When teaching IT, I have seen many, many students hesitate way too much. The have reluctance to click, tap, press Enter, and so on. They will ask 2 or 3 times if they are doing the right thing before they try and do it. It is such a counter-productive way to learn tech.
You have to tap, click, drag, etc. and make mistakes and correct them. Once you figure out why something disappeared and how to bring it back, you’ll never make that move again. Unless you want to. Making very sure that you are clicking the right thing before clicking is not as memorable as just clicking and either 1) fixing the mistake 2) congratulating yourself on figuring it out.
But it is often difficult to get students to take action and see if it will work. They want to know. Sometimes that’s OK, but it’s not feasible all of the time. In a class of 6 or 12 or 20 students, if each student waiting until the instructor looked over their shoulder and gave the OK, that class would go really slowly. Plus, like I stated earlier, taking an action and dealing with the consequence sticks in the memory more than explicit instructions.
One of the ways I deal with reticent students is to keep reiterating that they can’t break the machine. At least not more than I can fix it. They are all standard installs after all with little data. Worst case is a reinstall. I would even advocate this philosophy for their home computer, with the caveat of backing up first. But how are you going to learn? Some of my most painful lessons were of 1) typing a very long paper only to have the computer crashed before I saved 2) building PCs from scratch, everything in the right spot and not understanding what exactly was not working 3) ruining an expensive CPU chip with static electricity.
My most public painful lesson was as a new network administrator. I sent a message my local area network, about 20 users, that I was going to bring the server down for a half hour for updates. I didn’t clear it with my supervisor, I knew what had to be done. I thought I was cool, instead of just sending an email, I sent a message through NetBIOS. If done correctly, a little message pops up on your screen, and you can hit OK to get rid of it. Well I did send the message correctly, too correctly.
I worked for a Fortune 500 company at the time with large office in 3 cities. And my message went out to thousands of company users in 3 cities. Apparently I freaked quite a few people who needed their server and when the admins on of the other cities tracked down the message to my network, my boss let me know the extent my message had reached.
I lived through an instructive lesson, co-worker laughs, and extreme, however temporary, mortification. And I learned.
You don’t want the painful lessons. But you need them.