Ninety-year-old Blanche Keahi leaned toward Hayden Orchard and smiled for a selfie. “Aw, I didn’t have my hair done!” she said when she saw the result on Hayden’s phone. The two laughed and took another picture.
The Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii Windward Clubhouse and the Kailua Senior Citizens Club have launched a brilliant program: pairing tech-savvy kids with kupuna who want to learn how to use their phones and computers.
Last week Keahi sat with seventh-grader Hayden as he carefully wrote out instructions for texting and calling so she could remember what to do when she got home. “He’s a good teacher,” Keahi said.
“She just needs to practice,” Hayden said.
The collaboration was the idea of Susie Thain, a member of the Kailua Seniors Club who figured there was an untapped well of information from the kids next door. The sessions began this month.
The kids are of the generation that practically used cellphones as teething rings. “When you’re little you’re always asking your parents if you can play with their phone. You just get used to how it works,” Hayden said. The challenge is to explain something they know almost instinctively to someone who still uses words like “icebox” and “dial.”
“Last year my daughter got a plan and gave me a phone. She said to take it — in case of anything,” Keahi said. “I told her, ‘I don’t know if I can handle that thing.’”
Just using the touch screen was foreign to her. “I notice that Hayden uses a light touch instead of pressing hard,” Keahi said. “It makes a difference,” Hayden assured her.
Linda Koyanagi sat with seventh-grader Justus Biegel as he explained how to use the camera, maps and GPS on her phone. “Do I have to do the updates when it tells me to do updates?” she asked.
“The security updates, do that,” Justus answered. “But if you do a new update for your whole phone, it will make your screen look different, and that gets confusing and you won’t know what it all is again.”
Koyanagi nodded, grateful for the advice.
A good teacher knows not only the subject area, but what the student needs. Justus knew both.
Maureen Purington, director of the Boys and Girls Club of Hawaii Windward Clubhouse, smiled as Justus politely excused himself so he could run to football practice. The kids are poised, well mannered and sincere with the seniors. “We have the four major goals for the kids: to give them a sense of belonging, to feel useful, to see that they have influence and for them to feel competence. This has them firing on all cylinders,” Purington said.
A group of seniors and students hung out in a side room they dubbed “the flip phone cave.”
“We’ve found that both groups have the same phones — the seniors get hand-me-down phones and the kids get hand-me-down phones,” said Samantha Mulvany, youth development specialist at the Boys and Girls Club.
Ethel Akau Kahili was paired with eighth-grader Chris Seei. When he asked her whether she played computer games, she answered, “Oh, yes! I play solitaire!” Chris, the resident computer genius in the clubhouse, had never played computer solitaire — the games he plays are much more active. “I’ll teach you!” Kahili said, so they went over to a desktop to practice. Kahili plans to teach lei-making lessons at the Clubhouse. Other seniors are talking about reciprocating by sharing their talents with the kids in future sessions.
Mary Piette was beaming as she looked around the room. “As seniors there’s such a gap for us,” she said. “But this is great fun. We’ve been laughing at the kids, and they’ve been laughing at us. We get to know each other as humans.” Piette got help from the kids to manage her Facebook account. She recently updated her status to “Hanging out at the Boys and Girls Club.”
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Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
