I remember when I was kid, they used to teach us keyboard typing with stuff like Mavis Beacon and Microsoft Word.
Have schools now moved to teaching people how to type on cell phones? Do kids still use computers, even?
I remember when I was kid, they used to teach us keyboard typing with stuff like Mavis Beacon and Microsoft Word.
Have schools now moved to teaching people how to type on cell phones? Do kids still use computers, even?
In most parts of the world, kids are still being taught cursive writing with pen or pencil, although as adults, they may have little use for the skill. Typing is still a desirable skill as in further education, most coursework is submitted online these days.
It may be, as voice-to-text gets better (I am dictating this using Dragon) it will take over, but there are many jobs that need keyboard skill today and likely to be for the foreseeable future.
I know of no educational establishment that teaches typing with thumbs - kids seem to acquire that skill on their own.
The lil’wrekker’s in college, she cannot write in cursive, they never taught it in her school. She has used a laptop and p.c. since 6th grade. They even provided laptops in her highschool. And, dang, that girl can type on her iPhone, with her thumbs fast as lightening. It is amazing to watch!
In some of the school districts in my area, [del]typing[/del] keyboarding is now a requirement for graduation from high school. No school, as far as I’m aware teaches thumb typing. There are some things that still have to be learned on the street corner.
Cursive is still taught though, much to my amazement. I wonder why.
The United States Constitution is written in cursive. I was watching a local PBS show that was looking into why a local neighborhood was called “Little Oklahoma.” They traced census records from the early 20th Century to find any local residents who had migrated from Oklahoma. The Census records were all in cursive. I would hate to think that our history will be relegated to obsolescence, as though it were on a floppy disk.
I’d say there’s no professional call for thumbtyping on a phone, so why would that be taught? I used to type with my thumbs, but now I use a keyboard that lets me slide my index finger across the keyboard. I find it much easier.
Learning to read cursive is a skill that one can learn if their field of work or hobby requires it. If someone wants to translate Beowulf, they’ll learn Old English but a knowledge of Old English is irrelevant to 99.99% of us.
Extending cochrane’s answer (keyboard typing is currently a useful professional skill; thumb-typing is not, and there may not even be a standard thumb keyboard), schools still (mostly, not everywhere on the planet) teach joined-up writing, since unless the school plans to supply the student with free laptops for life (and even if they do), the student may still at some point need to write something down.
A certain level of proficiency in typing and shorthand used to be one of the requirements for a secretarial position.
I switched from cursive to printing when I was in 7th grade. Say 1972 or so. I can’t write cursive, and have no need for it. I can read it of course.
I did learn touch typing on old manual typewriters in 1978. Perhaps one of the best classes I ever took. It was an elective if I recall.
Thumb typing? Whatever. I doubt kids need any instruction on that.
Research has been conducted on students that take lecture notes in cursive vs typing in a laptop.
The physical act of writing gave students better retention and comprehension of the lecture.
Musicians have long know that the brain stores information from physical differently. That’s why we structure practice time to practice scales, arpeggios and other fundamentals. We are focused on building muscle memory.
A essay question on a test is no different. You open the blue book and start writing. It’s a mixture of retained memory and muscle memory.
They also found young children learn to recognize letters and learn to read by writing.
Since taking notes by hand uses muscle memory, and typing notes on a keyboard uses muscle memory, why would one result in improved recall over the other (and/or over listening to the lecture without writing anything down)? What is the proposed mechanism?
A more typical reason “cursive” writing is taught is simply that, barring some form of shorthand, it is the only way of writing fast enough to take notes. Furthermore, systematic practice copying lines is supposed to result in a legible hand. Being able to read, say, Elizabethan handwriting does not really enter into it.
I, too, switched in 7th grade, and my thoughts on reading guestchaz’s quote was: to give middle schoolers something meaningless to rebel over!
I can still write it (it’s not easy, and I sometimes have to stop and think, but I can do it in a pinch). Of course my printed writing has evolved over the years to a semi-cursive form all it’s own. Sometime similar to the official cursive, but often not. And there are still some letter that get written all by their lonesome, all the time.
Yeah, I quit using cursive as soon as I was allowed to also. I can theoretically write it, but if I do, it looks like a schoolboy’s nasty scrawl. I still have to sign things, and my signature looks nasty also. I did OK taking notes in printing. Since only I had to read it, sentence fragments and various abbreviations didn’t matter. For classes where notes in actual English actually applied. For many of my classes, notes would have a lot of mathematical notation which doesn’t join up in the first place.
I learned to touch type in high school. That abandoned me when I started programming on old model 33 teletypes - a combination of a keyboard which darn near had to be hit with mallets, and typing a lot of symbolic manipulation sprinkled with punctuation marks which don’t figure into the “home keys” training.
One thing I CAN do if I want to is print in very teensy little letters. I used to annoy coworkers by leaving multiple sentence missives for them on post-it notes.
One of my friends, who’s a University lecturer in England, noted that in the last two years, she’s suddenly started getting students in her class, teenage students straight from school, who can’t type on a keyboard, just on a phone.
How did your friend discover this?
In any case, there is nothing preventing students from typing and editing documents on a smartphone- it just seems like it would be a lot slower and less convenient than doing so at an ergonomic computer workstation with a proper keyboard, monitor, and text editor/word processor/typesetting software. That is why it would be useless to teach phone typing in school.
It may be that with the development of Windows Ink, students may well find the ability to take notes on a touch-pad is a useful skill.
Here’s one article, from Scientific American, though it doesn’t specifically mention cursive: A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop.
Kids These Days Are Stupid. Take that as an axiom, and any change is innovation, and therefore wrong.
Much as how the shift from vellum to paper killed literacy, the shift from scrolls to books destroyed literacy and the shift from tablets to scrolls killed literacy as well. As per Socrates, of course, literacy itself killed human thought, and reduced us all to imbecilic status.
That presumes you’re faster with cursive than print, and that your fast cursive results in something readable. Both are questionable.
In addition to all of the other objections which refute this line of argumentation, it’s entirely possible to be able to read a hand you cannot reproduce.
I had to teach the lil’wrekker how to sign her name in cursive my myself, for the DMV and checks she recieved. I journal in cursive and I can read it just fine, I doubt anyone else could. My older kids had handwriting lessons and were graded on it. My sons is scrawly because he is a lefty and don’t care. My middle daughter is a draftsperson so she writes in tiny perfect print everyday. But she can and does write in really nice cursive.
AFAIK they do not teach thumb typing, but they also do not teach cursive many places anymore. I suppose its not hard to learn at home, but damn do I want that time back. Spent years doing it at school and the only time I use it is for signatures, and even then it looks like a doctors/chicken scratch.