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The Case For Mandatory Touch-Typing In High School
Hugh Pickens writes "With the perspective of forty-plus years since my graduation, I would say the single most useful course I took in high school was a business class in touch-typing that gave me a head start for writing and with computers that I have benefited from my entire life. So it was with particular interest that I read Gordon Rayner's essay in the Telegraph proposing that schools add a mandatory course in touch typing to the cornerstones of education: reading, writing and arithmetic. 'Regardless of the career a child takes up when they leave school, a high percentage of them will use a keyboard in their daily work, and all of them are likely to use a keyboard in their leisure time,' writes Rayner. 'Touch-typing would help every child throughout their lives — so why are our schools so blind to this?'"
I'm a software engineer, and I get to work daily with some people who never learned to touch-type. It would be a nice bonus to productivity if everyone around me could; not ground-breaking, but nice. I think, by and large, by the time people hit the workforce, their typing habits are pretty unlikely to change without some major effort. Is even high school too late? Most kids are regularly using computers right through primary school. I think learning to type is a responsibility shared by parents and primary schools these days.
Bottom line is, they need to be learning things in some sort of a sequence so that they can build on what they already know. My opinion is they should go with it as follows:
I am well aware the article talks about teaching this at the high school level, but from what I've seen, it doesn't improve much. When I was in high school, there were juniors and seniors who could barely read, and their handwriting may as well have been from Omicron Persei 8 for how legible it was. We need to make sure kids have a handle on the basic skills BEFORE they get to high school. If we can manage that, I'm pretty sure most will pick up typing quite well on their own.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Touch-typing is a drop in the bucket. First, we'd have to begin to get rid of the lecture method with all it's crotchety old proponents who over-emphasize the main learning stream while under-emphasizing the alternatives. Then we'd have to rebuild education metholodogy to suit the 21st century. I'd say we're a few generations behind.
Agreed.
When you take a better look at it, our education system has just been adding more of the same. My grandmother took four years of obligatory education (this was in Yugoslavia, now Croatia; YGMMMV). My parents and I took eight years of primary school. The current government, may it burn in seven hells, wants to make the first twelve years of education obligatory.
The worst part is that the second four years of education are rather alike the first four, albeit with several new subjects, i.e. some old subjects diverging into several new ones. To top it all, the four years of current secondary education are just a rehash of the second four years of primary education.
The system's efficiency is dropping steadily and steeply; teachers are out of touch with current technologies, and those who train teachers are even worse. The school system has increasingly less connection to both the real world and to its basic purpose, i.e. teaching. Instead, schools' primary purpose is becoming something quite different: keep the children trapped in the system, and keep young people at children's level for as long as possible.
Touch typing would be a giant step forward in any education system since a primary skill would be taught. However, I abhor the idea of such a skill being graded, as it usually happens with anything taught in schools.
BTW curious tidbit just crossed my mind: instead of teaching touch typing, Croatian schools recently reintroduced calligraphy. Instead of learning normal cursive script (joined-up writing), first-graders are taught old-style calligraphy. The fact that practically no-one uses a pen these days seems to have escaped the 19th century educators.
Bloody morons.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I'm stunned that it isn't required already. I took typing and even did it with a broken finger taped to a popsicle stick but it was one of the best courses I took. It is agonizing to watch someone poking their fingers on a keyboard with their hands moving all over the place and their eyes looking down and up and down and up. So much wasted effort and time and at the same time, businesses let people get away with this too. I've seen developers who can't touch-type and that is pathetic when such a skill means so much to getting the job done. Would you hire a mechanic who used a wrench for a hammer and screwdriver as a chisel? But, it's allowed, it's accepted, and as we have been made aware in this thread, touch-typing is an after thought in our school system so it's unlikely to change.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Agreed! I took a Scheidegger touchtyping course when I was around 10 years old, on one of ye olde electric typewriters, and it turns out that it is one of the most useful things I ever learned. Well, math and spelling are very useful too, of course, but touchtyping is a skill that has served me throughout my professional life.
The problem is that in elementary school, most teachers don't know how to touch type, so how could they teach the children? The teachers should be taught first!
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
But adding new technology is bad if it isn't used correctly. i.e. putting "smartboards", projectors, etc. in every classroom. No teacher knows how to use them, they are all required to use them, and student learning completely stops. Sitting in class for 20 minutes because the teacher can't get the computer to talk to the projector HARMS learning.
My sister was one of the first teachers around here to get those. She actually knows how to use it, and uses it to great effect.
