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Should Gaj make his own thread This poll is closed. |
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6 | 54.55% |
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| Total: | 11 votes | ||
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I took a tech course in high school and our teacher found a typing program (Rhino?) that he had us learn on (because it did all the assessment for him) and it was one of the most practically useful skills I learned. It took me like 2 minutes to write the above text because I suck at typing on my phone now, though.
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Jan 27, 2022 11:23
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jazzyhattrick posted:When do you guys think schools will catch up to the *checks notes* mid 1990s, realise that pretty much everybody works with a computer now and start teaching kids to touch type? they didn't even bother teaching it when they handed every kid a chromebook to learn remotely for a year
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Jan 27, 2022 11:32
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Dogmeat posted:they didn't even bother teaching it when they handed every kid a chromebook to learn remotely for a year IIRC it apparently became a problem, since schools used to assume that kids either already knew basic computer skills or would learn them on their own, which was maybe valid in the late 90 to 00s when everyone was playing computer games and surfing the web, but now kids are growing up on touchscreen devices and no one's ever taught them concepts like 'file locations'.
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Jan 27, 2022 11:40
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jazzyhattrick posted:When do you guys think schools will catch up to the *checks notes* mid 1990s, realise that pretty much everybody works with a computer now and start teaching kids to touch type? When I was in high school (late 80s) I took a touch-typing class and it was easily the most practical and useful class on any subject I have ever taken from that point forward. Aside from reading and general math it's the only school-taught skill that I have used every day since I learned it. I can't believe that touch typing is not taught as a required course in some capacity now in high school or even middle school. As an aside, we learned on IBM Selectrics which were weird and loud and I have only recently broke the habit of the double space after a period. Also, I was the first person at my high school to compose, print, and hand-in for a grade a paper on a word processor.
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Jan 27, 2022 11:53
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Local Weather posted:When I was in high school (late 80s) I took a touch-typing class and it was easily the most practical and useful class on any subject I have ever taken from that point forward. Aside from reading and general math it's the only school-taught skill that I have used every day since I learned it. I can't believe that touch typing is not taught as a required course in some capacity now in high school or even middle school. They were still teaching the double space and how many carriage returns you need to add to your formal business letter in 2000. Not a thing about emails, of course. Outside of the actual touch typing, it was completely useless. Probably to the point of being detrimental. While the curriculum was entirely typewriter based, the typing exercises were done on a computer. But we had to edit it every day to change the date since it had a Y2K bug, lol.
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Jan 27, 2022 12:05
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Dogmeat posted:But we had to edit it every day to change the date since it had a Y2K bug, lol.
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Jan 27, 2022 13:37
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Local Weather posted:When I was in high school (late 80s) I took a touch-typing class and it was easily the most practical and useful class on any subject I have ever taken from that point forward. Aside from reading and general math it's the only school-taught skill that I have used every day since I learned it. I can't believe that touch typing is not taught as a required course in some capacity now in high school or even middle school. I learned at primary school age (elementary for you americans). I'm dyspraxic, so handwriting anything more than half a page is a huge pain in the arse, even now I can write fast or I can write legibly, not both. I doubt I would have made it through school if I had to handwrite everything. Silver lining is I learned the skill that matters more in the real world. I can buzz along at 100wpm while everyone else is 2 finger tapping. Have to admit, it's kinda satisfying that the boot's on the other foot.
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Jan 27, 2022 13:56
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My early 90s elementary school made us learn cursive but also had a weekly typing classes. Suburbia is a land of contrasts.
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Jan 27, 2022 13:57
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We had computer lab, where you could play Mavis Beacon teaches typing, or Number Muncher. Everyone played Number Muncher. Right before I left that school we got Mario Typing, and it seemed poised to take over Number Munchers spot, but I don't know if it did.
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Jan 27, 2022 14:30
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I had a required "keyboarding" class in 9th grade in 2003. We had little cloth covers so we couldn't look at our hands while we played Mavis Beacon My 9th grade campus was a complete shithole, and the computers were very bad even by 2003 standards. Mine had a broken pencil jammed in the disk drive, so the servo motor was trying to open and close 24/7 It did help me out, it engrained better habits that were honed in vibeo game chat
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Jan 27, 2022 14:52
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I had to learn cursive in second grade almost 30 years ago and it has been very valuable and useful exactly.... zero times. Most people (i.e. boomers and the boomer minded) who claim it's so great and that you're not making an effort to read it refuse to accept that the majority of it is just poorly scribbled in terrible handwriting where everything looks the same and a detailed analysis will reveal that what they claim is a m is actually a n or possibly u because they lost track on how many squiggles they had drawn. 
