Writing/Sailing

I recently took a sailing class. It started with two 2-hour zoom sessions (Tuesday/Thursday) and finished with two 8-hour sailing sessions (Saturday/Sunday).

When learning to sail, there is a lot of terminology (declarative knowledge) and there is the actual practice of sailing itself (performative knowledge).

Obviously you can’t sail on Zoom, so what we learned on Tuesday and Thursday was a lot of terminology, as well as the basic procedures of sailing. I did have a little prior experience with sailing, but had hit a wall because I really didn’t have any idea what I was doing. So during the Zoom sessions, I worked on memorizing the terminology (the parts of the boat, the various riggings, etc.) but didn’t do so well. And even though I had been on the water before, I still had some trouble visualizing what the instructor wanted to teach me about manipulating the sail in relation to the wind.

At the same time, though, I was glad to go over a few things before going out into the water. I think I would have been afraid had we just been told to head out without any declarative knowledge whatsoever.

As a teacher, I sometimes have trouble being a student because I’m often thinking about how the class is being taught at the same time that I’m trying to learn as a student. And so while I should have been listening to my teachers online I found myself thinking about how most of my career I’ve tried to find ways of giving students experience writing and terminology at the exact right time.

I often fail.

Why? Because there is no exact formula for when performative and declarative knowledge will meet up in a student. They meet differently for different people at different times. And for writers, no two days are exactly the same, and if my limited experience with sailing is any indication, the same is true for sailing.

So I guess the connection I want to make (and this is mostly for me but I hope you find it interesting too) is that we can’t fully abandon either mode of knowledge about writing. The turn toward threshold concepts is useful for our field, though only as useful as knowing the parts of a boat and sail are to sailing. There is no substitute for getting out on the water and watching what happens when you turn the sail in various directions in the wind.