What I’ve Been Learning — Nov 2021
Over at Taught by Humans, a big part of our ethos is our love of learning. Learning tech-related things, yes, but also just constantly learning news things and improving on what we already know. Each month we are going to give a short update on what we’ve been learning (this month it is only me as Alice is busy finishing off some work for uni).
Knitting
In November, while feeling a bit frazzled with everything I had going on, I decided I needed a hobby which would give me some peace. Once before I tried knitting, but that was during a time period where I spent half my week in London and the other half in Bristol, so I mostly just slept whenever I sat down (and trying to knit on a coach when you aren’t very good at knitting is not something I would recommend). When a new shop opened up round the corner from me, it seemed like fate for me to restart this hobby.
I throughly enjoy knitting, it’s something I used to do with my Nanny as a small child. It took awhile to understand the motions for the different stitches (thanks Wool and the Gang for the great step by step guides), and I knitted several rectangles and other random shapes just to get the hang of things. Also, knitting patterns are their own language which is its own challenge. This resulted in my first attempt at a hat being extremely tiny, as I misread a section of the pattern and missed about 12cm of a beanie hat (oops — anyone have a dog or a baby in need of a badly knitted hat?)
I have now made a two tone hat (by accident, I bought a slightly different wool after my tiny disaster) with a pom-pom on top. Actually finishing this felt like an amazing accomplishment, it’s not perfect by any means but I love it. Knitting every evening also greatly helped me be mindful and switch off. I am looking forward to learning more knitting skills — hopefully how to knit different coloured patterns.
Spanish
I am a lover of Duolingo, and in November (spurred on by a weekend trip to Seville) I restarted my daily Spanish lessons. I’m setting myself the ambitious goal of completing all of level 2 (which I am about three quarters of the way through now) by the end of the year. While I feel like I’m learning a lot, and I was able to order the majority of things I wanted and read menus when in Spanish, I have a long way to go and can still only speak in the present. If anyone has any tips on learning languages I would love to hear them!
Patience
The previous two learning feed into this one a bit, but the biggest thing I’ve been trying to learn this month is patience. If you know me, I am always rushing and constantly annoyed at how slow the world moves (and as such I am horribly suited to academia, but that is another story). I have been working on my patience — letting things take as long as they need to, and not letting them get under my skin. For example, I am currently waiting for feedback on a draft of my PhD thesis, so I am taking the time to rewatch one of my fav TV shows — Black Mirror. Being a PhD student and a business owner, patience is beyond a virtue and something I should have embraced a long time ago.
Social Media
This year I have been extremely lucky to hire Alice as our Digital Communications Manager, and have her run the day to day of our social media accounts. We are now working together to try and up our numbers and improve engagement, which involves a lot of learning on both our parts.
I have been researching and learning about how to be effective on LinkedIn, using Hootsuite blogs as they are a good mine. Alice has been doing the same for Instagram. We’re still at the early stage of learning about social media, this will probably be something which features month on month as we start to put our research into practice.
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We are always learning, and want to share our passion for learning (about everything, not just tech) in this monthly blog series.
