Intro to Computer Courses
Stroudsburg School District
Stroudsburg, PA
March 1995
It’s a Wednesday night in March. it is still blistering cold
outside and dark. it was dark when I left for work in the morning and it will
be dark when I finally get to go home tonight. some days I really hate those
long days of work. Tonight is especially long because I will be sitting for
three hours in a computer course: Introduction
to the McIntosh for Educators.
Our school system has just decided to convert to Apple computers.
Since I am the high school principal I feel an obligation to understand this
technology. So I enrolled in this damn
course which will meet for 10 weeks every Wednesday night for three hours. It’s
painful.
I am the only administrator. The other 24 students are
teachers from within our district. A few of the teachers express their anxiety
about this class. “I’m so nervous,” says one older woman. Another woman jokes
that she has trouble turning on the radio. How is she going to master this computer?
Another teacher complains that she’ll never be able to use this computer with
her kindergarten students. Finally, a middle school teacher confesses that
she’s going to ride out the technology era until she retires because she’s just
too stupid to learn anything now.
“I don’t even want to touch it. I’m so afraid of it,” she
confesses to me.
“What are you afraid of”, I ask her rather flippantly.
“I don’t get it. I don’t understand why I should even use a
computer. It’s not my world. I’m too old to learn something now. I ’m afraid of
the introduction course. What comes after this course?”
I tell her she has nothing to fear about this introduction
course. “it’s a piece of cake”, I tell it with confidence. “this is the third
one I’ve taken”.
“You’ve taken this course three times,” she asks rather
bewildered and stunned at my lack of ability to understand how this computer
works.
“No! Not this particular course” I tell her, “but I’ve taken
three introduction to computer courses. first I took a course on how to use the
Tandy Computer by RadioShack and now that’s obsolete. Then I took an
introduction course on how to use the Apple 2E and the computer’s obsolete. Now
I’m taking yet a third course on the computer that I’m sure in five years this
system will be obsolete as well. And look at me. I’ve survived all of these
courses. You can too!”
She laughs. “Well I
guess I’ll give it more effort because I’m going to be retired in less than
five years. So I’ll only have to take one intro course”.
“That’s the spirit", I tell her.
Epilogue: within four years we were no longer using the Macintosh
computers.
