“A son or daughter can’t teach the 80- or 90-year-old computers,” said Coppola, who tried to teach her grandmother computer tricks. “There’s too much baggage there—emotional baggage. People get very funny; they don’t have the same patience with their mom or their dad or older relatives that they have with a stranger.”
The gap between young and old quickly came into view as the seniors introduced themselves to their tutors, most of whom were in their early 20s.
There was Dorothy, an elegant woman in a red vest, whose children had insisted she get a computer. She compared using it to trying to understand a second language. “It’s that foreign to me,” she said.
“I’m completely computer illiterate, except to play solitaire,” said a woman named Anita.
“This gadget scares the living daylights out of me,” said Frances, who was embarrassed to admit that she didn’t know the make of her computer. “I’ll tell you the truth, I almost got rid of the damned thing. It got a virus. Then it got frozen.”
Several had taken the course before but had forgotten what they learned or were hampered by poor eyesight and other limitations, such as arthritic fingers and fading memories.
Virtually all of them, though, said they needed to learn so they could keep in touch with distant relatives and friends, and see photographs of children and grandchildren.
“It scares me,” Edythe Eisenberg said of her iPad. “But when I call my kids and grandkids they don’t call back, so I have to use eMail.”
Before the one-on-one tutoring sessions could begin, students were put through what Coppola calls “sensitivity training,” a class designed to give the young teachers an idea of the ailments facing their elderly charges. It is conducted by Sharon Stahl Wexler and Lin Drury, registered nurses and Pace professors who work with Coppola on the program.
“We’re going to have a lot of fun!” Wexler told the slightly dubious-looking young crowd as she and Drury passed out props. They included earplugs to stifle hearing; unpopped popcorn to put into shoes to give the feeling of corns and calluses; tape to bind fingers into arthritic-like claws; glasses to emulate vision problems.
There were boxes of clementines to peel while wearing gloves; tiny pill boxes filled with fake medications to be carefully picked through; and a page of the telephone book, to be read while wearing the special glasses.
For extra credit, there were adult diapers, which students were invited to dampen and wear for a few hours while seated in front of a computer.
“They’re fun for the first couple of minutes, but imagine needing those implements to walk,” Wexler said as the trussed-up tutors meandered the hallways using walkers, crutches, wheelchairs, and canes. They included Alice Simmons, a theater major, who was being pushed in a wheelchair by Katie Allen, a history major.
A few days later, both of the young women began their tutoring sessions back at Hallmark.
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