a Mess™️

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

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).

My school was unusual because we had computers but they had a room full of actual typewriters for the typing class. So I learned to properly touch type on a typewriter even though it was the 90s. I happened to get involved in an online RP chat at the time that was on a website where it didn’t load what everyone else was saying until you hit send on your text or refreshed the page. So I had some incentive to learn to type fast and I did. (Steelsings I miss you!)

I’m a teacher now and kids still marvel at my ability to look at them and have a conversation and type something else. I also regularly teach high school seniors how to use things like CTRL F. I have been saying for pretty much my whole career that we need to stop assuming kids are naturally good at tech (fuck you concept of digital natives) and go back to teaching this stuff. It’s not better with the ipad generation- it’s worse. They only understand apps and not real computers.

Also, for the person upthread who mentioned the letters being not in order - there’s a reason for that! They invented the QWERTY keyboard arrangement to slow typists down because people were going too fast for the machines. There were other keyboard arrangements (DVORAK for example) that people can actually type faster at once they learn them but qwerty has stuck.

Huh… apparently that’s a myth! It was designed to speed up typing? TIL

“Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[4]: 162  but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that to place often-used letter pairs farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands.”

display at my local library!!

I see I've released a new word into the tumblr ecosystem, glad we're all being totally normal about it <3

They started messaging. Cachét complimented his drawing of a human-bug threesome and asked for a print. Three years later, Cachét and David got married. The human-bug threesome drawing hangs on the wall of their home.