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Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

And yet, this is an "intelligent" reply?

If handwriting is still being taught in schools, it's being extremely overvalued. When's the last time a kindergartner, or any elementary student for that matter, was required to take a typing class? And yet, those students learn to type at a passable level.

Teach touch typing instead. The children will learn the same fine motor skills but with something that will be much more important throughout the rest of their lives. They'll pick up handwriting as necessary, but public education shouldn't hand out grades and devote significant resources to its teaching.

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I hope that the next time your doctor writes a prescription for you, he doesn't think that good handwriting is extremely overvalued.

Hmmm, except my doctors - in their 30's and 40's and 50's - must have received plenty of good ole fashioned instruction in handwriting. What went wrong!?

Instead, I'd prefer a web app that allows my doctor's office to connect directly to the pharmacy. Heck, a good one wouldn't require any text even - point and click on the medication.

As an interesting sidenote-- Kaiser Permanente implemented this point-and-click pharmacy ordering a while ago, and supposedly cut their prescription mistakes by 95% and saved almost forty lives lives last year.

I went to a public school in NY. We had a weekly touch typing class in 5th grade (during the mid nineties). It wasn't rigorous enough to make great typists out of us, but it provided a decent foundation for keyboarding electives in middle school and high school.

This is exacly my point. A 5th grade typing class that meets weekly and electives down the line? But daily handwriting classes in kindergarten and 1st grade and often probably later? That seems very backward to me.

To counter with my own anecdote, I went to school in NY and had a required typing class in 7th grade. Then more electives if I wanted to take them in HS.

We had writing in Kindergarden/1st/2nd grade. Which doubled as English lessons (expanding vocabulary, etc). And learning how to read as well. Maybe I was just lucky enough to have good teachers, but I assume that it was done intentionally. Never writing "cat" over and over until the "c" was perfect, but finding different words that have a "c" and writing those instead.

Again, I see exactly zero harm but plenty of benefits by swapping that ordering of typing and handwriting - typing in kindergarten and 1st grade and handwriting in 7th grade. And that wouldn't change the reading or English lessons. Indeed, it would enrich them. (Think of typing 's' and hearing the sound it makes. Then 'sh'. Then 'shi'. etc.)

To counter your point - was talking with a Prep (ie - Grade 0) teacher last night.. She's doing MS Office classes with her Preps. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer. (And this is a public school in a lower-middle class area - admittedly in Australia).

I'm sure there's probably more handwriting classes - but it's slowly changing..

Question - Which Do you think would be better to learn the structure of letters from? Learning to type first, or learning to draw out the letters?

There's a reason I loved Australia when I visited - progressives!

Quite honestly, if you paired typing with auditory feedback for what letters sound like ('s' from 'c' from 'z' from 'sh' and 'sp'), you'd not only help the kids to learn the letters but also how to read. Handwriting doesn't offer that dual modality approach. Further you could pair typed words with the objects to which they refer (think animals), the sounds they make, and other facts about them. I'm actually shocked there aren't teaching programs like this. There must be that I'm not aware of.

my name is carolyn

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