Hands-on Teaching

I've done just enough teaching in my life, at this point, to know two things about myself:

1. When it comes to writing lesson plans, teaching from the book, or just generally working within a traditional classroom setting, I am hopelessly lost.
2. Despite this, I'm actually pretty good at teaching hands-on.

At the moment, I have a class of 13 adults - soldiers at the nearby barracks - who come for 4 hours, three times a week, to learn computers. We finished our third session this morning, and they're really coming along. I can't take credit for it all - this is an exceptional group, hardworking and professional. Still, I'm pretty happy with the philosophy that I've developed over time for teaching computer basics.

We rely on donations a lot out here, and we're extremely grateful for all of the donations that we receive. The main computer class next door has some really nice, top-of-the-line desktop PCs that were purchased for us by some generous friends a couple of years ago. These are the computers which are used by the full-time students at NAMTAS, taking their year-long course in computer science. They're the perfect machines for the job.

I work next door, in the newly-opened NAMTAS Business Centre (back home it would probably be called an internet cafe). This is where I teach the part-time class for the soldiers (in the mornings, before we open for business). Although it's not full-time, it's an intensive course; after two months, they'll be expected to know their way around MS Office, the internet, email, removable media (CDs/floppies/USB), printing, anti-virus scans, and plenty more. There's almost no lecture time, and practically no discussion of theory. It's about as hands-on as you get.

Now, our computers are not as glamorous as those next door. The newest CPU is at least four years old. Some keyboards have very faded lettering. There's a huge aesthetic difference between the shiny black-and-silver towers, monitors, keyboards and mice next door - and the hodgepodge of hardware (big/small/beige/black/gray/navy/hi-res/low-res/horizontal/vertical/American/British) found in here.

Three of the six computers are running Windows 2000. Two are running Windows 98. The remaining computer is running XP, but it's missing some key files, so I'm attempting to download a completely different, non-Windows OS for that one.

Two have Office 97, three have Office 2000, and one is running OpenOffice - also a non-windows application (though very similar to MS Office).

Four of the mice have scroll wheels, one has a freaky little center button that's like a scroll wheel, and one has just the two basic left & right buttons.

Half of the keyboards are British. Half are American (the " and @ keys are swapped, among other differences). Some have actual written labels on keys like Backspace, Enter, and Tab - others just have the corresponding symbols.

Some of the computers have floppy disk drives. Some have CD or DVD drives. One out of the six has no working USB ports. At the moment, three have working internet connections.

And there are other, smaller differences - the defaults on Office, for example, are set to metric measurement on some, and SI on others. Some automatically perform spell check (squiggly red lines) while some don't. Some have shortcuts to popular programs on the desktop, some have shortcuts on the Quicklaunch toolbar, and some have 'em in the Start Menu.

I could very easily change some of these things, to make the computers operate in a more uniform fashion. But I've decided not to - because this hodgepodge is absolutely perfect for an intensive computer course aimed at beginners.

You might think that giving everyone the exact same tools would make for a better learning environment. In this case, I have to disagree. In fact, I don't think I could have designed a better classroom than this myself, even if given free rein to choose any software or hardware I desired.

One almost universal truth about computer novices is that they're terrified they'll break something or screw it up. And when something unexpected comes up on the screen, usually they think something Very Bad has happened, even if there's nothing wrong at all. If such a person learns MS Word on a non-spellchecking computer, and later tries to type a letter on a computer that automatically checks spelling, chances are they'll freak out when they see those red lines for the first time. "Oh my God, what is that...THING? WHAT IS IT? What did I do? Is the computer broken? Please tell me what's going on. Please, tell me WHY is that horrible red line destroying my letter?"

Believe me, I've seen it happen. Here, and back in the US too. Dozens of times - and with events just as innocuous as the appearance of those squiggly red lines:

"Why is the cursor arrow colored black instead of white on this computer? Is that bad?"
"This computer is making noises...the one I have at home doesn't make these noises...shit, SHIT, I need a little help here, is it going to blow up or something?"
"John! There's no tab key! There's one that's the same size, in the same place, but it has some symbol on it. Where's the tab key?"
"Why the heck does this computer have TWO shift keys? Which one am I supposed to use?"

And so on, and so on, and so on. Now, imagine what happens when somebody comes face-to-face with these little quirks for the FIRST time, when there's nobody around to explain it. That person might just assume that they screwed something up, and they'd be that less likely to take chances in the future (i.e. clicking on different menus to try and find what they need, clicking "OK" and continuing with work when an unimportant error screen comes up, etc). However, if somebody learns from Day One that every computer is a little bit different, and that sometimes you have to click around a little bit to find what you need, they're a lot more likely to see the computer for the versatile, fluid tool that it is, and will learn to adapt in order to accomplish their task at hand. I actually require my students to sit at a different workstation every day so they'll be forced to adapt.

I'm able to tell my students, "Oh, it's no big deal - on this version of Word, if you want an outline numbered list, there's an additional option for that. Try and bring it up on the screen," or "yeah, sometimes you don't find the shortcuts on the desktop...just take a couple of minutes exploring, you'll find them." A lot of future confusion is saved this way - and meanwhile, the students exercise a skill that's invaluable to computer users: they learn to adapt.

At first I was worried that this teaching style would make it damn near impossible to ensure that all the students were learning at about the same rate. What it's actually done is turned all of my students into teacher's aides; since each of them has had experience on different computers, and they're all getting used to working out these little differences in the user interface, they're able (and eager) to help each other out whenever their classmate is in a jam. Since these problems are fresh in their minds, they're probably able to explain it more clearly than I am - and by explaining it out loud, they're really keeping the lesson fresh in their own minds. This also makes for a more co-operative atmosphere in the class, which I'm hoping will prevent students from getting too far ahead of their classmates, or lagging too far behind.

It's only been three class sessions, but they're making enormous strides. I've actually started planning some lessons ahead of time (something I almost never do), built around the troubleshoot-it-yourself idea. For example, after they learn to save their work to flash disks, burn to CD, save to floppy, and to use e-mail, I'm going to assign each person a list of specific tasks centered on moving files from one place to another. Someone might be asked to move a particular image file from Computer A to computer F, an excel document from B to D, and a word document from E to C. Since each computer in this class has a unique combination of those four file transfer systems (CD, floppy, USB/flash, ethernet/email), it will be their job to figure out the best medium for the transfer, and then to do it.



(Any thoughts?)