\chapter{After the Salad Days}

\begin{verse}[75mm]
My salad days,\\
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,\\
To say as I said then! But, come, away;\\
Get me ink and paper:\\
He shall have every day a several greeting,\\
Or I’ll unpeople Egypt.
\end{verse}
{\raggedleft\footnotesize Cleopatra to Charmian\\William Shakespeare, \textit{Antony and Cleopatra} (1.5.69-77)\par}

\section{After College}

I graduated from college with a bachelor of science degree in biology, a teaching certificate, and high hopes. Unfortunately, biology teaching jobs were hard to come by, as were teaching jobs in general. I didn't know it at the time, but this was largely because I had no interest in sports and therefore no interest in coaching.\footnote{I have thoughts about this, but I'm not entirely sure how they related to Linux, so I'll have to publish them elsewhere, I suppose.}

Fortunately, community education and high school completion classes (i.e., ``night school'') were still well-funded in my hometown, and I managed to get job teaching one class of each. 

The high school completion class was earth science, and had exactly three students, all young women in their twenties who for one reason or another never managed to complete high school. That was actually a fun class, because although I was not terribly prepared (I'd had exactly one geology class in college) and they did not have much of an interest in earth science at all, they were very motivated to finish the class so they could get their high school diploma. My own father had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade\footnote{My mother had dropped out in the seventh grade.} and at the age of eleven, I was able to attend his graduation ceremony when he finally completed high school in his mid thirties. They were determined to do this, and I was determined to help them through this. We had spent the day working at jobs we didn't really like, so these two evenings a week were fairly relaxed and we actually managed to have a good time.

The community education class was an ``Introduction to Computers'' class, which was composed almost entirely of people far older than me. These were people who knew absolutely nothing about computers but very much wanted to learn. Some of them didn't even know how to turn a computer on, which is understandable considering all the different places manufacturers put power switches.\footnote{A computer is not an intuitive device like a knife or a pencil, so there is no natural place to put it. Their confusion is entirely understandable.}

I don't remember much about teaching this class (it was over twenty-five years ago, after all), but two things stick out in my mind. 

First, the students in this class (most in their fifties and sixties) were eager to learn and highly enthusiastic, so all the bullshit about old people not wanting to learn anything about computers or not being able to learn anything about computers is just that—bullshit. I have pretty solid experience from very early on in my career that people of all ages can and want to learn about computers, including people approaching or past retirement age. 

For what it's worth, I also have pretty solid experience of people of all ages, including younger people, not wanting to learn how to do things with computers, but we tend not to see stereotypes about them. All the people who laid the foundation for our modern technology are either old or dead now, but for some reason computers are still seen as a young person's game. In reality, they are no different than anything else we do in our daily lives, like cooking or gardening. Some people will have an interest in those things and become proficient at them and some people will have no interest in them and will never even know the basics. For some reason, though, we choose to create all sorts of myths and stereotypes about computers and age that simply aren't true. I have no idea why. 

Second, \textit{never touch the mouse}.

A moment, if you please, to talk about \textit{pedagogy}. A sound pedagogical model for teaching people new skills is a three-step process:

\begin{enumerate}[noitemsep]
\item The learner watches the trainer perform the task.
\item The trainer watches the learner perform the task.
\item The learner practices on their own in a no-risk or low-risk environment.
\end{enumerate}

All of these steps are iterative; that is, a learner may go back and forth between steps 1 and 2 several times, and then make go back and forth from step three to steps one and two several times.\footnote{My current job follows this model, but they only allot enough time for each step to happen once, and no iteration is permitted. To say that training is sometimes a disaster is an understatement. To say that we have had issues with new people is also an understatement. To think that we will ever do something different is a mistake. Doing something different would cost money.} I spent a lot of my early life working in restaurants being trained and also training other under this model. 

This model tends to go out the window in a classroom environment. The reason is simple: if I'm teaching someone in a restaurant how to chop onions, I'm teaching one person, not thirty. It's pretty easy to adhere to this model in that situation; when you're teaching ten or twenty or thirty people, the model breaks down at step two. Of course it does; there simply isn't the time to watch ten or twenty or thirty people do this thing and allow them all to ask questions.\footnote{I imagine that cooking schools have a way to manage this; but they also have notoriously high dropout rates. They aren't interested in training \textit{everybody} that walks through their front doors; rather, they act as a winnowing process to figure out who is the very best and to leave all the others by the wayside.}

What I have seen happen many times in computer classes is that the instructor will demonstrate something in front of the class and then walk around while the students practice. I did pretty much the same thing. But inevitably someone will ask ``Can you show me that again?''. So the teacher/instructor will say ``Sure!'', walk over, \textit{grab the mouse}, and then go through all the same motions that they did just a little bit ago.

This works for some people. But some people don't learn just by watching; they need to get to that second step, to do it themselves. Grabbing the mouse and demonstrating again (only this time, right in their face) isn't going to work either. 

I learned early on (when I was student teaching, in fact) to just stand behind the person and guide them through all the steps I just demonstrated. That way, they were doing it, not me, and I could answer questions as we went. Of course, sometimes all they needed was that little boost of confidence or getting over a step they forgot, other times they needed a lot more direct instruction: ``Okay, now move your mouse so the cursor is over the file menu. Yep, that's it, now click and hold down the mouse button. Nope, not the right button, the left button. Now move your mouse down until it's over the `Print' option. Yep, there you go. Nope, you went too far, go back up a little bit. Yep, now you can let go of the mouse button.'' And then the print dialogue box would appear and we were good to go.\footnote{I have to admit, I'm reaching here. Back in the day, mice on PC's had two buttons, but if I recall correctly, you had to click and hold down the left button to open a menu and keep it open until you hovered over the menu item you wanted, and then had to let go of the button to select that item.}

