First Meeting 02-17

The first time meeting with Elodia Avelar was wonderful. She was a sweet and eager woman, who was very excited to learn. She has a daughter. She was in classes to learn general education for her GED, but a lot of the class stopped coming so the class stopped being taught. Spencer joined us. She wanted to learn how to check her employee information, particularly her sick hours and her vacation hours. I brought my laptop so we began immediately. Spencer joined us. I began by showing her how to click the "e" to access the internet. My Yahoo! homepage came up. I explained that Yahoo! was my homepage and explained that Yahoo! was a search engine that you could type questions into and the page would take you to another website with an answer. I showed her an example of searching by typing in a question about what the weather might be and showed her how the internet and Yahoo! found the answer. I then showed her to click the very top "box"/"blank, click it until the words are highlighted in blue, delete the "address," and type in the new address that would take her to her employee information. I explained as I typed in my.tcu.edu and hit enter. I asked her if she had an account where she knew her account's username and password. She recalled her information and I showed her how to enter it and hit enter. There was a bit of clicking around to find the information she wanted and once we found it I showed her. Spencer explained how the maximum amount of hours and how her hours were adding up worked. I had been writing down each step as we went on a separate piece of paper. We then exited out and had her try doing each step on her own. She went through each step, if she got stuck she referenced the process paper, and got to her information on her own! Spencer and I then met her at the library and showed her how to Ctrl+Alt+Delete and gain access to the public computers, because she thought there was a computer lab she could use (she doesn't have her own computer) and wanted to know how to access a campus computer. We showed her the log-on and log-off process. The session was then ending. She was excited. She said excited that she learned so much in such a short session. She said the whole process was a lot easier than she thought it was going to be. We are planning on going over the bills online information on her my.tcu.edu, but mostly plan on coaching her for the GED because she seems to really want to get that, which is very admirable. I absolutely loved meeting with her and talking with her. It was so humbling to be reminded of this simple knowledge of knowing how to do these simple things on the computer, and the awareness of what a blessing it is to even own my own computer. I could not ask for a more wonderful mentee.