After the first week of volunteering at the Canadian Centre For Victims of Torture, the scale of the project we were attempting became evident. The people volunteering with me at CCVT that were also in the course, Jini and John, were joined by a pair of very enthusiastic volunteers who were doing this on their own spare time. The way we divided up the work was each of us got one or two of the students and tutored them for the duration of the two-hour session. We soon learned that there was unforeseen difficulties in teaching this group.
Firstly was the significant English barrier - teaching a student a new subject is often difficult and teaching them that subject in a language that the students barely understand is far more so. I was teaching them the basics of computer input - how to use a mouse and keyboard. For example, they at could not hear the difference between “Backspace” and “Space” and would hit the same key for both. This is exacerbated by my instinctive use of language that, in my everyday life, is common language but to them is not. For example I would just say “undo that” when a mistake is made, but I don’t immediately realize that they have no clue what “undo” even means, as it is a very abstract concept. This is by no means critical of the intelligence of the students. My regular students were two lovely middle aged women from Ethiopia who were clearly making an effort to be there learning something. If one figured out something that I was trying to say, they would teach the other in their native Tigrinya, which was greatly appreciated by me and sped up progress.
Second, on top of the language barrier, there was the task of teaching someone how to use a computer for the first time. There are many things that we, the computer literate, take for granted that we understand. Its only when we try to explain it to a complete beginner that we realize some things are not naturally intuitive. It took some time for them to realize the things they were putting on the screen was an abstract representation of concepts. They could write basic English sentences just fine on paper, but once I tell them to type it in the computer, they could not grasp just what that means to put text - an abstract representation of writing - into a computer. They couldn’t grasp that you could open, minimize and close programs on the computer, as it has little relation to a real life concept as far as I could tell. Also, as it turns out, a standard keyboard is not a very intuitive piece of equipment - after all the keys were placed specifically to slow a typist down. So on top of the English language being an issue, there was also the abstraction represented by a computer interface.
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