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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 don't type very fast, but I also don't really have anything too interesting to say.
As chairman of the Hunt-And-Peck Association of Typists (HPAT), I demand equal representation in the class room.
When I was in elementary school, we went to the computer lab a couple days a week and were forced to use the PAWS typing tutor software on the Apple IIe. Is it really that case that there are still schools that don't teach this? Also, based on my experience, I don't think we should wait until high school to teach people to type. Elementary school seems like the right place, as children are learning to read and write, why not learn to type too?
Teaching children touch-typing is an excellent idea, but high school is much too late. Even junior high school kids have reports to write, and still younger kids are using computers. Touch-typing should be taught in elementary school. As far as the curriculum is concerned, grade five or six would probably be alright, but it might need to be earlier to prevent kids from fossilizing bad two-finger habits.
I went to an unusual school that taught touch-typing in grade six back in 1968. We didn't have personal computers then, but for me it was a godsend as I have awful handwriting. Judging from my experience in that school, sixth graders have no difficulty learning touch typing.
I do not (repeat do NOT) use the "home keys"
I can understand getting away with not using the ';', but this post itself contains all the home keys.
You must be some kind of savant.
I find people who type faster are more likely to document their work because it takes less time to do so. After all, you've spent all that time thinking, what is it to write a half page summary of what that new module does and why it does it, and why it does it the way it does it? If you're hunting and pecking, it could take you longer to write the summary than it did to think of the code. If you can touch type (or at the very least type faster than 40-50WPM by whatever means), then it's no real burden. After all, if you're spending that much time thinking about your work, then you've already worked out pretty much everything you need to say.
I type 80-90WPM from copy myself, thanks to having taking a touch typing course. Granted, I don't follow 100% proper classroom technique, but I do pretty well. Before that, I was a four-finger typer that did pretty good. I managed 35WPM from copy on my first typing test when I started my touch typing course. That was hard won from typing BASIC programs on my TI home computer as well as any other 80s machine I could get time on.
I enjoy the freedom that touch typing gives me. In the same amount of time I can write much clearer and more complete documentation, clearer, more complete emails, and generally get communication done with and out of the way much more fluidly. I can type almost as fast as I can think. When I was pecking away at 35WPM, I was thinking way faster than I wrote, and so I wrote only the minimum, and ended up with cryptic crud.
*shrug*
Program Intellivision!
You'd be surprised. Touch-typing doesn't just teach "how to type fast and accurately", it also teaches "how to type with minimum strain on your hands/wrists".
If this hasn't affected you, you're lucky. If this has, you know exactly what I mean.
Touch-typing is a drop in the bucket.
Agreed. Since most people can't write, there's no point in having them touch type.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
"The system's efficiency is dropping steadily and steeply; teachers are out of touch with current technologies"
Has calculus changed in the last 150 years?
Has English changed (aside from a handful of grammar constructs, a few words, etc.) in the last 50?
Does addition work differently that it did in the 15 century?
Adding new teaching methods is a good idea if they work and help learning. i.e. putting full color 3-D graphs of certain functions in calc. books.
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.
Unfortunately, every time anyone tries to put "technology" into public schools, it fails miserably. Students are much better off taking notes from a lecture written on a chalkboard than watching a presentation bluescreen for the third time this week.
People are very quick to say "TEACHERS ARE OUT OF DATE!", but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The material being taught hasn't changed because IT STILL WORKS LIKE IT DID BACK THEN!
The other argument is that classes are "less relevant" to today's students. This is really just another way of saying "students are lazy and without spinning animations on screen every 5 seconds they start to daydream". Calculus is just as relevant to students now as it was to students 50 years ago (depending on choice of profession, this may be a lot or a little). But putting the fundamental theorem on calculus or on "these new-fangled interwebs" doesn't result in better learning over seeing it on a chalkboard.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
>>I do not (repeat do NOT) use the "home keys"
>I can understand getting away with not using the ';', but this post itself contains all the home keys.
I tore out type ere I wrote, to type up top:
upper typewriter row, pert repertoire.
Reporter, I quote to you: To write, pop type out.
Retire typewriter row two. Your tri-row?
Rip it out, too. Tour your top row territory.
Queer tip, you retort? I worry your poor typewriter?
To torque it out -- typewriter terror?
You require row two, your tri-row prop?
You pout, try to quip. (Poor etiquette.) You titter.
(Poorer propriety.) You utter uppity output?
Quiet, you! Quit it! You purport to write.
I tire to peer to your rot, your petty writ,
to eye your wire report. You write pyrite,
terrier to torpor. I pity you, preppie yuppie.
I tutor you, tyro, to uproot your trite tree,
put type to pyre. Rupture type. Write to write.
I erupt. I riot. I prototype pure power
to write. I, upper typewriter requiter.
I outwit you, too. To perpetuity, I write poetry.
You, to put it true, putter out rote poop.
(with regards to Nick Montfort)