Trenchwork

I rarely say much these days about teaching, and I suppose that’s due in part to the peculiarity of the entire adjunct-in-a-foreign-environment situation.  Being an adjunct is simply weird enough, but compound it with a foreign system (note that “foreign” here means foreign to me) and you feel remarkably like you’re walking through a carnival fun house in someone else’s shoes.

But I find myself wondering about students now and then, and their expectations of educational programs, education in general, and us as teachers in particular.

One of the classes I just finished with required 4 novels over a 16 week period, a short essay of 1200 words, and a final exam.  Not much, truth be told, but it’s not my course.  And I suppose that’s another part of the reason I don’t talk much about teaching;  very little of what I’m doing is actually my own course design these days, and I miss that incredibly.

However, while I’m accustomed to students complaining about the workload, a recent conversation caught me off guard simply because of its blatancy.  The student hadn’t read the last novel, and had no intention of doing so.  S/He’d attended the lecture and therefore “knew what the story was about.”

Right.

It was useless to explain that the lectures only provide context and analysis issues, and certainly don’t cover everything in the novel, although I did try.  I even resorted to the “you probably won’t manage the exam if you don’t read the text” desperate appeal, but since the student had cleared an earlier exam without having read the text, it wasn’t precisely convincing.

I don’t know which is more distressing:  the idea that a student actually COULD pass an exam without having read a text (and no, it wasn’t my exam), or the fact that a student registers for a sophomore/junior-level literature class with no intention of  reading the literature.  “I’m studying literature.  Just tell me what the story says; I don’t have to read it.”

There’s something horribly wrong with that discussion, and I find myself torn between frustration, incredible irritation, and a certain depression.  The latter because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it; it’s neither my system nor my course.

Sigh.

Getting OFF the soapbox and moving on to fibery stuff, you’ll have to wait for fleece until the next installment.  I’m determined to get off the computer for a couple of hours tonight and do a bit of spinning.  But I do have a  little to show you.

First, I promised to teach a class of about 47 students (in 3 groups, I think) to spindle.  It’s just an orientation, and is the primary reason why I’ve been spinning a few funky and novelty yarns.  And yes, I have a couple to show you, but first there’s dyeing.  Allowing 2 ounces of fiber per student, there’s six pounds of Brown Sheep mill ends roving from Carol Lee at The Sheep Shed Studio.  It’s perfect fiber for this kind of thing; it’s cheap enough that no one is traumatized if it ends up fairly well destroyed, but has a good handle and makes for a nice yarn.  It’s great for training and getting new folks started, and I’ll admit I’ve worked my way through about 15 pounds of it for just that purpose.  The only drawback to the mill ends rather than the regular rovings is that the roving isn’t necessarily consistently wide; some sections are thinner than others.  But it still works, and the kids will do fine with it.

Scott (their teacher) told me that they seem to be into bright colors at the moment; he noticed that as they got into their weaving segment. I took him seriously.

This is a fairly bad photo; I couldn’t find a place to photo all of it where there was halfway decent light! And you certainly don’t get a sense of the scale of things, but there are 87 braids there, and each braid is made up of a 6-foot long or longer length of roving. MOST of the colors are done in batches of 10, except for the crayon-rainbow batches, and I think there are about 20 of them. There is ONE subtle, earth-tones batch just to show that all fibers don’t have to be glow-in-the-dark shades.

We have a pepto-pink with splashes of yellow (which don’t show in the photo):

There’s a flame orange with splashes of yellow (which also doesn’t show), the brown, and an orange (which should have been red) with splashes of pepto-pink:

A slime green (much brighter than here) with splashes of blue:

A blue with splashes of red and purple, and a host of primary-color rainbow fibers:

and

and

And last, a yellow and purple (which looks like black/navy in this photo):

Whew!

Do you reckon they’ll be happy? At least this gives them a choice! Or several.

I have, however, realized that braids are truly horrible ways to show fiber. It’s impossible to see how the colors pattern themselves across a roving; you only get a sense of the colors and not the structure of those colors. Normally I wrap the bundles into birds’ nests, but transporting 87 nests is a lot messier than transporting 87 braids. So, for the sake of organization, you’ll have to settle for the braids.

Spinning has been a bit eclectic, and the goal has been to gather enough of a variety of yarns to be able to show the students (teens, remember) that there are options and handspun yarn can look like any number of things—and need not look like rag yarn if you don’t want it to. So, in addition to what’s already in the stash, I’ve run up these . . .

First, I realized I had no singles in my stash. Everything is plied. I know why I don’t; I don’t want to have to worry about skewed fabric or finding a pattern specifically for those yarns. I’m lazy. But I need to at least show them that you CAN spin a single and, given certain considerations, knit with it. So first there was this:

This is Icelandic, hand-dyed by Spunky Eclectic in “Snow Squall.” It’s spun a bit thick-thin, as softly as possible, and for a total of 271 yards.

And then there was this:

This is another Spunky Eclectic fiber club fiber. It’s Romney, hand-dyed in the “Goblin Eyes” colorway. There are 8 ounces and 244 yards, and I deliberately spun it thick-thin. The dye work is lovely here, and the photo doesn’t do it justice. The colors look like velvet and are much richer in real life.

Both singles are low-twist and as softly spun as I could manage. Much to my surprise, I found that the Icelandic needed more twist than I expected—and fulled much more readily than I expected. Only a bit of grace and a lot of luck saved me from having a felted mass for that one, and determined to get it right, I span and fulled the Romney next. It came out nearly perfectly. The Icelandic, on the other hand, has three knots in the skein simply because I underestimated how much twist was actually necessary and then had to reconnect. That’ll teach me to get cocky!

Then, however, things got funky. First I ran up this:

Four ounces of Spunky’s “Pie for Everyone” Falkland. (Are you seeing a theme here?) It’s plied with Anchor’s glitter viscose crochet cable yarn/thread, decidedly thick-thin, and there are 46 yards.

Then I used the other half of “Pie for Everyone” to do this:

It’s a thick-thin, plied back on itself with feathers, felted balls, and silk fabric. I suspect the silk bled a wee bit and is the reason the yarn is a bit more mauve than the other “Pie,” but I don’t mind it. There are 71 yards.

And finally, a simple, dignified novelty yarn.

I had about 4 ounces of a red superwash, so plied it with metallic thread and sequins for a worsted-weight very soft yarn with a bit of glitz and glitter. This one actually surprised me a bit, but I rather like it. For the record, the WPI = 12, and TPI is about 7. There are 131 yards; enough for a scarf of some sort eventually.

And that, friends and neighbors, is the last of my novelties for a little while.  The rest of the week is going to be spent indulging in fleece.  Lovely fleece.