Yeah, I Can Do That … ish.
I just got a notice for my 30th high school reunion, and it took me by surprise. Thirty years? I know I just got out of school, because I still have the parking permit hanging on my rear-view mirror! Oh, wait, that doesn’t count.
I have been taking classes at the Junior College at the breakneck speed of one class a semester. At this rate, I estimate I will have completed my Office Assistant certificate in the year 2025. Nah, just kidding – it will be next fall. Not this fall – 2017 – but 2018. Or possibly spring of 2019.
Part of my slowness is availability. There’s this thing called work, and there’s this thing called life, and there’s this thing called childcare, and somehow those have to align just so with the schedule of classes. This accounts for my one-class-per-semester rate. Also, there’s that fear of the unknown.
My first class was Business English. I thought I’d start out with something familiar and easy– you know, like my native tongue. It turns out that this class had every single thing I was not confident about – those tricky things like “who versus whom,” and “when to use numerals and when to spell out the numbers.” There was a lot of homework, but the most difficult thing was that a lot of the classwork was online. The worksheets had to be entered on PDFs that you filled in, saved, and uploaded to the website. The quizzes and tests were online, too. My “familiar and easy” class got all up in my stress zone, quickly!
The next class was what I would lovingly refer to as “bunny foo-foo.” The title was Exploring Business Careers, but it turned out to be more of a discovering yourself and your strengths to find a career you would be happy doing. (When I say bunny foo-foo, I mean this: we had an entire class devoted to determining our values, and we did this by shuffling little card decks and rearranging rows on our desks until we had a certain number. It was fun, and it was insightful, but I still didn’t know what a legal secretary did all day, which is what I thought the class would be about.)
The next class was similarly bunny foo-foo, and similarly fun and insightful. The title was Soft Skills for Business, and we touched on things like listening and teamwork. One night’s assignment was to build a tower out of 20 spaghetti strands, a yard of electrical tape, a yard of string, and a marshmallow with a team chosen by determining what kind of learner you were. (My team won – woo hoo!)
Now I’m down to five classes, but they are more technical and therefore more intimidating to me. One is 10 Key (the numbers on the right of the keyboard), another is typing – and I have to take two of these, because although I only need Typing 2, I have to take Typing 1 to get there. (This is intimidating because while I can clearly type, I have learned all sorts of bad habits, and will have to unlearn those. You know, like I won’t be allowed to look for the symbols on top of the numbers, so there goes that lazy cheat.) The final two are my most intimidating: Microsoft Word 1 and Excel 1.
When Megan heard that those classes made me nervous she snorted. “You know how to use Microsoft Word, Mom. You USE IT.” Actually, I don’t. I know how to do approximately six things – okay, maybe 10 — and that’s it. The learning curve is going to be steep and slippery! And Excel is a complete and total mystery, so…
I am actively rephrasing the anxiousness into eagerness – I get to learn a new program! – and focusing on the plusses. For example, I will soon know how to confidently open a new document, instead of saving a blank one as “new document” and resaving the typed piece with a different title so that the “new document” remains on the list of documents. I will have more skills to add to cut, paste, copy, select, and check for spelling and grammar.
Yay! Or rather, yay?
