Too Stupid to Tie His Own Shoes

[drwex]

This year in school they're teaching K to tie his shoes. Good, practical skill that. Pygment has gotten him some lace-up sneakers (as opposed to the velcro-close ones we've had in past) and he's digging right in. Except...

This morning we're in a rush and he comes to me for help with tying them. Now "help" means "show me how to do this" not "do it for me" (a notable difference between 6-year-olds and 3-year-olds, in case you were wondering). So here I am trying to show him how to tie laces and I realize several things:

(a) I've never taught anyone to tie their own shoes.
(b) doing this in mirror-reverse is harder than just tying something for someone else (like laces on the back of a dress or corset)
(c) I have no frelling clue how to explain what I'm doing. I resort to breaking it down to step-by-step with us passing the laces back and forth because I can't do it without laces in my hands, which leads me to realize
(d) the way I tie my own shoes is full of wasted steps and things I oughtn't do, like picking up one of the laces to make a loop when I'm just going to drop that loop anyway.

All day today my own laces have been coming untied, which I suspect is a side effect of me actually thinking about typing my shoes, rather than just tying them.

Which goes to prove I'm clearly too stupid to tie my own shoes.

Comments

[tisana.livejournal.com]

I realized--first back when they thought I was a dunce in geometry and later when my mother who'd been driving 40 years tried to teach me to drive stick--that it isn't how good you are at a skill that makes you a good teacher. It's knowing how to break it down into steps, as you said. In that case, it's often those who had difficulty learning something, not those who picked it up easily, that are better teachers--because the slower learners got a better look at the process, and making mistakes makes you less likely to forget later.

I also figured out I should never be a teacher, since I'm terrible at breaking things down. I'm decent at learning by copying (in which case, mirroring can be confusing), but not everyone is, and it's not a fair expectation.

Anyway. It's probably a good bet you don't remember the process of learning to tie your shoes. I only kind of do, and what I remember is that 1) I had difficulty, and 2) the fact that there's more to one way to do it confused me considerably, because no one thought to explain that part. Gods, I loved it when, shortly after, velcro became popular on shoes.

Um. Yeah. Sympathies for both of you.