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Message: [QUOTE="Roedy Green, post: 3113657"] Strangely it is not. What is odd is the other women in the class chastised me as well. I was dumbfounded. Their point was I should have noticed how stressful this was for her and backed off, and that I should apologise for giving her an impossible ill-defined task. I gave her no algorithm to decide which key to kit. Her reluctance for me made no sense. It was not as though I was asking her to jump out of a plane. I had taught university level and children before, but never a group such as this. It was completely different. I talked about this with various people trying to understand what was happening. One person said, that older adults are extremely afraid of making a mistake, especially a public mistake.. They would find it humiliating. (I had noticed teaching university students a few would refuse to work at the black board.) They want to know exactly what to do. They want assurance the odds of making a mistake are extremely low. It seems to me, you can't learn anything in computers until you are willing to make hundreds of mistakes. You have to keep trying thing after thing until you find something that works. If you punish yourself for failing to guess the right answer the first time, you will become paralysed and incapable of solving any but the simplest problems. [/QUOTE]