suzmccarth <suzmccarth at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> My two closest colleagues, responsable for producing more and longer
> documents than I do, both use hunt and peck. I couldn't believe it at
> first but sneaking up behind them I have confirmed that this is their
> native keyboarding strategy. At their age there is not a chance in a
> million they will alter their style, and there is no sign that they
> feel at a disadvantage. I would never *dare* to suggest that they
> learn now - not if I care to maintain good workplace relationships.

I've learned, gradually, that the difference between "proper" typing
skills and hunting and pecking is not at all black-and-white. It is a
continuum. I had access to a manual typewriter starting at the age of 5
(37 years ago) and spent my junior high, high school, and college years
as a newspaper journalist and my later college and professional years as
a software developer, all of which adds up to an awful lot of keyboard
hours. I've never had a typing class, but I just clocked in at 73 wpm
with no errors on http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php. Any
typing teacher would weep at my style (e.g. my left hand sometimes
crosses over as far as the U key, and my "home row" is about half a row
too high), but it seems to get the job done.

> Schools concentrate on teaching children not to copy verbatim from
> the internet and not to quote any text without both an identifiable
> author, and publisher. This makes wikipedia problematic for schools.
> We simply cannot accept it unless an author can be found.
>
> Schools attempt to teach children to be critical of information on
> the net and not believe everything they read. If there were any time
> left over from this gargantuan task, we might teach typing.

I've learned to be very skeptical of any sentence that starts "Schools
teach X" or "Schools don't teach Y." Not long ago on this list I read
that today's schools don't teach handwriting, which I know from direct
observation not to be true.

That said, if "schools" are teaching children to cite their sources and
not to copy anything blindly -- from the Internet or elsewhere -- it's a
good thing for scholarship.

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/