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Jan 27, 2022 14:56
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My middle school had typing courses. Not computer, but typing. An entire room full of huge, electromechanical typewriters. I grew up writing and taking notes on paper in cursive all the way through my college years. I never really had a laptop, which were relatively rare in those days, so can't speak to how effective note taking is on them, but I definitely liked taking notes on paper as it was very flexible. Marginalia, corrections, and annotations were much easier to do on the fly. I still think learning the basics of handwriting and cursive are good skills if only because it helps train the hand and mind to think about what's going down on the page. They stopped teaching it in our kids elementary school so my wife actually volunteered for several years while they progressed through those grades to do basic cursive instruction in their classes. All the kids loved it. Learning how to write even just their names in cursive was like learning a magic spell to them. Scratch Monkey fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 15:17
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My middle school taught me typing and it was infinitely more useful than any other computer education I got because computers and technology move way way too fast so if they teach you where something is or to use a program it might not exist, or it moves randomly. Ideally schools wouldn’t use a normal operating system like Windows or MacOS because poo poo changes constantly and it requires kind of a lot of computer janitoring. I maintain still after all these years that it would be infinitely better for education (and Microsoft) if they sold a cheap, solid machine whose sole functions were to run the latest (auto-updated) versions of Notepad, Calculator, Office, and maybe a browser.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:24
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hawowanlawow posted:I had a required "keyboarding" class in 9th grade in 2003. We had little cloth covers so we couldn't look at our hands while we played Mavis Beacon Video game chat was the ultimate honer of typing skills until voice chat became a thing. I don't think I've ever typed faster than I did during the days of Battlefield 1942.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:27
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As a boomer (I guess? I don't know anymore), we were taught cursive starting in 3rd grade (1971 for me). Typing waited until 8th grade, and was a two semester class (I, and II), and was elective. After learning typing, I ditched cursive entirely my freshman year in HS, since it wasn't required, and after taking two drafting classes my sophomore, and junior year, forgot about it entirely. Since I ended up a computer toucher for 95% of my working years, learning to type turned out to be a critical skill. I probably could still write cursive if there was a gun to my head, and the only thing I use it for at all is my signature (which looks like an EEG anyway).
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Jan 27, 2022 15:45
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jokes posted:My middle school taught me typing and it was infinitely more useful than any other computer education I got because computers and technology move way way too fast so if they teach you where something is or to use a program it might not exist, or it moves randomly. That's called a chromebook and you kinda summarized why schools like them. Webapps are always up to date, and you can't do very much to gently caress them up accidentally.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:47
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I type at like 90 words per minute because I posted so goddamn much on early 2000s message boards.
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Jan 27, 2022 15:49
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hawowanlawow posted:I had a required "keyboarding" class in 9th grade in 2003. We had little cloth covers so we couldn't look at our hands while we played Mavis Beacon
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Jan 27, 2022 16:23
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HD DAD posted:I type at like 90 words per minute because I posted so goddamn much on early 2000s message boards. Same but talking poo poo really quickly while playing video games so I learned to talk really quickly while running through a small hallway or whatever in case there was a pyro at the end of the hall
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Jan 27, 2022 16:56
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jazzyhattrick posted:I learned at primary school age (elementary for you americans). I'm dyspraxic, so handwriting anything more than half a page is a huge pain in the arse, even now I can write fast or I can write legibly, not both. I doubt I would have made it through school if I had to handwrite everything. Holy poo poo in my 36 years of life I've never meet someone who even knew what Dyspraxia was, let alone another dyspraxic person. I still get hand cramps writing more than about a page of notes, but typing every thought I've had since like the seventh grade combined with aggressive IRC shitposting has definitely raised my WPM for typing.
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Jan 27, 2022 17:20
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My school was really out of date with this stuff, in typing class in middle school in 2003 we had to do it on old typewriters graded on time and errors, because “you can’t just erase mistakes this easily” I don’t think I’ve used a typewriter after that class.
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Jan 27, 2022 17:27
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Local Weather posted:When I was in high school (late 80s) I took a touch-typing class and it was easily the most practical and useful class on any subject I have ever taken from that point forward. Aside from reading and general math it's the only school-taught skill that I have used every day since I learned it.  except 1990s.Local Weather posted:As an aside, we learned on IBM Selectrics which were weird and loud and I have only recently broke the habit of the double space after a period. except you can have my double-space-between-sentences when you pry it from my cold dead right thumb.
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Jan 27, 2022 17:34
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Neito posted:Holy poo poo in my 36 years of life I've never meet someone who even knew what Dyspraxia was, let alone another dyspraxic person. to this day i hate writing anything down, i got lucky that my brain works well with computers. when i did my mortgage i had to sign and initial a ridiculous amount of papers and my hand was hurting for the rest of the day. i have some pencils in the house but they're put away except the ones in my garage for woodworking reading the symptoms for dysgraphia there's "Relies heavily on vision to write." do uh...do normal people not need to look at what they're writing while they do it?
