Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ubermonkey | Hacker News Reader

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Do people take typing in high school anymore?

I'm old (50), and did, during my sophomore (10th grade) year. That year (85-86) was the last year my high school used actual typewriters for the class; the room had 35 IBM Selectrics, and the din of the motors was INSANE. When the teacher wanted to talk, she would literally wave a flag, and we'd turn them all off so we could hear her.

The next year, they switched to computers -- but, it being Mississippi, they were IBM PC jrs, primarily of note now for having a wireless keyboard. Unlike bluetooth keyboards of today (including the one I'm typing on), these did not work so well. But the room was quieter.

Anyway, we had no paper or covers or blank keycaps. I guess some folks could've been "cheating" or something, but in that class there was a real sense that doing so would be dumb. Unlike in, say, an required academic class, there was no undercurrent of "I don't really need to know this" -- pretty much everyone, from honor roll kids to C- students, was in there to learn to type. By then, it was already SUPER clear how important this would be for any white-collar job, and so...

I took typing in high school, with IBM typewriters as well. For 50 minutes, we typed away, starting with fingers on the home rows. I learned to type business letters, notes, and even use proper spacing. By the way, we were taught to put 2 spaces after period. Typing class was one of my favorite, with no homework, and just 50 minutes of typing away every day.

I'll never be able to get used to just putting 1 space after a period, and it really bugs me when editing a sentence deletes one.

At a job I had, they gave people a book titled: Your Mac Is Not A Typewriter

One of the big things was the single space rule.

Interesting thing tho. Many years later I read on Steve Losh’s blog that he uses two spaces after every period. Why? So he can just do a simple search to move through sentences.

You understand why the standard for typewriters is 2, and why that isn't correct for every other context, right?

It was covered in my public school education, but we did it in grade school (late 90s, early aughts).

I remember that back during the heyday of AIM and Runescape (which were incredibly popular at my school), students became better typists than our teachers.

A friend of mine is a high school teacher now, and has lamented to me how smartphones (particularly autocorrect) have ruined students' typing and spelling abilities.

I'm probably near your age. We also had typing classes. I took them in elementary school and junior high. There were classes offered in high school but after years of Runescape I didn't need to take a typing class anymore.

I wonder what it's like for kids today and if typing skills will even be useful in their future.

Every generation of teachers has something they complain about that's "ruining" some aspect of their students.

And yet, here we are. I suspect it's more about "aaaah! the next generation is different and therefore WRONG!!!"

I'm a bit older than you, and the typing class I took in high school (or was it junior high?) was the best thing I ever did. That was in the '70's sometime and we still had mechanical typewriters. It was not yet obvious that keyboard skills would be super important in the future world, so I don't remember what attracted me to the class.

Later in college someone as a prank removed all the keytops from a time sharing terminal. Didn't stop me, I just sat down and started typing.

When I took typing in school back in ~2001 we still did it on typewriters and we were not allowed to use correction tape. Having a sheet of paper fixed over the keyboard so we couldn't see it was also mandatory. That almost everyone had access to a computer at home did not matter, but I'm pretty sure most people who took the class became proficient typists in the process, I certainly did

It was a part of school when I attended, amongst other computer skills.

I have a sister who is 7 years younger than me. When she attended the same schools, the computer courses had already begun scaling back. The justification was that "kids just know how to use them". This included explicit typing class because "Kids don't need to be taught that anymore. They already know!".

Same story for me up to the IBM selectrics.

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