Of Self-Esteem And Safety Nets

One never knows where an idea for a column will appear. The other night my wife and I were riding with some friends to a social outing. We’ve known these people for several years and both of them know what I do. So my male friend surprised me by saying that he had finally networked his house. They have his and hers computers and some shared resources such as a printer and Internet access. I don’t know if he has a dedicated server.

So how should I respond? He had never called or asked for help, which is not all that unusual, but some of our friends will call for help if their refrigerator light goes out. In fact, I had no idea that he was upgrading his home capabilities.

“Was it difficult?” I asked to fill in time.

“Yes, it took me a long time and a lot of false starts, but it works…” Before he could go into details, his wife interrupted, “He’s really proud of it.”

He hesitated and looked at her, but she was not mocking or joking. It was simply a statement of fact. He was proud of what he had done. His lack of denial was enough to confirm her statement.

That was a real kick in the head for me. Of course he was proud. Of course he wanted to do it by himself. It had nothing to do with our relationship as part of a distributed mutual support system. He just wanted to see if he could do it.

At that moment I realized that without being aware of it, I had been an enabling influence. First, he was familiar with my setup and had seen what it can do. But more important, he knew that if he really got in trouble, he had a backup resource that he could call in to give a hand. Maybe in some small way, I was contributing to his accomplishment without even knowing it by being a passive safety net.

So the question is, how can we help initiate the process of wanting to extend learning to those seniors who are not computer literate and who would like to change that? How can we help them see that the rewards go beyond simply utilizing e-mail to a real sense of pride in accomplishment? If a senior is dragged into a computer class simply “Because it is the thing to do,” I doubt that the process will be a pleasure or source of pride for either the senior or the tutor. Whoever did the dragging will also be disappointed.

Without trying to facilitate a change in attitude from drudgery to discovery, I have witnessed it happening almost spontaneously. After several sessions of working on something that you and I might consider absurdly simple, a novice senior suddenly “gets it,” and smiles. The wonderful thing is that this first step can build on itself. Success begets more success. The more a student begins to feel in control, the faster the learning process proceeds. Until finally the student refers to “just picking it up” instead of “learning it in class.” In the best cases, this leads to a desire to share with peers some new trick or procedure. Then progress really becomes self-reinforcing.
The concept of fostering self-esteem has taken a real beating lately. I think that is partly because self-esteem is based on performance reviews we set internally and judge by ourselves. My friend’s self-esteem took a big jump up by doing for himself what I could have done in a fraction of the time, but he did it. He decided that he could do it if he tried, and by golly, he did. If only there were a way to bottle that up and sell it!

For more in-depth tips on tutoring seniors, see the complete tutorial here. I also have posted a tutorial on elementary decision theory for those who might question a physician’s diagnosis (important for seniors) or anti-terrorist activities (important for everyone) but haven’t had the framework to analyze the data. That tutorial can be found here.