The Village Learns a New Skill

My father used to say that a true scholar is always eager to learn, and always eager to teach. Ian is a true scholar. A true yo-yo scholar.

The $5 yo-yo instructional video ended approximately an hour ago, and already our vocabularies are all greatly enriched. Ian learned, and is teaching, "The Sleeper": a particularly sophisticated maneuver involving winding up the yo-yo, inserting your finger into the loop, and dropping the sphere, letting it dangle. What's fascinating about this particular move is that the yo-yo doesn't just dangle: it ravels and unravels, ravels and unravels, until, ten to twenty-five seconds later, the Meister then has the opportunity to wind up the yo-yo afresh. Ian asserts that it's called the sleeper because the yo-yo seems to "sleep", but I might have my own reasons for calling it that.

Daniel, Madeleine and I have all been taught The Sleeper.

Meanwhile, there's a particular technique required for truly masterful winding of the yo-yo. You don't just twist it around in circles and hope that nature will take its course. No, you catch the string with the index-finger of the hand holding the yo-yo, long enough to catch it, and create a modicum of tautness, to build up constructive tension in the unit.

Ian invited me to wind up the yo-yo. True the Daniel Way (I'm sure that Daniel Jr. would have done the same thing), I twirled it madly without rhyme or reason, and certainly without the strategic index finger extended to create that essential tautness. After the yo-yo was nearly wound, I asked Ian, "How am I doing?"

"Bad."

I also learned that the loop at the end of the yo-yo string is not what you might take it to be; you are not supposed to insert your finger directly into it. Instead, you are to take a segment of the larger string - "the heap," as they would say in high tech, and create a secondary loop from the original loop, and insert the primary operant finger into that new loop.

Ian came over to me amidst all this blogging, and asked me if I would like to do another Sleeper. Of course I would. Here is a subset of the instructions that I typed up prior to my performance:

"Do you want to do another sleeper this time I'm going to leave the whole thing to you. Remember what I taught you... And remember what I said about just letting it go and leaving the thing on your finger... Okay, remember all that, here, let me see you do a good sleeper... So, let's see a good sleeper. And rememer, you also need to be standing when you do it."

This time, I earned an extremely enthusiastic thumbs up. Meister was visibly thrilled at my progress.

There has also been some "walking" of "the dog," but this is more of an exhibition sport, it seems.

Meanwhile, Daniel was doing "around the world" with his own yo-yo, but Sensei Ian was having none of it: ""Stop doing around the world - I'm going to take away the yo-yo."

The instructor speaks with authority, because Daniel was not even supposed to get his yo-yo today. A few bouts of bad behavior set his yo-yo bestowal date approximately 24 hours behind schedule - I heard Amy extending the ban, or threatening to do so, while she was talking to me, or trying to talk to me, when she called me at work today. So of course, I was astonished to find Daniel in possession of a yo-yo, when I got home from work; it turned out that Ian had interceded for him.

Of course, you have to draw the line somewhere. As I was blogging this highly detailed episode, the instructor approached me and proposed the following:

"Daddy, let's look for a website about yo-yo's."

When my brother was in graduate school pursuing a degree in Slavic Linguistics, we all learned about tense and aspect, metathasis, fricatives, back-velars... When my father was pursuing a doctorate in Education, we learned a great deal about educational professionals around the country networking for excellence. Now I know about The Sleeper, and several makes and models of yo-yos, including the Ned-yo, the Boomerang, and Ian's own "Cosmic Spin." But it's not enough just to talk about these things. Ian believes in learning-by-doing:

"Daddy maybe you would like your own yo-yo. Would you like the starter's one, the boomerang...?"

(April 19, 2011)