Riggers · the east, London
I am not a teacher and I would like to stop being asked
Pinned as not_going_to_teach
- Wants
- a partner at any level, provided nobody involved calls it lessons
- Rope so far
- Six years, self taught and then corrected by better people than me.
- Around
- the east, London
Roughly half of what arrives in my messages is a request for instruction dressed up as a date. I understand why it happens. There are far more people who want to learn than there are people willing to sit through the boring parts with them, and I am visible enough to be an obvious ask.
The trouble is that it turns the whole thing into a lesson, and a lesson has a teacher and a pupil, and I have never once managed to be somebody's teacher and their partner at the same time. It goes wrong in a specific way: they stop telling me when something is not working, because they think that is their fault for not knowing enough. That is exactly the information I need and exactly what disappears.
Twenty eight, east London, six years in. I do not mind at all if you have never done this. I mind if the arrangement is that I improve you. If we are learning something together and both of us are allowed to be bad at it, we will get on.
What I want is a long partnership with one person, built slowly, where the rope is a thing we do rather than a subject one of us is qualified in.
Not looking for anyone who opens with a request for a class. Not looking to be anyone's introduction to this as a whole. And not looking for a partner who calls me by a title, which I find funny for about a week and unbearable thereafter.