Thankful for Challenges

Yesterday a teacher shared with me how difficult it was for her to copy a hyperlink from an email, open a new web browser, paste the link, and go.

These instructions (which were necessary steps to view the page because the default IE browser will not load the page that was emailed to her by her building principal) were, by her own words, "like hearing a foreign language" for her.

Her frustration took me back to several memories of experiences I've had learning something new, where everyone seemed to know more than I did, and proficiency for me seemed light years away. I even mentioned to her that I am not tech savvy by nature, and I remember learning myself the things I was showing her.

We talked about right-clicking vs. left-clicking, we talked about where the URL or web address gets typed in a web browser, we talked about how to find programs in Windows 7 (which was new to me only two months ago, actually) and several other tech tidbits that she was picking up for the first time. She said what MANY teachers say, that she was often embarrassed to ask for help, because so much of our job is based on digital tasks, and many people assume we all know how to navigate our way through them.

I offered some advice: this is no different than anything else you've learned. When you learn something for the first time, it is slow and messy. This is often a great benefit, though, because the time spent, the frustrations, dead-ends and failures, all combine to make a longer-lasting impact on our brains and help us perform better with any skill or task when we try it in the future. When someone does something for us, all we learn to do is ask that person for help. But when we work through the obstacles, we really learn, and we learn it for the long haul.

Today, I found myself needing to take my own advice.

Something that embarrassed me that I just did not know how to do for whatever reason was getting a passport. I was raised to "see the USA first," so I've been in 47 states, but haven't been out of the country for 20 years (other than trips to Canada and the Bahamas in the days when we didn't need passports to travel there). I was 12 when I got my last passport.

I need to chaperone a ski trip to Canada this Winter, and I've been told it can take months to get the passport, so I started with Google searches and asking friends. I was told to go to the post office, the UPS store, a notary, and many other places, and I reached several dead ends in the process because many of these places no longer do passport services. I find it strange that in the recent years when more of us are required to get passports, there are so many fewer places to get them! I drove to several places today, a task complicated by leaving my GPS at home (argh!) and found at least three places whose web sites claim do passport services, no longer do. I suggested to all of them that they should update their websites for people like me who, I don't know, skipped lunch, got lost, asked for directions three times and finally arrived only to find out you don't do what you claimed to do! By 1 p.m. I could feel the frustration rising and I began to see the similarities between my situation and the many teachers who I help with technology issues.

I continued my efforts in the afternoon. The application I found online was like any other government document I've seen... some parts were incredibly over-explained, and others -- the ones I was curious about -- had no explanation whatsoever. Do I need a passport book or a passport card? I didn't know. What was my old passport number? Let me check the wastebasket from my room in my childhood home 15 years ago when it expired...

The post offices that still have a Notary and will process passports, by the way, have ridiculous windows of time every day where they can do this (like 30 minutes!) and they are booked solid until mid-November. So after a frustrating day of dead ends, I still don't have the passport. I decided to go and sit through the probably painful process of walking in to the County Court House during business hours and turning in the documents tomorrow.

Some people would laugh at me for having so much difficulty with this process because I'm sure this is a simple procedure for many people out there, but for me it was difficult.

I'm kind of glad it was. In a few weeks, I am going to have to help guide anywhere from 40 to 80 high school students through this process when they start getting their passports to go on this trip. I am glad I can anticipate many of the dead ends they will face. I will not forget how I ended up solving this time-costly problem (or how I HOPE it will be solved tomorrow), and I will be better equipped to teach it to others.

This might have been a long, awkward example, but I hope the point rings true. Whatever challenges us (as silly as it may seem to others) is what teaches us.