Hold on, this is fascinating. Reblog this and tell me in the notes how old you are and if you ever had typing lessons.
What in Godβs good name is a βtyping lessonβ
I canβt tell if youβre being serious or not
Iβm serious what is a typing lesson? What would they teach you? To type? My brother in Christ it is like writing with a pen but technically easier.
Before home computers were very common, people typically only typed for business-related things, so the only people that actually knew how to use typewriters and word processors were authors, secretaries, accountants, etc. These people would take classes for typing bc it was seen as a skill. This gradually fell out of fashion, much like teaching kids cursive
Typing is only intuitive to gen y & z bc most of us learned through computer games or had someone tell us where to rest our fingers. People who never learned to type use just their index fingers, hit one key, take a long time to find the next letter, hit it with an index finger, and repeat until finished
34 i played this:
33 and i started with Mavis Beacon
34, had typing lessons in 3rd and 4th grade and Mavis Beacon as a kid and Iβve still never used home row except when I was forced to. I type everything with my left hand. The only thing my right is for is using the shift, backspace, and enter keys.
43, first had typing lessons in 4th grade on some type of Mac, then my mother bought me a book and a manual typewriter and made me learn to touch-type, for which I am still grateful 30+ years later. I remember how excited we were when we upgraded to an electric typewriter.
Of course, I got hit by nostalgia so hard that I recently bought a manual typewriter and have been writing letters to people with it! I love it to pieces.
28 and I learned to type through Type To Learn. I have severe dysgraphia to the point where I couldnβt keep up with writing in school early on, so the summer after second grade my parents trained me intensely on all the typing programs they could get, and found ways to help me learn to type fast.
Iβm so nostalgic for those games.
βIt is like writing with a pen but technically easierβ my brother in Christ children also take writing lessons
#LMAO yeah^#i had computer class in 2001 where we eventually had to put paper over our hands to take a test to see if we could type without looking#we also played games#i hated the paper thing at the time. i knew i just needed MORE practice. i dont think i got GOOD at typing until a few years after that#also.. when you have a pen. you can just create the letter you need. with a keyboard you have to FIND IT. and its NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER#how is that easier??#but i guess i dont know any kids whove grown up with computers and could probably type before they could writeβ¦.????? π³Β
Modern kids canβt type before they can write. I mean, most kids understand how to use a keyboard, and pressing letters takes less coordination than writing them so can be started at a younger age for learning to spell, but Iβve worked a lot with kids in the 8-14 year age bracket and theyβre usually FASCINATED by how fast I type. (My typing speed isβ¦ not impressive. If they made me take one of those speed/accuracy tests they used to do for admin or data entry jobs, I would NOT pass.) But many of the kids Iβve worked with take my comfort and familiarity with a keyboard (Iβm a writer) as some impressive, magical skill, because an awful lot of them are letter-peckers.
24, learned actual touch-typing when I was maybe 4 or 5 with this, the sound effects still live rent-free in my brain:
The shift keys on our computer were broken, so up until high school I would type capitals by turning caps lock on for a single key and then back off again.
Iβm 39. We had typing lessons every year throughout elementary school. I never really got good at it until I started playing mmos, though.
My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. Theyβve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesnβt even know the term βhome rowβ. I donβt know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.
Iβve gone what I can to help them learn how to type, but Iβm not a teacher.
Mid 50β²s.
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, Iβm calling you out ZX81!
If you canβt 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.
Itβs successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.
Genuinely as a computing teacher in the 11-18 age group, Iβm saying this now:
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 donβt 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 heβd made a consistent error in his code and I could see him going back and adding up all the time heβd 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 donβt 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).
Basically, digital literacy is being fucking stolen by the appification of the digital platforms available to kids.
