Educational Psychology tells us that people have different learning styles, and ideally teaching should be tailored to the individual. While this works well with one-on-one tutoring, it doesn't in a classroom, where the lecture mode means that one style has to fit all.
My learning style, while comfortable with interactional learning in social situations, requires a massive amount of repetition for learning anything technically detailed. I am fortunate in that for all learning necessary to managing my computer's hardware my husband David is my tutor, and for the same involving hardware, my son Jeff is my tutor. When first I asked for coaching about the computer more than twenty years ago, both husband and son used the "Tell her once and she'll get it" approach. On me, of course, it DID NOT WORK, and frustration reigned on all sides. Slowly they learned to accept how I learned, and slowly they adapted their teaching style to my learning style. Consequently in the middle of November when son Jeff visited, he coached me flawlessly and patiently through learning a new skill, departing with the reminder to practice every day for a couple of weeks. David has reiterated that reminder daily, and here I am, now able to perform MOST - but not all - of the operations necessary to incorporate pictures and text on the same page.
HOORAY!
Perhaps I am not conveying well what a big deal this is for me.
It is A BIG DEAL for me.
However, it brings complications, one of which is my father's book. I had prepared the illustrations for it almost a decade ago using my then-available skills, and do not want at this point to discard about a foot thick of sets of illustrations. Dad's book will have to be old-format with his pictures and the same with his footnotes. There is discomfort for me in this as now that I know better ways something in me wants to discard hundreds of hours of work and apply my new skills. But to do that would not only be unacceptably wasteful but would cut into the time allocated for the next project.
Later, rethinking the matter, I should be able to combine text and photographs in the last section of the book, the decade of the 1970s. The pictures from this time have not yet been scanned. Perhaps that's the solution, including with it an explanation of the changing format...