Procrastination and MonkeyPost 3

763.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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Yes, I’m still mired to the hips in procrastination because I still don’t know how to do what I need to do with MonkeyPost and I’m scared of experimenting because I don’t know where to start and I don’t want to get even more befuddled.

I wish I could find a teacher who wouldn’t laugh at me for being so bad at Teknika and would explain very simply and step by step so I can keep up. I retired bewildered from the fray with the MonkeyPost video because the speed the squeaky-voiced gerbil was going made me dizzy.

I imagine my lovely teacher sitting down with me and telling me to breathe slowly (so my amigdala reptile doesn’t start getting panicky) and telling me first what we’re going to do and making a nice list. Then we’d work our way down the list and anytime the programmers had hidden something or changed it without warning or done some kind of weirdness, she’d be there to calm me down and maybe make me laugh at the idiocy of the programmers.

And she would have empathy and explain that doing an Automation Sequence doesn’t have to be a horrible ordeal, it just feels that way.

And she wouldn’t have the problem of Expert Blindness, though of course she would be an expert.

Expert Blindness is the problem that most experts learned how to do basic stuff so long ago that they’ve forgotten completely what it feels like NOT to know. This cripples their ability to teach. Experts never get that sick tense feeling in their stomach nor the sense that they don’t know anything and it’s hopeless. It isn’t hopeless. I have actually conquered Teknika in the past occasionally. But the expert needs to see things from my point of view before she can explain anything properly.

Speaking as somebody who does remember what it feels like not to know (because I still don’t know a lot of stuff), I’m aware that you have to break everything into little steps and NOT SKIP anything. Both are important but I think not-skipping is the most important, as all tutorials skip stuff. If you already know it, that’s fine. If you don’t – you can waste hours and days trying to work it out.

I remember once, years and years ago, I was doing a Maths course with the Open University. We hit algebra. I was given a little game to play (on a small floppy disc) which was presented as a sort of tiddleywinks (a pre-computer game involving flipping buttons or tokens into a cup). I was extremely cynical about this, having struggled with Maths all my life, but I played it and actually started to understand the rules of the game. I enjoyed it.

And then the game revealed that I had been doing algebra all along and showed how the different coloured tiddlywinks turned into symbols and how it was the relations between the symbols that mattered. I was literally breathtaken. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if somebody had switched on a light. And then I realised that the Maths teacher at my school had skipped some important matters like the true meaning of the equals sign. All of it suddenly made sense.

So what I want is a teacher who understands all this. Also someone who doesn’t take over and do the thing for me – which nearly all help-desk people want to do, probably because their expert status means that they have no idea why I find things so difficult and they want to get on with it. But that means I’m helpless the next time I need to do the thing. If I have already done it, I’d have some chance of remembering how and this would make me feel better about myself and also about Teknika.

There is also the problem of remembering what I did because so often I do some complicated Teknika thingy, finally get the computer to do what I want and then forget how I did any of it because it was so traumatic. And of course the bloody programmers are always changing things without warning so what I remember of what I did last month is now obsolete and I have to learn it all again.

I’d still like to find a really good teacher even though I understand that such a paragon is going to be rare at best and nonexistent at worst. I live in hope.

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