Hey sunshine;
First no worries you will learn things as long as you ask.
second, does your laptop have bluetooth? If so. place your laptop and phone in discovery mode and they should find each other. Bluetooth is short range so have them close together and they should wrk
Good Luck
If it is not being recognized or is being found as a unknown device then the flash drive is broken. No chance of recovering the files unless you use a recovery program.
Sorry