Buổi 74: Thi thử giữa khóa – Speaking (Part 1–3)

Bài mẫu do khóa học viết; câu chuyện là giả định.

I’d like to talk about the time I taught my aunt how to make video calls, which turned out to be a lot harder – and a lot more rewarding – than I expected.

This was a few years ago. My aunt lives on her own in our home town, and the rest of the family had moved to different cities, so we’d been trying to persuade her to use video calls instead of just phoning. She’d been given a smartphone, but it had sat in a drawer for months because she was afraid of “pressing the wrong thing”.

My first attempt was a disaster. I sat next to her and explained everything far too quickly – I was swiping and tapping and saying things like “just go to settings”, which meant absolutely nothing to her. After ten minutes, she said she was too old for this and put the phone down.

So the next weekend I changed my approach completely. I wrote the steps on a card in large letters, with only four steps on it, and I let her hold the phone the whole time. I didn’t touch it once. Every time she got stuck, I asked her what she thought the next step was rather than telling her. It took nearly an hour, but by the end she’d called my cousin on her own.

What I felt most was a mixture of pride and embarrassment – pride in her, and embarrassment about my first attempt. It taught me that when you know something well, it’s very easy to forget how it feels not to know it. Now, whenever I explain something at work, I try to slow down and let the other person do it themselves.