Unlock Your Potential: The Wisdom of 'Going Round the Bend' — Epoche B2
Unlock Your Potential: Take the Long Way Round Eight Saturdays at the loom, Bonwire — enrolment now open for the September intake Most short courses promise to make you competent by Friday. This one will not, and that is the point. What we teach is kente: the cloth woven in Bonwire, in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, on a narrow-strip loom — a loom whose warp is only a hand's width across, so that the weaver produces long strips of about four inches which are then sewn edge to edge into a full cloth. Eight Saturdays will get you a single strip. You have taken the online course. You watched forty minutes of video at 1.5 speed, you followed along, and three weeks later you could not do it. This is not a failure of discipline. It is what happens when a skill is transmitted as information instead of being built into the hands. Adepa Weaving Workshop teaches kente the way it has been taught in Bonwire for generations: slowly, in company, and mostly by getting it wrong in front of someone who will not correct you immediately. Over eight Saturdays you will learn to dress a narrow-strip loom, throw and beat a plain weave, read a warp, and take a four-inch strip through your first full pattern. You will spend the whole of week one on tension alone. Nobody enjoys week one. What the eight weeks look like Weeks 1–2 — Setting up. Warping, tension, and the heddles — the frames of cord loops that lift alternate warp threads to open the gap the shuttle passes through. You will not weave anything. Weeks 3–5 — Plain weave. Repetition on a single strip until the beat is even. Your master will point out the fault in a strip you finished last week rather than the one you are working on now — this is deliberate, and it is how you learn to see the fault yourself. Weeks 6–8 — Pattern. One named design, its structure, and where it may and may not properly be worn. You leave with the strip you wove, faults included. Details Where: Adepa Weaving Workshop, Bonwire, Ejisu district — 40 minutes by trotro from Kejetia, Kumasi. Directions sent on booking. When: Saturdays, 08:00–13:00, from 7 September. Eight sessions. Class size: Six. There are six looms. This is not a marketing device. Fee: GH₵520, including yarn and use of a loom. GH₵460 if you pay before 20 August. Payment in two instalments on request. Who it is for: Complete beginners, aged 16 and over. No experience of any craft is assumed. Booking: Call or message the workshop on the number posted at the Bonwire visitor centre, or ask at the workshop any weekday morning. What forty hours can honestly buy Before the reasoning behind the method, here is the arithmetic of the offer, so that nobody arrives with the wrong expectation. Eight Saturdays of five hours is forty hours of instruction, at GH₵520, or thirteen cedis an hour including yarn and the loan of a loom. Set forty hours against what a working weaver has done. The most-quoted figure for expert skill comes from a study by Anders Ericsson and colleagues, who asked violinists at a Berlin music academy to log their practice and found that the best players had accumulated something like ten thousand hours of solo practice by their early twenties. Our course is $$\frac{40}{10{,}000}=0.004,$$ that is, four tenths of one per cent of that. Two honest qualifications: the ten thousand hours was an average for one group of musicians, not a threshold anyone must cross, and Ericsson himself objected to its later use as a rule. But the order of magnitude is the point. Forty hours is where a craft starts. The size of a finished cloth makes the same point in yarn. A man's full cloth is of the order of two metres by three and a half. At about ten centimetres a strip, that is $$\frac{2.0\ \mathrm{m}}{0.10\ \mathrm{m}}=20 \text{ strips},$$ each some 3.5 m long — roughly 70 m of weaving, sewn together selvedge to selvedge. You will leave with rather less than a metre of it. What you will have that the video did not give you is the ability to start the next one alone. A correction to something we used to print Our old prospectus said that roughly a third of the course is preparation because roughly a third of the trade is preparation. The first half of that is simply wrong on our own timetable: weeks one and two are two sessions out of eight, which is a quarter, not a third. We have corrected it rather than quietly dropping it, because the reason it was wrong is instructive. Dressing a loom is a fixed cost. It is paid once per warp, whatever length you then weave. If dressing takes $T_w$ hours and you weave at $r$ metres an hour, the share of your total time spent preparing a strip of length $\ell$ is $$\frac{T_w}{T_w+\ell/r}.$$ The denominator grows with $\ell$ while the numerator does not, so the share falls as the strip gets longer. For a beginner weaving under a metre, preparation is most of the work. For a master who dresses a long warp and weaves it for weeks, it is a small fraction. "A third of the trade is preparation" was our beginners' experience mistaken for the trade's. What is true without qualification is that the preparation is the part a video cannot give you, because tension is a thing your hands judge and not a thing you can be told. Why the master waits a week to tell you The oddest instruction in the timetable — that faults are pointed out a week late — is the one with the most research behind it, and it turns on a distinction worth stating plainly. Performance is how well you do something while you are being taught. Learning is what remains weeks later, when the teacher is gone. They are not the same measurement, and the practice conditions that maximise the first often damage the second. Richard Schmidt and Robert Bjork gathered the evidence for this across motor and verbal skills in 1992. The case closest to our loom concerns feedback. In experiments on motor tasks, learners given information about their error after every single attempt performed better during the practice session than learners given it o