One of my goals for this year has been to spend more time creating low-stakes art. In service of this goal (I don’t do SMART goals for myself. This particular goal is framed as “continue to pursue growth in some things in both fine and performing arts.”), I try to spend some time every day coloring, sketching, painting, cooking, or just otherwise playing around with art supplies. My most recent obsession is knitting – I learned when I was 8 and every few years find myself deep diving back into all things knitting. And despite being on my fifth knitting rabbit hole, I have to relearn the basics from scratch every time.
If you are unfamiliar with knitting, all you need for the following extended analogy is this information: knitting involves two basic stitches: the knit stitch (slightly easier) and the purl stitch (slightly harder). Most beginner patterns of things like washtowels, scarves, and blankets are made up of some combination of these two stitches.
I have committed to my brother and sister in law that I will knit them a cotton blanket for their second wedding anniversary. In my preparatory ‘sketches’ for this project, I have been making small dishtowels where I can practice the skills I will need. First, I watched a tutorial video of how to start a project and how to do the simple knit stitch. Despite buying a kit that was called a beginner-friendly ‘learn to knit’ kit and despite technically having been knitting on and off for 26 years, the ‘beginner friendly pattern’ terrified me. So I decided I was going to first knit a washcloth flawlessly in all-knit-stitches before then trying to mix knits and purls before trying to follow a specified pattern. Once these 3 skills had been learned and reinforced, I decided, I would progress to switching colors, and THEN I would MAYBE be ready to start a blanket.
So, I began. But I kept making mistakes. Perhaps predictably, my first washcloth was riddled with holes. So I stuck with the very beginner all-knit-stitch garter stitch (no purls) for a few more washcloths. 5 dish cloths filled with progressively fewer holes later, it struck me; Instead of aiming for flawless stitching before moving on to the next level of my self-designed knitting curriculum, why don’t I look up how to fix my holes? After some googling, I found this video explaining six common knitting mistakes beginners often make. The next time I found a hole in my knitting, this time working on a shawl, I could think back and diagnose which of the 6 mistakes applied here and, administer the proper remedy. Now, on my 9th washcloth and first shawl (at least in this latest era in my knitting), I learned the seedling of critical thinking, at least as applied to knitting.
I had done thousands of standard knit and purl stitches before I started to voluntarily watch videos about mistakes and troubleshooting. I worked thousands more before I actually tried to implement my learnings on an actual hole. I have, so far, corrected one hole and unraveled once (4 rows), because I felt confident the second mistake was an unfixable one. So. I have attempted fixing two of my mistakes.
If I had a knitting tutor and I wasn’t attempting to be self-taught, I would perhaps have been guided sooner to attempt some of these less basic strategies. And our jobs as teachers in the classroom is most certainly to hold kids’ hands as they climb the ladder of rigour and challenges and ensure that they don’t fear failing.
At the same time, whatever challenging task we want our students to perform must be anchored on a strong foundation. If I had watched the videos on mistakes or even been taught mistake-fixing without knowing how to knit and purl correctly first, the lesson would have felt like a completely unintelligible language without cognates. If I had only knit one stitch in my life before learning about mending, I would have been afraid of working on my washcloths, or gone much more slowly, now armed – or weighed down – with the knowledge of all the ways I could go wrong. Automaticity would have felt further away and knitting would have felt much less fun.
In our academic subjects, I think that folks often forget about practice, knowledge, and self-esteem as some of the foundational building blocks upon which critical thinking1 is built.
Oftentimes, when I go into the classroom, I see teachers expect students to, metaphorically, design knit patterns without asking them to produce a single stitch. To extend my analogy, here are some vignettes of what kind of logical leaps I see in some classrooms:
- I see teachers teaching the ‘principles’ of designing a good sweater using “how key points”, like ‘ensure fit’, ‘consider weather appropriateness’ and ‘strive for uniqueness’ and then asking students to design a knitting pattern without ever having knit someone else’s design to completion.
- I see lessons where students are taught the most common mistakes in beginner knitting through a video and then,in a picture or written scenario, have to diagnose the appropriate mistake.
- Teachers routinely skip knitting practice where students actually knit and instead facilitate conversations where they use children to answer questions like “what is similar between knitting and drawing?” or “what mindsets can we learn from knitting?”
I often see teachers dismiss knit stitches as boring, or practice as “traditional” pedagogy and not progressive enough. But let me be clear: none of the exercises above have anything to do with critical thinking or knitting expertise. None of these exercises will help students be a knitwear designer, a test knitter, or even capable of knitting a scarf as a gift to a loved one. In other words, these exercises are a complete waste of time.
Alright. Time to step out of the analogy.
We have fundamentally lost our way when we pit knowledge and skill against each other in a fencing match. We have fundamentally misunderstood how learning works when we overvalue “21st century skills” to the extent that we design exercises like the made-up ones above to try to end-run around knowledge and get to “critical thinking.”
It doesn’t work. Often now, in my work, I see the consequences when someone lacks the capacity they need to access their goals.2 The knitting student who goes through those activities mentioned above? What would their experiences be if they later joined a knitting circle? Knitting communities are some of the warmest, most encouraging, and inclusive groups I have seen, but I still think there might be a raised eyebrow, a suppressed giggle, or a reluctance to pass on a pattern for a student from the above classroom to test or a knot to unravel. What happens to a student who went through the science or history or math or English version of the activities mentioned above? When we skip steps, we deny our students the building blocks they need to enter the communities our students might want to join as adults.
- I have a lot of issues with both Bloom’s Taxonomy and with the buzzwordification of critical thinking, but I shall put those ideas aside for the moment.
↩︎ - As I continue to teach young people, I see the tremendous harm we do when we neglect or devalue the building blocks of a discipline. I have seen students enthralled or inflamed by arguments in history without knowing basic facts; have seen young adults lead workshops for other teachers, assigning or citing research papers whose arguments run exactly counter to their training because they had misunderstood the article. I see folks all the time thinking criticism is synonymous with criticality. I encourage folks who are interested in this interplay between knowledge and critical thinking to read Sam Wineburg’s essay on Bloom’s taxonomy and this article on literacy in subject areas – two articles that have greatly shaped my thinking.
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