MAGNOLIA SPRINGS — Magnolia Springs Public Library is initiating a program that will pair the town’s younger generation with its elders in an effort to provide training.

But the youth aren’t the students. They’re the teachers.

According to Magnolia Springs Librarian Alida Given, through the Teen Tech Savvy Program, youth will teach the older generation about finding their way around mobile devices.

“We have a population with people who are non-youth,” Given said at the library. “They don’t have an idea of how to use it.”

She was recently one of those people, trying to figure out how to download an app onto her phone. So she asked a youngster to explain how to do so.

“She just grabbed it, downloaded it and handed it back to me,” Given said. “That didn’t help.”

After failing to make the young person understand the concept of teaching others that are older, she decided to devise a training program that would be helpful to library patrons.

“People who are older are still bright as buttons, but just not able to grasp this technology,” Given said, explaining that the program also teaches youth to have compassion for a generation that might not be as quick at grasping techology they’ve grown up with.

So she recently had a training session for four youth interested in the program.

“I put old glasses on them, stuffed their ears with cotton and wrapped their fingers with tape, so they’d have an idea of trying to work with arthritic hands," Given said.

Once the props were in place, Given gave the volunteers pencil and paper, and asked them to follow her example in writing a Chinese karta, blurring through the process that is second nature to her, having lived in China.

“They said, ‘Augh! We don’t know what you did,’” she said. “I think that at leaste dawned on them a little bit."

Once the training was complete, the volunteers were put on a list Given keeps on hand when seniors come to her with tech problems.

“One helped a fellow with his computer and laptop,” she said.

Given plans to schedule another session for interested youth over the summer. For more information, call the Magnolia Springs Public Library at 965-2305.