assigned fullmetal at birth

My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. They’ve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesn’t even know the term “home row”. I don’t know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.

Typing classes were only availble to those taking the secretarial class, which was not open to boys.

It should be noted that there is a distinction between typing as it used to mean and word processing. Typewriters were unforgiving machines, not only could you not cut, paste or delete (for obvious reasons) so your spelling had to be very, VERY good, but the legibiity of each letter produced depended on how hard you hit the key (unless you went to a fancy school which had electric typewriters, which were not the norm).

Those of us who were subversive enough to learn keybaord skills through computing had a MUCH easier time of it. Though it was often offset by the shitty keyboards some computers had, and YES, I’m calling you out ZX81!

If you can’t see any depth to those keys, you are correct, they have none because the ZX81 keyboard was a damned membrane!

But believe me, if you could learn to typeat a decent speed on of these, then NOTHING could stop you, expcet for the fact that the odds were good you were typing faster than it could process input.

It’s successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.

We need to bring back typing lessons to the curriculum. The kids will fly if you give them a tablet or smartphone but they have no clue on how to use a keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. If the senior PE class decides to be twats and pry up the keys and swap them round, I will still have 14/15 year olds unable to type because the keys are swapped. And I often don’t notice when helping them because I just.. touch type.

I legitimately broke a Higher Computing Science (so a 16 year old who had chosen to do computer stuff) by showing him how Ctrl+H let him find and replace because he’d made a consistent error in his code and I could see him going back and adding up all the time he’d spent trying to find all the incidences of a specific variable in his code and there I was showing him CTRL+F and all these things.

These kids might not pick a computer based subject after the age of 13 and half of them don’t understand file systems, version control, difference between cloud vs local storage, how to save, etc.

So many kids would just turn off the monitor and think that was the computer, usually leaving themselves logged in (to the point I locked the monitor power button and had multiple posters up reminding kids to press the spacebar on the keyboard to wake up the monitor first).

Metric ✖ Help I’m Alive 

THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.