Since this is the time of year that people send a lot of cards to each other, and since many seniors like to send out cards for special occasions, part of any formal course might include some work on creating personalized greeting cards. This can be a danger.

Over the years, I have acquired a sizeable collection of CDs with greeting card programs on them. Most came with printers as a freebie and are worth a bit more than I paid for them. The freebies all come with delicately phrased advertisements that extol the virtues of the freebie version, but politely indicate that by spending just a little bit more, your ability to please the other members of your family with even better cards will increase greatly. I’ve never taken them up on it. However, one can make quite nice cards with most any software. Sometimes I use an older Microsoft Home Publishing or my newer Microsoft Office Publisher 2003 and sometimes the templates that come with WordPerfect. My wife prefers to use one of our commercial CDs such as a Hallmark package. The danger with all these programs is two-fold (to coin a phrase).

On one hand, they tend to be very restrictive in choice and position of text. Some do not allow a choice of fonts. Inserting pictures ranges from straightforward to impossible with stops at frustrating and inflexible. But the one big benefit all such programs have is taking care of the upside down printing and sorting out of positioning that a folded card requires. When I am forced to, I can start from scratch and lay out such a template, but why bother? And more importantly, why subject your students to that unnecessary task? Use the canned templates.

As to content, I would much rather design a short text coupled with some personal pictures than use a pablum one-size-fits-all sentiment. Hallmark would have gone out of business years ago if my preferences agreed with the majority of people. Most students will be pleased on their first attempts to simply have their names and the names of the recipients printed in the same font as the card text instead of being written longhand. Adding a personal picture will be a bonus.

However, in the context of teaching a class, the instructor has a clear choice: (1) standardize on a teaching software package so everyone is on the same page, or (2) encourage the skills necessary to do it alone (with the aid of formatting for the folds).

To some extent, the preferred choice depends on the state of the class or student. Raw beginners might very well be overwhelmed if given the task to create a greeting card from a blank template. But more sophisticated users will surely chafe at the strictures of some commercial programs.

Tutors giving private lessons have almost surely run into the situation where a client wants to make a greeting card and has installed some program the tutor has never seen before. “I just want to…” the client says and looks at you expectantly. Lying alongside the computer is a rather thick book that says something like “Make wonderful cards easily all by yourself–even idiots can do it!” So you have about ten seconds to come up to speed or disappoint a client. At times like this, you begin to wish you had anticipated the likely applications the client would have in mind and had a lesson or two on greeting cards. This is the voice of experience talking.