Since the PC Center was closed this past Tuesday, I did not have an opportunity to sit on Open Work Time. And so I am taking the opportunity of this “off week” to relate what I learned last term when I sat in and observed a library instruction session called Introduction to Windows.
The classes offered at the PC Center are arranged in an ascending scale of difficulty. New users begin with the classes which teach the most basic elements of computer use and know-how. Students can then take the next class in order to build on and further improve their abilities with computers, the Internet, etc. Introduction to Computers is the first introductory class, followed by Intro. to Windows. In this latter class, students are shown the various utilities of Microsoft Windows.
As I remember, the class moved very slowly and we were in the second hour when the subject was the scroll bar: what it does, how to click on it and how to use it. The class was full and the librarian had to try to watch over everyone and keep them up with the lesson — all the while trying to keep on schedule.
As the librarian has explained to me more recently, students don’t practice what they have learned. So they come back for a new class after weeks, perhaps a month, to learn something else when the old skills have not yet been perfected. In this class it fell to me to play babysitter when one woman sat her granddaughters next to me because the only open seats were in the back of the room while the only available computer was in the front.
As the librarian was very busy with many of the students, I decided to try to help out where I could. One older (60ish?) lady in the back row, whose screen was directly in front of me, was continually having trouble with the mouse. Her trouble struck me the most about this class and the memory was my first thought when I learned I needed to do service learning. She, like a few others in the class, displayed a sense of irreversible disaster with every potential mistake: opening a window accidentally, for instance. — As though something awful had happened or could happen.
A sense of helplessness was prevalent in their practice but nothing was like the trouble this woman was having trying to move the mouse pointer from one side of the screen all the way across to the other side. It was as if the pointer was stranded in the upper right corner of the screen and when the librarian instructed the class to click on the start button at the other corner, the mouse pad was simply not large enough to allow her to move the mouse in a direct line from one corner to its opposite. She kept running off the mouse pad. She would express her frustration then start over, but she couldn’t get the pointer any further than perhaps mid-way to her destination. As the one librarian had to spread out her time among all the students of the group, I decided to try to help out. I showed the lady she could pick up the mouse and set it down on another part of the pad, then she could keep moving the pointer across the screen. This helped the first time, then the next time the same trouble was apparent, I explained it to her again. This helped the second time. After the third time, I began to wonder if my explanation would help for the fourth time.
It seems difficult to imagine people who have not used computers or the Internet, and so have not needed to develop these abilities, to turn around and look for a need for them and therefore a reason to put in the effort to learn them. Perhaps we never remember, or use, what may be valuable if it does not serve some function or interest in the motive(s) of our lives.
