LEARNING TO DOUBLE-CLICK

Today I taught three fifty-year-old mountain women how to plug in a computer and type a capital letter. Two out of the three women had never sat down at a computer before, and after two hours, they could plug in the laptop, turn it on, open Word, type their names (with caps AND accents) and then save the file in their own folder.

It helped me appreciate how complicated it is to use a computer. We take so much of our knowledge for-granted. For example, I hadn't planned on taking fifteen minutes to teach how to double-click, but that's where we're at. And they have questions I've never considered before, like: "Why can I hold the 'shift' button down and nothing happens, but if I hold the 'A' button down, I get a million As?"

It's interesting to watch these three ladies work, these ladies who were actually afraid of computers (afraid!) when they first sat down. They thought they'd break it with the smallest mistake. We started class in Spanish, but a lot of times there was still a communication barrier, and they began talking to each other in Mixtec, leaving me in the dust. But even then, it felt like they were really owning this experience, and making it their own.

They were so excited about how much they'd learned at the end of class that one woman even joked that, now that she was learning the computer, she was going to leave her husband and get a job in Tlaixaco, (a bigger town two hours away). On their way out, they asked if we could double-up on computer classes and skip English class altogether. Fine by me.