If you’ve ever worked on an earth skill before, you may have become frustrated and impatient and given up. Or, you made a breakthrough and figured it out. Like all skills, when you’ve never done them before even someone with a tiny bit of fluency can appear to be a master.
As I continue to build fluency with Basketry I’ve noticed a few things. Each new basket I make teaches me to pay attention to all the different steps as I work on a basket. Each new basket is better crafted than the one before, as I remember to take the necessary steps to keep it firmly woven together and learn how to manipulate the materials. People with little to no fluency in basketry have told me how beautiful some of my older baskets are, without noticing all the imperfections and design flaws in them. They’ve never made a basket before and so to them, I have some great skill, when in fact I am merely one step ahead of them.
The more I work on all of the earth skills, I realize how incredibly easy they all are to learn if they are first given a good technique “Setup“. Flint-knapping? Easy. Bow-making? Easy. Hide-tanning? Easy. There is a scale that exists that looks something like this: Setup + Time = Fluency. If you have a poor setup you will still become fluent but it comes at the cost of spending more of your time. So much so, that often people give up out of frustration. With an amazing setup, you will greatly diminish the amount of time it takes to become fluent. It limits the frustrations and maximizes the fun.
Of all the aspects of teaching, my biggest obsession is with finding and fine-tuning the most amazing setup for learning to take place. As I previously mentioned, setup takes precedence over all learning. Without a good setup, you won’t be able to carry a lot away from the class. This is why I am so obsessed with setup. I have learned things that I later could not reproduce because I didn’t learn the setup. Even if all I had learned was the setup, it would have been better than no setup with lots of information and experience in the subject, because if you can’t reproduce it, it’s basically useless.
Creating a setup is a lot of work, and often the best setups come from people who have been studying the subject for many years. When you invest your money in an educational institution, you are paying for the staff of that institution to create the best setup possible for you to learn. Going to an educational institution is a trade off. You pay an educational institution and its staff to create the setup for you in order to speed up your fluency.
I had struggled with earth skills for years before I learned about the fluency game and about setup. The more I learn the easier it seems that these skills really are. Many people don’t get involved in earth skills, such as friction fire or flint-knapping, because they fear they won’t be able to do them or have taken a class with a shitty setup and given up altogether. I’m writing this to let you know, it’s not your fault. It was a bad setup. Know there is hope and truth in this technique: “Earth Skills Are Easy”.
Technique: “Earth Skills Are Easy”
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Posted: December 15, 2010 by Peter Bauer
If you’ve ever worked on an earth skill before, you may have become frustrated and impatient and given up. Or, you made a breakthrough and figured it out. Like all skills, when you’ve never done them before even someone with a tiny bit of fluency can appear to be a master.
As I continue to build fluency with Basketry I’ve noticed a few things. Each new basket I make teaches me to pay attention to all the different steps as I work on a basket. Each new basket is better crafted than the one before, as I remember to take the necessary steps to keep it firmly woven together and learn how to manipulate the materials. People with little to no fluency in basketry have told me how beautiful some of my older baskets are, without noticing all the imperfections and design flaws in them. They’ve never made a basket before and so to them, I have some great skill, when in fact I am merely one step ahead of them.
The more I work on all of the earth skills, I realize how incredibly easy they all are to learn if they are first given a good technique “Setup“. Flint-knapping? Easy. Bow-making? Easy. Hide-tanning? Easy. There is a scale that exists that looks something like this: Setup + Time = Fluency. If you have a poor setup you will still become fluent but it comes at the cost of spending more of your time. So much so, that often people give up out of frustration. With an amazing setup, you will greatly diminish the amount of time it takes to become fluent. It limits the frustrations and maximizes the fun.
Of all the aspects of teaching, my biggest obsession is with finding and fine-tuning the most amazing setup for learning to take place. As I previously mentioned, setup takes precedence over all learning. Without a good setup, you won’t be able to carry a lot away from the class. This is why I am so obsessed with setup. I have learned things that I later could not reproduce because I didn’t learn the setup. Even if all I had learned was the setup, it would have been better than no setup with lots of information and experience in the subject, because if you can’t reproduce it, it’s basically useless.
Creating a setup is a lot of work, and often the best setups come from people who have been studying the subject for many years. When you invest your money in an educational institution, you are paying for the staff of that institution to create the best setup possible for you to learn. Going to an educational institution is a trade off. You pay an educational institution and its staff to create the setup for you in order to speed up your fluency.
I had struggled with earth skills for years before I learned about the fluency game and about setup. The more I learn the easier it seems that these skills really are. Many people don’t get involved in earth skills, such as friction fire or flint-knapping, because they fear they won’t be able to do them or have taken a class with a shitty setup and given up altogether. I’m writing this to let you know, it’s not your fault. It was a bad setup. Know there is hope and truth in this technique: “Earth Skills Are Easy”.
Category: Rewilding Immersion Program