AN INDEPENDENT LOCAL COMMONSEL SEGUNDO / CALIFORNIA
ES↗el segundoA LOCAL GUIDE. AN OPEN UNIVERSITY.

UNIVERSITY OF EL SEGUNDO / CLASS / SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2026

Skill night at the fire.
Teach one thing in ten minutes.

This class meets on the sand. It runs at the Saturday bonfire at Dockweiler on December 12, from about sunset (4:44 PM) on. No signup and no fee. Bring one thing you can show someone in ten minutes, or just come to learn one. This page is the reading. It takes about five minutes.

1. Ten minutes is plenty

Most skills worth sharing at a fire are small: a bowline knot, finding Orion, a three-chord song, a card trick, a prompt that saves you an hour a week. Ten minutes is long enough to learn one of them and short enough that nobody’s s’more burns while they wait.

Here is a shape that works for almost anything:

  1. Minute one: show the finished thing. Tie the knot, play the song, run the prompt. People learn faster when they know where they’re going.
  2. Minutes two to four: do it slowly, out loud. Name each step as you do it. Use your hands more than your words.
  3. Minutes five to nine: they do it. Hand it over. Watch, and fix one thing at a time.
  4. Minute ten: one thing to remember. A single line they can repeat to the next person. If they can teach it, they’ve learned it.

It’s dark by the time this starts, so pick something that works by firelight and a phone flashlight. Skip anything that needs a table or a screen bigger than a phone.

2. What people are bringing

When you check in on skill night, the bonfire page asks what you’re bringing. The choices are a song or an instrument; knots, camping or fire craft; stars, moon or tides; cooking or s’mores; photos or drawing; code, AI or a build; a game or a trick; or just here to learn. The answers show only as counts, so you can see what’s on offer around the fire without anyone’s name on it.

Teaching fire craft? Keep it to what the pits allow. The County’s rules are on the bonfire page, each with its source.

3. The math of crew firsts

The bonfire page gives a “crew first” every time a group of people checks in together for the first time. So how many crew firsts are possible? It’s a counting problem.

Take a group of n regulars. Each one is either in a crew or not, which gives 2n ways to choose. Throw out the empty choice and the n choices of one person alone, since one person isn’t a crew. That leaves 2n − n − 1 possible crews of two or more.

Worked out

  • 4 regulars: 16 − 4 − 1 = 11 possible crews.
  • 10 regulars: 1,024 − 10 − 1 = 1,013 possible crews. Of those, 45 are pairs and 120 are crews of three.
  • 20 regulars: 1,048,576 − 20 − 1 = 1,048,555 possible crews.

If twenty neighbors formed one new crew every Saturday, they would need about 20,000 years to run out. Four regulars have only 11 crews between them, though, so a small group runs out in a season. The way to keep earning firsts is to bring someone new.

The number of crews of exactly k people is “n choose k”, written C(n, k) = n! / (k! (n − k)!). Add C(n, 2) + C(n, 3) + … + C(n, n) and you get the same 2n − n − 1.

4. Assignment

Before December 12

Pick your one thing. Write the four steps above on a card or in your phone: the finished thing, the slow version, their turn, the one line. Practice it on one person at home. Then on skill night, check in at the fire, teach it to one person you didn’t come with, and learn one thing from somebody else. That’s a crew first, and a passing grade.

Open the bonfire page →   Add the Saturdays to your calendar

Independent. The University of El Segundo is a project of elsegundo.xyz, not an accredited school. The bonfire is an informal neighbors’ gathering at public fire pits, not an official City of El Segundo or LA County event and not a permitted event.