Some things that may be pertinant:
I’m 45
Math class left me behind in about 8th grade, and that same ‘head swimming’ feeling accompanied me through all my attempts at algebra etc
I worked as a temp in the mid-80s through early 90s (where faking my way through office technology until I caught on was my primary job skill)

I literally had to teach my mom what a mouse WAS, how it corresponded to the screen, how to hold it, how to hang on while clicking, how to double click without moving it off target, the whole nine yards.

I still don’t think I’ve seen many successful students in areas like music theory that didn’t do well in music tech if they gave same effort.

AMEN! We could start our own class.

I just learned yesterday that the internet and world wide web are two different things.

And those are totally different from a “mouse”.

Phil, not to compliment myself, but I know I didn’t fall into the description you gave. RTL yes, lame student and poor learner, no. It’s like there was (and sometimes still is) a technology gap in my brain. With other subject matter, teachers start at the beginning. With technology, it always seemed like they assumed a foundation was there and jumped off from that point, leaving me playing catch-up and hesitant to ask what I needed to ask. I could always tell that the kinds of things I was unclear on were akin to asking “What are primary colors again?” in a class on advanced color theory. Pride kept me from piping up.

Simone, where are you from? I thought such perspectives were few and far between these days.

But maybe that’s just where we are from…

They refuse to learn or use the terminology that will allow them to ask intelligent questions. This is not a technical task, it is a simple verbal one… you have to be able to point at something on the screen and call it by its correct name. Otherwise, you can’t ask a comprehensible question, and you can’t understand the answer. This is tantamount to a math student refusing to learn the term “quotient” or “exponent”, making it impossible for them to even ask an intelligent question.

They won’t go through sequential learning processes that have been designed for them. Partway through they realize they aren’t getting it all, and so they stop, as if anyone ever “gets it all” the first time throught.

They won’t review fundamentals after a period of experimentation (read, they won’t go through the tutorial again to see if they get more from it this time, now that they’ve had some experience with the thing).

These are learning (or NOT learning) traits that apply to learning lots of things besides technology. I observe that people who learn technology well usually have the capacity (frequently demonstrated) to learn well in other areas.

There are exceptions to any generalization. But this is what I see.

For the most part, RTLs are really RLs…. again, with those occasional exceptions. To put it another way: people who get As in Music Theory very rarely get Fs in Music Tech.

It would be like if ballet dancing became a requirement to earn your music degree, because sometimes people dance to music. Then a different group of people would be reticent. Some in the technology class have never paired music and computers ever.

The good thing about RTLs is that they have so much to learn from you, and will feel a greater sense of accomplishment after producing a job well done.

After they quit whining about it. (j/k) :)

I guess I’m suggesting, Mike, that curiosity and a willingness to make mistakes can be encouraged at home and in school, and if they’re not, it’s pretty difficult to take the bull by the horns.

“I want an email,” she would say, “But I don’t need the internet.”

Now, this was one of the most capable women you’ve ever met. She was living on her own and driving herself around until about 3 months before she died (prematurely at 84, if you ask me, due to cancer). She had been a schoolteacher, a political activist (I guess very involved in Goldwater’s run in ‘64) and at the end of her career, was an office manager for a very swanky Pacific Palisades orthodontics office whose clients included Vin Scully and a young Drew Barrymore. This is not to mention the fact that she was the consummate hostess of all hostesses.

I will never, ever forget the moment when I was showing her how to navigate around her recently Best Bought PC, and she had to pause to lean over, grab her notepad, and write down the words, “Double Click.”

I understood at that moment, that intelligence has very little to do with understanding technology. The concept was new, and worth remembering, so she went to her organizational format to remember something that I’ve taken for granted since I was six years old.

Stupid computer!

Don’t be alarmed, but I am an APU parent. I watch my APU music girl use her required computer. Sometimes she gets mad at it. Privately I gringe and laugh..all those hand writtien statistics problems, the program writing, the exercises in binary math, and my horrible typing at the key punch…I know its not the equipment. User error.