Of course, I was the one who helped set it up, and figure out how it all works. Now that she knows, she teaches all the other teachers as best as she can.
She's a bright one, though. Most of the other teachers don't grasp things like this as quickly as she does. (thats what happens when both your parents are engineering-type people)
The sad bit, though?
The whole school has a single tech to support them. And they have to submit requests in through the county, to get the help.
The teachers ask me for help via my sister, since it takes almost a month for it to go through the proper channels.
It's not the teachers or the technology that is at fault. It's the administrative systems that are attached to them.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I've kept trying to tell my own kids that out of all the classes I took in HS, typing has helped me the most.
Sure math and english were important, don't get me wrong, but the typing helped the most.
BWP
In the late 1970s I took a typing class in junior high school. Boys were actually discouraged from taking typing, so there were only a few other boys in the class. Despite the speed and accuracy requirements to pass the class being quite low, I barely passed, and the teacher advised me that I should never take a job requiring typing skills.
I learned about the same time, but my experience was a bit different. I opted to take a typing class that was advertised as "business somethingorother" to prepare girls for future careers as secretaries. My reasons for taking the class were twofold. First, that's where the girls were, so what better place to meet one? Second, certain classes required that term papers be typed and not hand-written. I wasn't about to sit at home and do the hunt and peck routine so typing class it was.
I met lots of girls, of course. The problem was I typed faster than most of them, so they resented me. The more "interesting" girls were hanging around outside smoking cigarettes, anyway. ;-)
When computers came along, I felt right at home. My typing, same as you, has gotten better over the years. Funny how far learning proper technique can take you.
Best class I ever took? Absolutely. And seeing how poorly people type on keyboards today, and listening to all the "ergonomic" complaints and excuses, I'd suggest that all kids be forced to take a typing class (and preferrably on a manual typewriter where they can discover the value of technique). Whether they grow up to work as secretaries or programmers, doesn't matter. Most all jobs (auto mechanics included) involve using a keyboard for part of the work day. And for non-working hours, how can anyone find or get porn effectively without being able to type?
Yeah, I kinda forgot about that. I graduated in 1974. I took typing as an elective, and I was one of only two boys in the class. We caught hell, because the jocks thought it was effeminate. Today, I guess all of those jocks search for their porn with the old tried and true hunt-and-peck method. That sure slows a guy down, I imagine. Learning to type was probably the best move I made in high school. In the Navy, I was able to sit in an office and fill out forms in a minute or two, that other people spent 10, 15, even 30 minutes doing by hand. That ability got me INTO the office, where I was able to sit on my butt while other people chipped paint, carried supplies, swabbed the decks, etc.
Today, our local school system has "keyboarding" classes. The kids know how to do things with a keyboard that I never wanted to do. I still don't know what those 16 extra keys are supposed to do on my own keyboard - I'm perfectly happy with a standard 102 key! :^(
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
As a bit of a reality check, let me describe what happened when my school got one of those "smart boards".
The teacher that ordered it was rather technophile, for a teacher at least. Though also a little older, not quite up to date with current technology. However, when he tried to use it in class, he ran into all kind of problems. The software required a later version of Internet Explorer than was installed on that presumably vanilla Win2k that was supposed to run the thing. Not that it said so outright, it gave a cryptic message about some function not being available. Of course, he had no way of knowing what's the problem was, and sent for some tech support. They took the PC with them, and didn't return it for a week. So, it was back to traditional blackboards.
After the PC was back, it was discovered there were applications missing the smartboard software assumed was there, e.g. Acrobat Reader iirc. So, it was back to tech support again.. And so on, thousands of problems came up that prevented the use of that shiny new toy, and after a while even that teacher gave up.
So, you're saying it's stupid to not be able to install a smart board. I don't think teachers, or anyone except computer professionals, have to have this obscure knowledge about interpreting cryptic error messages, and as computer technology is often portrait as the solution to everything, more people run into that kind of problems, get frustrated and give up.
Contrary to common conception, computers are not the solution to everything - way too often, they create problems where there were none, trying to solve non-issues.
I have yet to experience a use of a smart board, where a traditional blackboard wouldn't have done the job at least as well, without requiring any training on part of the user.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
An interesting side-bar:
I have a friend who suffered brain trauma. He lost his ability to speak and write (aphasia). He could understand everything spoken to him. The unusual aspect of this injury is that his ability to communicate via typing was unharmed (this came out during a PT session using computers). He couldn't remember how to join words with a pen -- he couldn't remember how to say words to form a sentance -- but he could read and type. He could also read out loud. He keeps canned phrases on his phone which he'll read off.