know I am taking piano. I'm also taking drawing lessons now from my kids art teacher. Yeah, it's really fun. And I'm learning so much. And you know what, like, not for nothing. But the kinds of people that you meet at, like, drawing class or adults are great people actually, because they're grown as humans who are trying to develop a hobby with an expert teacher. Those are nice people that you want to get to know like, y'all. Yeah, I'd never occurred to me, they'd be great place to make friends. But turns out it is. And Tom and I also just started taking tap dancing lessons. I have always wanted to tap dance. Honestly. I love I love tap dancing. You know, I'm a fan of classic Hollywood. 30s 40s 50s Hollywood, and particularly the dancing movies. Yeah, so my favorite movies after of course, bringing a baby, which is not a dancing movie are dancing movies. So yeah, so now Tom and I are taking tap dancing. And as I'm like, tap dancing, and it's like, friggin complicated. It's harder than it looks, obviously. And I'm thinking we're doing these weird time isn't like, Oh, I'm so glad I spent all of last year playing WC, right, because it's like, this is a transferable bit of knowledge. It's like weird polyrhythm in the off feats and stuff. I was like, Okay, I know how to do this and or like, do two feet different things, right? It's not 10 fingers doing different things. So like, All right, that's all right. But yeah, I'm taking all these lessons and learning about all the different ways that people can be taught to do specific kinds of skills. And I just look like I did my hobbies, arrow, but like, I spent three weeks in my drawing class doing this one drawing of a ribbon, because like, my kid who's like taking these lessons like, well, first, you're gonna draw a hand, then you're going to draw a ribbon, then you're going to draw face, right? Because this sort of stuff. Yeah. That you you need to learn. And sure enough, I drew a hand first. And that was about like shape and volume and negative space. And then you draw ribbon, which is about textures, you're not doing outlines and drawing, like you're not doing a hard line around things. You're trying to make it sort of photorealistic using pencils. And I learned a bunch of techniques in the ribbon, I posted it on Twitter, people were liking my ribbon, you can look it up if you want, but it's like a triangle sort of shape, because it's folded. And bits of the triangle look better than others. And so I was like, Oh, shit, that's a metaphor. So I was teaching with that the other day, and I put it up for my students about this is what learning looks like learning doesn't look like by the end of the term, it's a perfect ribbon, right? You see evidence of the places where you were less skilled. But those were the moments when your teacher came by and said, Ah, hold your pencil like this. No, watch me, no, hold this other tool like this watch, we're going to blend in circles don't blend like this. Or you could put some put a little bit of graphite on a sheet of paper over here and then pick it up with the blending tool. And then you can bring it to the paper that when you like what, right and then you can't go back and fix the bits of the ribbon that you drew that the teacher was like, Oh, I see what you don't know how to do, right? That the whole, like the gestalt of the ribbon, like, you can zoom in on parts or be like, Man, that's actually that's really good. But then other parts of the people are like, John aren't right. And I was like, Oh, that also becomes a metaphor for teaching and cognition. And so like it was a way for me to explain to my students as they're trying to write their participation reports, which I'm like, this is your learning journey, right? Yeah, I'm drawing. I'm drawing charts on the board about like, you don't start smart and stay smart the whole time. That's not what success looks like, success sometimes looks like you know that you know, nothing. And then you like learn in a kind of linear way as the course goes on. And that's one model. Or you maybe come in overconfident. And so the first three weeks, you feel dumber and dumber and dumber, as your confidence is eroded, and you discover how much you didn't know. And then you sort of proceed maybe exponentially because once you get it, you really get it on. But usually it looks more like a roller coaster that kind of goes up and down as you get challenged when you master one skill, and then you get challenged to move to the next one. And you suffer a kind of loss in function, right? And the graphs are like okay, for them. They're like, all right, but it's an abstraction, but I put the ribbon up, I made them all get up from their chairs, too, because I like to make them get up and walk around and like four giant TVs in the classroom. So they all went to the giant TVs and looked at my ribbon. And I'm like, What do you notice about the ribbon? And they're like, trying to say nice things and like parts of the ribbon are much better executed than others. Right? But that's okay. But it's okay. Like, that's what learning is. And like, can you tell which part I did last? And they picked the best part. I was like, yeah, like, why did you think I did that will last or like, oh, because it's the best part. I'm like, Alright, so how does learning work? Right? So it's like, I'm taking drawing lessons for two hours a week. And it's it's fucking around, right? I'm just doing it because I like it. But as I was sitting there writing, and being taught by an expert, not in my field, using teaching techniques that are not my techniques, and really thinking about my own learning as I'm doing it, it gave me something that I could bring back to the classroom. That is the best metaphor I've ever found for explaining to students how their own learning works in a way that they finally got it right. So it's not like I was having showered I'm where I was like processing ideas in the back of my head. I was doing something that was explicitly not work, right? My brain is like Gladstone drawing lasagnes sign up for 10 weeks of two hours a week drawing lessons with a professional artist because I don't do things halfway, right. So here I am, I get all these tools. And I'm doing all this drawing and stuff that I'm doing it just because I love it. And I suck at it. And I'm getting better. And while I'm there, Well, shit, I got smarter. Yeah, about something in a way that I brought back to my job, which is why people at work always say to me, like, Oh, that's a great metaphor. I never thought of it like that before. Yeah, oh, Amy, that's your gift, right? Like, my gift is my brain doesn't want to go in a straight line. My brain wants to take tap dancing lessons, right. And then my brain wants to, I don't know, do drawing lessons, or my brain wants to like fight with polyrhythm, or my brain wants to go for long walks, and then sit in the park and think about Starbucks, and why their menu is organized the way that it is, you know, and then it comes out later. Something for work. So I'm not processing, I'm just letting my brain go and do the things it wants to do. And I never trust myself that it's going to make me like, I want to do my leisure activities, just because I enjoy them. Yeah, and I do, I don't want to like, I don't want to like turn hustle culture on everything to be like, I'm going to be a professional art teacher, which is normally how that goes. Right? I love yoga so much. I was gonna be like, like yoga. Yeah, like, and now I'm teaching yoga six hours a week, right? Like, which is the thing that was happening there for a while, like, I don't want to do that. But I was like, you know, maybe my day job is being creative, right? My day job as a professor is having ideas that other people haven't had yet of reading all the things and then writing about them and teaching people and, and that may be when I take drawing lessons or play piano or do yoga, or read The New Yorker, because I can't sleep in the middle of the night, that that's actually part of what is my job, right is putting stuff into my head so that things can come out of my head. And I am trying to stop thinking of those activities as things that I'm doing instead of work. Like, particularly when I do them in the middle of the day. Like sometimes I get overwhelmed at work if I'm doing like a bunch of grading and I'm like going to chew my own hair, if only I could reach it at that level. And I'm just like, take a break. And I'll put like one of my My Little Pony figurines on the desk, and I'll take like an hour and try to draw it. Right. And as I'm drawing it, my brain calms down. And I get more energy, but also just like count the joy of trying to represent something visually, and like does that look like walking around? Sure it does. Yes. Oh, yeah. It does. That doesn't look like work. Right. But and it's not strictly speaking a billable hour kind of thing. But I can't I mean, I think we've discussed before, like, nobody can write for eight hours a day. That's ridiculous, right? So even if you're a professional writer, you don't write for eight hours a day. That's nothing that people will know. And