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Jan 27, 2022 17:55
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butt dickus posted:reading the symptoms for dysgraphia there's "Relies heavily on vision to write." do uh...do normal people not need to look at what they're writing while they do it? I only need to glance down occasionally to make sure I'm not wandering off the line. I don't need to look to form letters or words.
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Jan 27, 2022 18:08
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Huh, I just assumed they were teaching all kids to type these days. I had typing classes in elementary school in the mid 80's on Commodore 64.
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Jan 27, 2022 18:16
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butt dickus posted:reading the symptoms for dysgraphia there's "Relies heavily on vision to write." do uh...do normal people not need to look at what they're writing while they do it? Is this thread going to be for dyspraxia what "finding out that most people don't see the taillight streaks at night" is for Astigmatism?
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Jan 27, 2022 18:29
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wait...this ringing in my ears isn't the sound of silence?
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Jan 27, 2022 18:35
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jokes posted:Same but talking poo poo really quickly while playing video games so I learned to talk really quickly while running through a small hallway or whatever in case there was a pyro at the end of the hall I often joke that the reason I type 90+ WPM is that you need to be able to talk poo poo quickly and accurately while in a game. Imagine chicken-pecking your response while the other person is like five messages deep calling your mom a ho.
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Jan 27, 2022 18:38
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CPL593H posted:I learned cursive in second grade and never used it again as soon as I go to fifth grade. Basically my teachers made us use it and then were like "Meh.". Teaching kids cursive is a huge waste of time. Schools could better use that time to pretend that racism doesn't exist because the Civil War and Martin Luther King ended that problem. Cursive was basically forced on us through the entirety of grade school. "YOU MUST WRITE CURSIVE! IN HIGH SCHOOL, NO PRINTED WORK WILL BE ACCEPTED!!" Well, people started getting computers and past 6th grade or so, any papers written at home were generally typed. When we got to high school, it turns out that they didn't care how we wrote, so 90% of the people stopped using cursive and went to some hybrid that they were comfortable with. At the very end of high school, we had to take some standardized test, and after the test part was over, the booklet required us to copy a long paragraph of "I solemnly swear that I did not cheat and bla bla bla" in our "own handwriting" (read: in cursive). That was legitimately the hardest part of the test because it had been years since most of the class had written anything but their name in cursive. "The uppercase 'Q' is like '2', right?" learnincurve posted:We knew “you won’t have a calculator on you all the time” turned out to be incorrect. That reminds me of how boomers taught 'math'. 'Math' being in quotes because for several years of school, it was less about learning mathematics and more about memorizing flashcards with equations like 76×14 and having to regurgitate the answers on timed tests where you had 2 seconds per question, so even if you knew how to solve the problem, if you didn't have the answer memorized, you were hosed. That was not only useless in the long term, but actively made people scared of math, because in their minds math equates to stress and memorization. Talking to people with kids in school, I'm really glad to hear that they largely don't do that crap anymore. Ghost Leviathan posted:IIRC it apparently became a problem, since schools used to assume that kids either already knew basic computer skills or would learn them on their own, which was maybe valid in the late 90 to 00s when everyone was playing computer games and surfing the web, but now kids are growing up on touchscreen devices and no one's ever taught them concepts like 'file locations'. I took the state mandated basic computer literacy course required for high school students right around then, and the class was very divided at that point. 1/3 of the class was more well-off kids for whom it was a complete waste of time, and the other 2/3 basically had zero computer experience outside of playing The Oregon Trail on old Apple II machines. The handful of us that finished the assignments in 5 minutes got to go into the room next door, hang out and played Doom on the LAN (they were lovely 486 machines that couldn't run anything better) or made presentation slides for the school district information channel, while the teacher dealt with kids who were seniors in some cases and had never seen a word processor before. Typing class was never a thing we did in grade school. My high school did offer a class on typing, but I think it was taught on actual typewriters at the turn of the century and if you were on the college prep/honors course track, you didn't have time to take it anyways. I would have gotten far more use out of learning to properly type vs the torture of writing page after page of cursive. Half the kids I went to school with who had computers at home could never use them because they were always 'broken'. 'Broken' in these cases meaning that their boomer dad couldn't figure out how to use it, so it was turned off and no one was allowed to touch it. The_Franz fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 18:59
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When I was in 3rd grade I wrote a short report (on what I forget) on my CoCo and printed it out on my dot matrix printer. The teacher refused to grade it because she thought the computer could have written it for me.
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Jan 27, 2022 19:46
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I got extra credit on my 3rd grade report on arctic foxes in 1996 because I used sources “from the internet!!”. My teacher thought it was cool as hell. 
