The first presentation of my course on downloading nifty things for free went extremely well. The laboratory was full, and we still had a waiting list, In fact, the next presentation is already full with a waiting list. This reflects more on the desire of my senior students to get things for free than my [...]
By the time you see this, I will have completed presenting my first short course on "Nifty Free Things from the Internet". This was a whimsical idea for a volunteer presentation through OASIS, which caters to continuing education for seniors. While I have no idea how it will turn out, I have already been surprised [...]
We had interesting exchanges this week with several seniors who are not now my clients and might not become clients in the near future.
The occasion was our annual Homeowners Association Garage Sale. For those who have not experienced this failure in social engineering, homeowners associations are a hybrid between government and private organizations. Their [...]
What can I tell my senior clients about docx and xlsx? Several have had the unpleasant experience of not being able to send readable files to friends. It is rather lame to suggest that recipients should go to Microsoft and download a converter to solve a problem they did nothing to cause. What is the [...]
Much of tutoring seniors involves helping students overcome (1) paralyzing fear of contaminating their computers with some horrible virus, or (2) their complete trusting of the Internet and the kindness of strangers.
Even when a student has a fully protected system and safe surfing habits, things can sometimes go wrong. This week one of my clients [...]
I have often mentioned that most of my senior clients are women. One could assume this is because men do not live as long as women in general, and therefore the senior population has more women than men. The demographics of aging are certainly a contributing factor, but that is not the whole story.
Some of [...]
One of my most interesting clients is an older woman who started from complete computer ignorance and decided to become computer literate. She went pretty far by herself, but eventually asked me to help her with a series of private lessons. She and her husband have a wireless LAN. He has a desktop he uses [...]
Last week I wrote about a client who experienced a combination of lack of computer literacy along with some hardware problems. His problems had apparently been made worse by some free help he got from friends. This week I am in a bit of a moral dilemma. His frustration level has increased and now he [...]
Often I am better at tutoring than at fixing hardware problems. That was demonstrated again this week when I had a new client. He wanted several things. His computer was getting too slow. His wireless Internet connection did not work (and never had worked). He wanted to know how to organize his folders and thousands [...]
Perhaps a person can actually make a good living by tutoring seniors, but I doubt it. Seniors as a group simply do not have much disposable income to spend on extras such a private tutoring. However, one can make some nice supplemental income and reap other benefits.
For instance, one of my regular clients is a [...]
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