By day, I am a librarian at a local technical school. Our students are not the typical students found in institutes of higher learning. Many are adults returning to get an associate’s degree after many years out of school. Many have their GED.
The other day, a student came into the library. She sat at the computer and logged in. She turned to me and said, “I need help.” As a good librarian, I immediately came out from behind my desk to sit with her at the computer and find out exactly what she needed. “Something to type this letter,” was her response. It is week four of the school term, and she is taking a course on using MS Office. I know that they have covered Word by now. But she needed me to show her how to open Word and how to begin typing.
Then she asked me how to print, and how to email it to her instructor.
I had to walk her through the entire process starting with, “Double click on the Internet Explorer icon.” When she finally got into her email program, she sat there staring at the screen. I asked her if she knew how to start composing a message. “No.” “Okay, first you have to click on ‘compose mail.’”
At my library, this type of student is typical. There are students who can do anything with their computers. They even know more than some of their instructors, but are here to get a piece of paper so they can make more money at their jobs. But most of the students have never touched a computer before in their lives. They can’t even log on!
I spend the bulk of my day helping students print and save to flash drives. I show them how to find programs on the computer and to use our digital library. I explain how to write a paper and why citation and punctuation are important.
I do this all day, six days a week.
And now I have to find a group of people who do not know how to use a computer and teach them in my spare time. I realize that my job is not really service-learning, but sometimes I feel like it meets the requirements.
Working with the student described above was very difficult because she was having trouble with what I thought were very simple things. Afterwards, when discussing the incident with her program chair (standard operating procedure here), I discovered that they had spent four hours the day before going over Word and her email! She had retained nothing from her tutoring session, and I’m pretty sure that she retained nothing from working with me!
How can people do this with any regularity?
