and there are a lot of variations that one can apply to the basic architecture, there is one thing about it that is driving me nuts.

I loathe, disdain, and despise bottom-up teaching because it completely annihilates any semblance of critical thought, and usually learning, for that matter. We do a lot of it in schools, because it is easy. When you are dividing fractions, you flip and multiply them. But why? What is the overall concept behind this? We know that squaring something means multiplying it by itself, but why don't we learn that it's the same idea as making a square with that number of units on a side, and what you're getting is the area? Why on earth would any knitting pattern book that purports to help you style your own knits begin with the premise that you need to do this in the tight confines of their yarn and their gauge, without giving you any hint in the way of actual measurements for each of the sizes listed? A one- to two-year size isn't given in inches, it's given in a number of stitches to cast on (if you have the right gauge in their chosen yarn).

Fortunately for all of us, you do not need to be the least bit bright to reverse engineer the measurements from this approach. From a top-down approach, you are trying to find the inches around. To do that, what pieces of information would you need? They tell you gauge, and they tell you the number of stitches to cast on. What mathematical operation would you need to use in order to figure out the overall inches used by that many stitches? If 20 stitches gives you 4 inches, then how many inches would 70 stitches give you? See, now you know how to actually figure out the problem-solving yourself, rather than having to remember that I told you to divide.

What is described in this book is not designing, it is cookbook. And I don't like cookbook. I will never teach someone how to do email by giving them step-by-step instructions. ("First click this, then this, then...") Invariably, they mess up one step and are petrified with confusion, because they do not have an overall guiding map in their head of what they are doing. These are the people who claim they could never knit/bake/grow stuff/use a computer because they could never remember all the steps involved. Because the approach they were taught was never "here is a forest, and there are a lot of trees in it," they were taught "tree, tree, tree, tree, another tree, etc." A lace pattern would be hell if all we had to go on was pages and pages of step-by-step instructions in text form. The sheer amount of yarn-overs would fell the heartiest of us.

So in my own corner of the world, I teach, and I teach my kids and my students how to think, and figure things out, and look at the big picture, and hope that they can carry a little bit of that out into the world with them.