My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #37, May 15, 2000

LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU

I've been doing a lot of teaching, lately, as part of a grant program to train seniors to find health information on the internet, and it's made me more aware than ever how much of a performance art teaching is.

We conduct workshops every week in small computer labs in three different local retirement communities and the hospital library. The workshops are purposely cozy, no more than two people to a computer, so that everybody has a crack at pointing and clicking their way through sites on the net. We've never had more than eight people in any class.

I set up a web page for them to work from, at http://marylaine.com/seniors.html, where I linked in about 110 high quality sites in different categories -- FAQ files, journal databases, nutrition info, support groups, reference sources, etc. The hospital's health sciences librarian and I have a few key points that we like to make each time, and about ten sites that we like to dwell on. We know each other's basic spiels cold by now. For all that, we have never done the same presentation twice.

That's because teachers are performers, feeding on the reactions of our audience, adlibbing as needed, adding some jokes and new material to answer people's questions. When our seniors have never seen a mouse before, we drop some of the medical content to spend time working with them on their purely mechanical skills, even if that means we take a 15 minute detour to play solitaire (a great way to master point, click, drag and drop).

When some of our seniors are too overwhelmed at the coordination problems involved, we just cut to the chase and show them the gee-golly-whiz stuff on the net to give them a compelling reason to WANT to master the mouse. Often, we don't even stick entirely to the health information -- we lure them through their interest in fly-fishing or quilt patterns or recipes, or with the book reviews on Amazon or the financial pages. (My seniors page includes not only medical references but links to some excellent all-purpose guides to high quality information like About.com and the Librarians' Index to the Internet.)

In a small class, it's obviously easier to gauge our students' reactions, but we pay attention to body language, no matter how big the group is: Are they focusing on us when we talk? Are they wriggling in their seats? Are they nodding their heads with understanding? Laughing at our jokes? Staring at us blankly? Drifting off? We adjust accordingly.

Teachers, like performers, needs to start where their audience is, and deal upfront with barriers to their understanding. Just as comics have to neutralize the obnoxious drunks in order to have their way with the people who came prepared to laugh, teachers have to take control of the class clowns and bullies in order to get through to the kids who are willing to learn.

So performers and teachers start with our best material -- we play the classical music with the catchiest tunes, start with our funniest jokes about experiences everybody has had. We simplify things, teaching them basic rules: we start with the phonics that explain 85% of our language, and teach the "ough" words (through, rough, bough) only when we have to. We teach them that things make sense. Yes, that means we lie to them, at least a little, but by doing so, we convince our students that the subject can be mastered.

We use all the available tricks. We use metaphor, to compare the unfamiliar to the things they know and understand -- learning the mouse is a coordination thing, like learning to tie your shoes, and you didn't learn that in five minutes, either. We use jokes. We suck them in by talking WITH them, not AT them.

Above all, we use our own enthusiasm. Even when our audience wants to learn, wants to be entertained, they have a low level of commitment to the enterprise. They're willing to let us show them our stuff, but that's about it. We use our own enthusiasm to turn them from audience into partner. It doesn't matter if we've done the script a thousand times; for each audience, it's their FIRST time, and we have to perform every time as if it's opening night.

The main barrier to computers is people's conviction that they're too dumb to learn to use them, so I start by explaining that five years ago, I had exactly two computer skills -- I could point and I could click. Everything else I learned on the job. I don't let them call themselves "dummies." I tell them they're newbies, because nobody has shown them this stuff yet.

I tell them that the reason kids take so much more easily to computers is they don't have hang-ups about DOING IT RIGHT. They look at the machines, see a wonderful toy, and proceed to play with it. They punch buttons to see what will happen, and eventually they figure out the rules. I tell my seniors that the only way they could break the machines is by going into DOS, and, you know what? I'm not going to tell them how to do that. The tool bars are called tool bars because you're SUPPOSED to punch the buttons, use the pull down menus, and see what you can do. Don't like the way your screen looks? You can change it.

You should see the relief on their faces. You mean, we don't have to adapt to IT? We can make IT adapt to US?

Now, they're mine. Now I can start teaching.

But the same basic lessons come out differently every time. I answer their questions, find out what they need to know about, and work it all into the presentation. I'll look up their medications on RXList, look for articles on their hip replacement surgery in the full-text databases, find an FAQ file on it. I use their topics to show them how search engines work.

Like any performance, teaching can be killed by determined resistance -- by the drunk who won't shut up, the people in the second row who won't stop talking. There was a woman in one of my classes who couldn't get the hang of the mouse, but wouldn't let me help her use it. She radiated such negativity that, if she'd been in the audience for Peter Pan, Tinkerbell would have died on the spot; no way did this woman believe in fairies. It was one of the hardest sessions I've ever conducted, because her negativity infected the atmosphere, making it difficult for me to get through to the folks who wanted to learn, believed they could learn. Eventually I had to cut my losses, ignore her, and focus entirely on the other people to restore their enthusiasm (and mine).

Teachers have to be improvisation artists, ready to add some jokes, do a little tap dance, stall for time when the computer doesn't do what we promised it would do. We have to pick up on every hint about ways we can suck them in, make them full partners in the teaching. If they mention their kids and grandkids, it's a splendid time to talk about starting the free e-mail account the hospital is offering; if they mention a hobby, we work it into our routine, using it to help teach what we planned to teach.

When my seniors compliment me on my teaching, I always tell them it's their doing as much as mine; good audiences make good teachers. The GREAT teachers, though, create good audiences. I haven't reached that level yet, but I'm working on it.