Brooklyn Brainery get into things ✁

Back in October we went to the Brooklyn Skillshare and spent a day a-learnin'. For the underinformed, the skillshare was a day-long event broken into 5 1.5-hour-long blocks. For each block you chose between 3 classes. Classes were taught by a variety of teachers, from hobbyists to professionals. And O, the Cost!: a ten-dollar sliding scale donation. If you aren't good at economics, that means it's basically free. A ton of people showed up, with probably a solid thirty to seventy people attending every class.

Now for a completely navel-gazing essay about the good, the bad, and how Brooklyn Brainery is the other half of the cheap Brooklyn education puzzle.

The Skillshare was successful in getting a huge group of people introduced to a lot of varied topics. I didn't know a damn thing about bike maintenance beforehand, but I can now fix wobbly tires on my too-heavy girls' bike with ease. Same thing with silversmithing. It would have taken either a pricy class or a whoooole lot of youtube to cover everything we did in those 90 minutes.

A necessity of cheap classes is that you end up with inexperienced teachers, or reaaaallly nice professionals who don’t mind working for free. The instructors at the Skillshare were reasonably well put-together, especially the one presenting bike maintenance (he fielded questions like a champ). A downside to pulling your instructors from hobbyists is that they aren't necessarily all that skilled in their field, and you end up with a situation where members of the audience might know more than the presenter. The top-down teaching method that lectures necessarily use can be tough in a less-experienced-instructor situation; misinformation or incomplete understanding is easily transmitted to the students because there's no vehicle for communication or second-guessing (too much audience participation can really, really kill an otherwise good lecture).

There really isn't any way to combat that outside of having small classes, which is what we're doing at the Brainery. You go into classes at BrBy knowing that the instructor doesn't know a damn thing, so everything is open to questioning and exploration. Don't take this as a shortcoming of the Skillshare, though! It's just how things have to be - you can't teach anything to six dozen people without the teacher having a degree of authority (which, in the case of the Skillshare, they actually deserve). 

Hour and a half long lectures, which is a great great length for a short introduction, really don't let you get too deep into a subject. Add in large classes (which generally prevent much hands-on work, though the knitting class seemed to handle the multitudes unexpectedly well) and you're really only going to skim the surface. That's why our classes are 4 weeks long - we want to take the interest something like the Skillshare generates and make it bear some sort of fruit. I'll let you know when I figure out a pun about growing seasons.

Something I really enjoyed about the Skillshare was how mobile you were allowed to be - you weren't shut up in a classroom and restricted to one class for a whole block. When I ended up in a lecture that wasn’t really for me, I could just run off to another one! Brooklyn Brainery definitely doesn't have that - our draconian policies require you to sign up and pay for specific classes. We do this to help raise funds but also to make sure we have a steady group that can go through the topic together. Accumulating knowledge and familiarity over a few class meetings will go a long way in cultivating ownership over a topic. Also! we're probably old fogeys who love tradition and are going to make you say the Pledge of Allegiance before every class at least twice.

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