Fish teaches typing

I've been teaching a computer software applications class (Word, Excel, etc) to ex-offenders at a community center in Chicago for three weeks now. I've come in on Monday of week four and everything has gone to shit, so I thought I'd write about it to help get my thoughts together.

I've had 4 students in the course, one has gone AWOL, while one just enrolled today.

The materials I have to work with include six computers in various states of repair, all five to nine years old. One computer only has a disk drive for media input while some have CDroms, network cards, and USB ports too. One of the machines can be considered "fully functional", i.e. has MS Office and a working disk drive (I'm not asking for much here)

I've been trying to get Open Office on the machines so I would have some software to teach the students on. Last week I tried to run a network between my laptop and the computers, in order to copy the files, but I was met with failure and futility. This morning I purchased a USB drive and assumed I could get the files through that way.

Apparently windows 98 and 95 don't auto-detect usb drives (kind of makes sense for 95, but I'd think that 98 would download the driver from the device... no such luck).

So in the process of installing OOo-Dev on two of the machines, I restarted them and got locked out. Now I'm down to 2 computers that at least have the typing tutor program on them. At least only 2 students have shown up today.

So now I need to get a USB thumb drive driver for 98 or install CD roms in some of these blasted things...