some glow stick fun

The ancient (well actually very modern) art of rave glow sticking is wrought with intricacies. At my friend’s request, it was my task to teach her those intricacies in one afternoon.  And after some smacking of oneself with the glow sticks, mostly on her part, she managed to learn two tricks! It was a very fun experience!

The basics  (swinging the glow sticks in parallel circular plans at your sides) were easy enough to teach and for her to learn.  Then the fun started. I found it a lot harder to teach the more complicated moves of “the butterfly” “the three beat weave” and the “five beat weave”.

At first I had no idea how I was going to teach someone how to do something fairly complicated then I noticed that an efficient way to teach her. This method was to first do it myself at normal speed, then at a slower pace and then to break it down in my mind and have her practice each step.

then the fun started!

The hard part was breaking down each step in my mind into easy to understand examples.  If found myself thinking back in my head to how my friend had taught me and then trying to transmit that information to her. I almost found it harder to be on the teaching side than on the learning side. Instead of just showing her the move and then saying “do this” I broke it down into steps. At first I kind of started off in a more “look, then do this” approach to no avail. It was important for her to see the moves in real life from the start to get a good overview in her head of the goal. Then she was able to see how each step related to the whole move. After that I would periodically show her the whole move, the steps and I even tried to do what she was doing in order to good mental picture so I could best correct her form.

I really learned a lot about the process of teaching and how to best transmit knowledge. I found myself putting myself into the shoes of the learner a lot to best teach. I did this mainly by remembering how I learned myself. It seems like a big part of learning and teaching, is knowing how to teach according to the audience and to the activity.  You might be able to say “watch and do” for something say like a jumping jack but for something like diving or glow sticking that wouldn’t work. I liked exploring the different forms of transmitting knowledge other than “here it is on a blackboard now do the problem”. I know for this activity that would definitely not have worked.