Learning Styles and Sewing

Some students and faculty at Mansfield University (PA) where I teach. I'm standing to the far left behind the guys in red.

I've been back to work for three weeks - it's fun but it takes time away from my sewing. Eventually I'll get my schedule back on track and settle into a routine. My biggest problem is that I've totally changed one of my classes. It's a senior (college) course in advanced public address. I used to approach it as pure public speaking - which is the way the course description is written. But thanks to some language ambiguity, I've been able to tweak it a bit and turn it into a training and development course.

This approach is fun for me (I wanted to be a corporate trainer) -- as I teach my students about learning and instruction, I find myself thinking about how we learn to sew. This was especially true when my class spent an exciting 75 minutes talking about learning styles. I found myself using examples from my experiences teaching a friend to drive my car (a manual), my own trials and tribulations learning to cook, and what I saw when I taught sewing to total beginners.

If you've never thought about how you learn, you might be surprised to find out that we all approach it a bit differently. So what I plan to do over the next week or two is help you identify how you learn. Once you realize your particular style, you might be better equipped to select classes and to find ways to compensate for poor instruction. Or even better, you will begin to understand that friend of yours who seems to be on a different planet (like his/her sewing room is organized with fabric sorted by color while yours is a scattered mess of five projects with no end in sight).

Tomorrow I'll start with a quick overview of the styles. Get ready...