What a difference crocheting can make

Marjorie Anderson
The Edmond Sun

EDMOND August 10, 2006 09:53 pm

— Bickering and backbiting have culminated in violence, and it’s not a safe world we live in today. Why can’t we all just get along? Maybe we can. This is a story about more than 50 disgruntled children who learned to co-exist short of bloodshed, and they did it in an unlikely way.
My aunt taught me to wield a crochet hook when I was in grade school, and my hope chest was full by the time I left home. If idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, the Old Boy never had a chance with me. Mine were as often as not creating doilies.
I’d even sit on the back pew at Wednesday night prayer meetings with a crochet hook in my hand producing the pillowcase lace that cascaded into my lap.
Later, midway of my teacher life, I’d crochet while selling tickets at basketball games and throughout teachers’ meetings and lunch breaks … and then one day my seniors asked me to teach them to “do that.”
Things weren’t going well in the classroom that early fall. This particular group of students didn’t like themselves or each other, and they sure didn’t like Beowulf. So, I reasoned, why not call a time out and teach them to crochet? A little hands-on interaction might lighten them up.
I knew I’d need to come up with a literary cause to justify such an undertaking, and I found it in a volume of Firefox — a book offering homey instructions for such things as canning vegetables, making soap, weaving cloth. ... Hey, that’s it! Crocheting is a kind of weaving, isn’t it?
The superintendent didn’t think so, but he’d let me give it a try. “I’ll be watching,” he said, “and I’ll expect the students to accomplish something that can be evaluated.”
“Of course,” I assured him, and Project Crochet was launched.
It wasn’t long before the manager of the town’s only department store came looking for me. “What’s going on with these kids?” she wanted to know. “They’ve bought up all our yarn and they’re trying to tell me it’s for a language arts project!”
“That’s right,” I assured her, and the supplies we needed were on the shelves the next day.
My lesson plan allowed one week for the project and it required every day. There was only one of me to teach 50-plus boy and girl teens how to feed yarn through the fingers of one hand while manipulating a crochet hook with the other, but we made it
happen.
I worked with first one student and then another until they knew what they were doing. Then, while the trainees were teaching their classmates, I became the roaming
troubleshooter.
Shoulders necessarily touched shoulders as they bent over their work, and then hands touched hands. Little by little instructions replaced insults and growls turned to giggles, until all you heard in that previously hostile classroom was an occasional, “Can I borrow that color?” and sometimes a plaintive, “Help me, I’m all tangled up.”
By the end of the week we had a colorful bulletin board displaying their lopsided pot holders, and even my reluctant superintendent was complimentary. Better than that, every one of those children had earned an A+ for cooperation and another for stick-to-itiveness. Best of all, though, they liked each other and — until we went back to “Beowulf” — I think they liked me, too.
So why can’t we all just get along? My fragmented students wove themselves into a cohesive group in one week’s time.
What a difference it might have made eons ago if Lebanese and Israeli children had taught each other to crochet.