My sister is gen x and I’m a millennial, she’s asks me the most batshit insane questions like, how do I turn off my iPhone? What? You’ve had it 4 years!
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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X, especially older ones, are only tech savy if they were nerds. After that technology became a more everyday thing so maybe millenial has the magic spot where it was common but not dumbed down. I dunno though.
To be fair, they changed it in the last couple of years. It used to be that you held the power button to power it off. Now you have to hold the power button AND a volume button for some reason.
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How would you learn keyboard typing, if one always types on the phone?! (I am not even Z and have to look on the keyboard)
Gen X here. I've got an average 123 WPM on typeracer, which puts me in the 99,8th percentile.
I started looking at the screen instead of the keyboard early on. There were touch typing classes as an option around 8th grade, I think, but it was literally just having a map of which fingers go where and typing text focusing on using the right fingers. I didn't take one, but I think I'm using the right fingers for 80% of the keys. I'm moving my hands back and forth a bit to let my dominant fingers do the work.
I started playing MUDs in 1997 at age 13, and building up that muscle memory for every combination of two- or three letter commands probably did more than I'd care to admit. I still miss the responsiveness of a proper DOS prompt, or Linux tty.
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I feel like this calls for the importance of not just inundation but actual education for kids.
We basically let a whole generation have the relationship with the most common and arguably valuable be defined by advertising companies.
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I was a terrible typer as a kid, two finger hunt and pecker. Got a job that necessitated fast typing while listening or reading. I learned how to touch type, or fake it enough, really quick. Humans are adaptable, that’s why we are everywhere, they just need the motivation to learn the skill.
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The article is kind of all over the place mixing high-school graduates and fourth-graders? I can see how you're sluggish at typing in fourth grade... The numbers for a 17 year old would be interesting... But yeah, 13 words per minute isn't impressive. And most young people I know use phones and tablets, not computers. So naturally a good amount of them isn't good around these things.
13 words per minute isn't impressive
Worse than that, it's abysmal. That would've been a failing grade back when I had a few months of mandatory typing classes back in 6th grade. 40 WPM was an A, and arguably that was overly generous due to factors like 1) most students weren't nearly as exposed to the keyboard in their daily lives as they are today, 2) the testmakers probably didn't fully grasp how important the Internet would become, 3) the test intentionally obscured the keyboard so you had to go by feel, and 4) because of (2), the class was very short despite taking you from knowing no typing to using all the English-language keys. (I just barely passed it IIRC in the 45-ish WPM range.)
On a whim, I decided to pull up a typing test – something I haven't done in probably 5 years – and tried to see how I could do by simulating the speed of hunt-and-peck. I really tried to make it excruciatingly slow, and it still came out to just under 20 WPM. Next, I tried to see what I could do if I only had my left hand, and it was 35 WPM with 97% accuracy. If you chopped off one of my hands, I could still type 2.7x faster than the average kid in that school's fourth grade could – bearing in mind that that's the average, meaning as long as the data is roughly normal, about half of the students fall below even that.
That's completely insane in a world where this iPad generation almost assuredly has tons of exposure to the QWERTY keyboard layout. It's just inexcusable, it's absolutely not the kids' fault as them doubling their average typing speed after actually being taught to type shows that, and it totally tracks that it's in Oklahoma.
I had to teach some zoomers how to send an email, especially about using bcc, pretty funny I have to say
We’re not even teaching them cursive anymore and they still can’t type? What are they doing in schools?
Gen alpha is learning cursive. Gen z is all highschool and college now.
-worked in a k-8 tutoring program for 2 years.
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I learned to touch type quickly mostly out of necessity to communicate quickly in online games before voice chat was a thing.