Then I met Brian. He told me later that he was impressed with me because the first time we met, I had a software manual on my lap and apparently I appeared to be reading and understanding it. Ahhh, love is blind. On our first date, he showed me his “gear.” I thought he was weird. But, I liked him. A lot. After some soul-searching (’Can I really live my life with someon who gets more excited about small black boxes that plug in and have little lights on them more than anything else?’) I decided I could.

Computers like Brian. And he likes them. He lovingly and gently helped me battle my RTL (Lovingly: “You have a seriously low tolerance for this stuff…seriously, why are you freaking out?!…Do you seriously not remember how to do that?!” Gently: “If you’re going to get your undies in such a wad just move and I’ll do it for you! SHEEESH!”)and against all odds, I stand here today, a recovered RTL.

What’s super funny though is that I worked as an aide in the MIDI lab. Ha-ha! But what was sad is that I was actually helpful to most of the people who came in there. Learning the MAC system and LOGIC was not a problem for me(I do great with software) it’s the hardware that would trip me up. If something became unplugged, Lord help us! Uh, why don’t you use THIS computer…? :)

I’m not looking at this as a way to remove the obligation on reticent learners to get up to speed on new tools, but from the perspective of a teacher. If these are real and consistent traits, then we should be asking if there are ways to train people out of them, so that they can emerge as self-sustaining learners.

Windows 3.1… sheesh.

But she slugged through it. She read manuals. She called me (when she could still hear well enough) and asked if she could delete some useless file whose name ended with .dll. (I said NO, hurriedly…)

She dutifully kept sets of instructions I gave her, and practiced with them.

She is now 92 (93 on July the Fourth coming up!). She had a stroke five years ago, and now types onehanded. I think she’s a bit vague still on the distinction between memory and storage (RAM and HD). I’m not sure she grasps conceptually the similarity between “surfing the internet” in AOL and using a browser, though in practice she does both.

She sends me email most days, sometimes with attachments, sends me links to websites she thinks I should read, can save photos on her ocmputer when I send them to her, and find them and print them later, if she wants. She knows how to forward email to me from other people.

It is her window on the world, and her main way of keeping in touch with family she can no longer understand on the phone.

She has probably exhibited ALL the traits you listed at one time or another, but she is PERSISTENT. She just doesn’t give up. If she has to, she’ll wait till I can explain it or fix it, but she always goes back at it again.

Which suggests to me that the main thing lacking in the RTL is enough mental toughness to stick it out, a low tolerance for ambiguity until understanding is formed, and just plain a low frustration tolerance. Anyone who uses technology successfully at a high level has learned to just keep trying until something works.

There is one other element in the mix for some music majors. Some of them believe they are ABOVE using technology to make music, because they are MUSICIANS.

Oy vey.

In other news, I interviewed Steve Bartek today at a cafe in Santa Monica for my grad class.

It was…AWESOME.

Somewhere, somebody has had this conversation before!

I was just speaking with a “colleague” of mine who had been shipped a new firewall/vpn appliance that needed to be setup. As he was unboxing the equipment, he wouldn’t stop repeating the mantra “I’m not a very techno-literate person. I couldn’t even get him to go through the first step (plug in the power cord) before he killed all conversation and let me know someone from the IT staff needed to come over to his house and set this up.

In my experience (not scientific proof, just observation) age is a big factor. As a individual ages they tend to not be as open to new ideas as they once were. All of the younger users in my company have no problems when a new system is put in place. All of my “elderly” users have monitors littered with sticky notes on procedures for this or that. All of my younger users could be counted on in our company not to write down their new 8-12 digit secure password for the system. You could see the strain in the “older” generation when I told them that corporate password policy forbids them to write down their password or tell their cubicle neighbor what it is.

Also, I don’t know where you would put this in your list, but whenever a simple problem has occurred and I bring my 15 plus years of experience in the field to bear on the problem by fixing it with a short explosion of key strokes, I’m some sort of wizard or holy man. The awe in their faces when I type “windows key”,r,cmd,enter,ipconfig /release, ipconfig /renew,exit,enter is truly amusing. I usually end the conversation by saying something about the “svga monitor virus” and leave the room.
-PC