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Jan 27, 2022 20:02
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We had that reading program thing where you got the free Pizza Hut pizzas if you read books and did quizzes on them on a computer. I realized all the Magic Schoolbus quizzes would just be on science stuff and since I was a relatively smart kid I just did all of those without reading them and got a bunch of easy free pizzas. Maybe I wouldn't have ended up so fat if I was dumber.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:08
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HD DAD posted:I got extra credit on my 3rd grade report on arctic foxes in 1996 because I used sources “from the internet!!”. My teacher thought it was cool as hell. Yeah, attitudes around computers changed a lot when I was a kid. In 3rd grade it was 1987 and the internet didn't exist outside of universities and computers were things to be feared. By the time I was in grade 7 (1991) they actually gave me (and a couple others) a Tandy 100 to write with because my printing was so atrocious but Apple IIe's were still the mainstay school computer. By the time I got into grade 10 (1995), the internet was the new big thing and schools were starting up computer labs in libraries and other rooms so that kids could access the internet.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:11
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Tarkus posted:Yeah, attitudes around computers changed a lot when I was a kid. In 3rd grade it was 1987 and the internet didn't exist outside of universities and computers were things to be feared. By the time I was in grade 7 (1991) they actually gave me (and a couple others) a Tandy 100 to write with because my printing was so atrocious but Apple IIe's were still the mainstay school computer. By the time I got into grade 10 (1995), the internet was the new big thing and schools were starting up computer labs in libraries and other rooms so that kids could access the internet. I think that when I graduated from high school, they had two computers with modems that could access the internet, but to be allowed anywhere near them you had to sign (or have your parents sign if you were under 18) a pile of papers swearing that you won't use it for porn or anything illegal. Most people who cared had computers and the internet at home by then, so uptake was low.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:37
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When I was in high school, public wifi was a pretty novel concept rather than something just commonly everywhere. Whoever setup the wifi was either a Star Wars or a WWF fan because the password was "VADER." It was not supposed to be shared to the students.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:46
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I remember struggling at first in my middle school typing class because I had already been well exposed to computers by that point so being forced to type "correctly" took some adjustment. Though I do think it helped more than it hurt. The other thing I remember was how the teacher would, wild-eyed, talk about how incredible Microsoft Word was because back in her day it was all done on typewriters so being able to do all the various things Word can do still seemed like magic to her. W/r/t "they'll expect you to write in cursive in high school!!!!" it always reminds me of my college prep biology teacher who ran her class using an incredibly strict and precise binder-based note and handout system and her excuse was it was a college prep course and that's how they did it in college so no complaining! I aint even been to college and I know she was full of poo poo. Also TIL being a clumsy rear end in a top hat who hates writing is yet another thing wrong with me that has a name, and entirely unsurprisingly it's connected to both ADHD and ASD.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:47
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I broke my writing arm one summer in elementary school and had a big cast on it for the start of one year and they got me this typewriter but it was kinda useless and I never really got to use it. The teacher made me write with my non-writing hand. I think I became ambidextrous in everything but writing after the whole experience. My handwriting is crap either way. I learned how to type when I got really into RPG Maker 2000. I had to take a typing class shortly after and I'd get done with the assignments really quickly and just surf the web and play those Mac games the rest of the period. I have this distinxt memory from that class. Some classmates and I were talking about dogs and I told someone I had a Great Dane. He didn't know what that was so I went to GIS to show him. I clicked one of the pictures, which was just a clean picture of a Great Dane, and I got pop ups for porn sites. The teacher was walking by and knowing how bad it would look on me I yanked the power cord from the outlet like my life depended on it. Bullet dodged.
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Jan 27, 2022 20:56
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John Murdoch posted:W/r/t "they'll expect you to write in cursive in high school!!!!" it always reminds me of my college prep biology teacher who ran her class using an incredibly strict and precise binder-based note and handout system and her excuse was it was a college prep course and that's how they did it in college so no complaining! I aint even been to college and I know she was full of poo poo. Teachers with Extremely Specific Note-Taking Systems that you Must Follow, or Bad Things will happen, always struck me as control freaks mad that nobody recongized the genius of their personal systems.
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Jan 27, 2022 21:00
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The_Franz posted:
Everytime it was dominated by the same 2 kids in class, no one else could beat them except each other. They were perceived so highly in that class by every, but I remember how great it felt when my slow rear end beat them on the standardized test by 5 points. Take that losers, who's the real nerd now, huh?
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Jan 27, 2022 21:03
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I'm old/young enough that my college had a mandatory intro to using a computer course. To challenge it you had to write a an exam that was so easy it was almost hard. ie: what are the 5 steps to run a program? What are the 7 ways to restart a computer?
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Jan 27, 2022 21:39
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