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[MasterShizzle]

I'm 30, and I work as a database manager. I type a lot in my job, both with regular English words and with programming languages. I can say that learning the "traditional" way is a BIG help in preventing repetitive stress problems later on. I was a hunt-and-peck typer for the longest time, and my hands flailed all over the place for quite a while after that. I developed carpal tunnel problems after high school, and had to sleep in a wrist brace for a number of years. I'm not saying that learning to type "properly" cured my wrist problems, but it certainly was less painful to type that way. If nothing else, learning that way should at least make you a more accurate typist. Keyboards are designed with "homerow" hand position in mind, so it just makes sense that they're easier to use that way.

Just learn it, grin and bear it, and then take out of it what you will and forget about that class. College and/or the workforce doesn't usually care about methods, only results. When I get a data-entry grunt to work for me, I don't care if he home-rows it or if he types out words with only his pinky fingers as long as his data is correct.

If you REALLY want to prepare for college/jobs, learn to use MS Excel. And I don't mean just SUM() and AVERAGE(), but learn VBA scripting, PivotTables, simulated SQL functionality with VLOOKUP(), logical conditions, all of it. Excel is the ONE program in my line of work that's used by everybody I come into contact with, even more universal than web browsers. Once Excel is your bitch, then the world is your bitch.

[Crashmaster]

I'm always neglecting the mouse while typing and try to move the around cursor with shift+numpad arrow keys to correct my many typing mistakeds. Damn big fingers.

[Nyxalinth]

Those are pretty niche environments to have a mandated typing speed/accuracy quota, and the more likely reason is that you have an antique teacher in your learning institution that is still beholden to their glory days as a professional typist being protected by a teacher's union, or because the school's administration likes living in a timewarp, because it is easier than actually updating their curriculum to suit the modern world.

Seriously. I am 32. Typewriters were OUT when I was 12. They have been OUT for over 20 years. They are NOT going to make a resurgence any time soon, barring a nuclear holocaust, or other similar global catastrophe. The computer has them outmatched and outgunned on every front, and retaining legacy requirements is bullshit, and they know it.

I've seen a few clerical positions asking for 80 words a minute. To what end?  I guess they want someone who can really churn out the pages and are still stuck in the sort of timewarp you mention.  Hell, once I saw a job ad requiring SHORTHAND.  I still see occasional ads requesting that resumes be faxed, not emailed.  So this sort of silliness sometimes exists in the working world too.

[wierd]

I'd chalk that up to incompetent HR people.

The kind that think it is perfectly rational to say that you need 15 years programming experience in .net 3.0, despite the fact that .net framework version 3.0 hasn't even existed for 15 years, and thus, short of hiring time travelers from the future, there is no possible way that any applicant can ever meet that requirement.

When you throw in "well entrenched" HR personel that have "been there forever", you can easily see how absurd and no longer applicable job requirements can get placed on a job requirements list.

It's like listing "Must be proficient with spinng, both with the wheel and with the distaff" on a job requirements list for working at a textile mill. NOBODY will be using freaking spinning wheels, but the people doing the hiring remember using those things, and feel that it is manditory that applicants have those skills, even when they will never, ever use them.

That's how dramatically technology for office settings has changed in the past 50 years, and isn't an exageration.

[Gentlefish]

Those are pretty niche environments to have a mandated typing speed/accuracy quota, and the more likely reason is that you have an antique teacher in your learning institution that is still beholden to their glory days as a professional typist being protected by a teacher's union, or because the school's administration likes living in a timewarp, because it is easier than actually updating their curriculum to suit the modern world.

Seriously. I am 32. Typewriters were OUT when I was 12. They have been OUT for over 20 years. They are NOT going to make a resurgence any time soon, barring a nuclear holocaust, or other similar global catastrophe. The computer has them outmatched and outgunned on every front, and retaining legacy requirements is bullshit, and they know it.

I've seen a few clerical positions asking for 80 words a minute. To what end?  I guess they want someone who can really churn out the pages and are still stuck in the sort of timewarp you mention.  Hell, once I saw a job ad requiring SHORTHAND.  I still see occasional ads requesting that resumes be faxed, not emailed.  So this sort of silliness sometimes exists in the working world too.

Well. Faxes are 100% secure, when sending sensitive material. Much, much more secure than e-mail for stuff like SSN's and confidential info.

I should know, I work at a place that still has some around.

[wierd]

Only if said email does not make use of technology that has been around for many decades. Eg, full message body and attachment encryption. A PGP crypt block is more than sufficient for most purposes.

Granted, almost nobody outside of the tinfoil hatter subculture does this.

A fax can be intercepted the same way a normal telephone call can be, since the fax protocol limits the line transmission speed to a maximum of 14.4kbps. That is well within the capabilites of an eavesdropper to record, and digitally reproduce the document from. By injecting controlled noise on the line, the eavesdropper can even force the transaction down all the way to 300baud, and capture redudant resends and error correction messages to better reconstruct the document with.

There is no such thing as a secure communication channel.

[Starver]

The last time I used Mavis Beacon was back in the early '80s!  Seriously.  On a computer that was probably a 286.  Monochrome graphics card (Hercules, though... a good one!), with it set up to be green-on-black.

I played a lot with that, and I got rather good at typing.  Not proper touch-typing, and (the software didn't know this, so couldn't penalise me) nothing at all like sticking to the home-row.  I wander all over the keyboard.  Right now I'm typing in a darkened room and while I've got my head turned towards this particular monitor I've only got a vague peripheral vision of my hands (there's enough light from one of the monitors to illuminate the keyboard if I need to reference it at all), and of course I immediately spot while typing out of my head if I accidentally djogy pmr ;ryyrt yp yjr tohjy or something.  (Gods, that was actually difficult to do!  Much slower, because the visual feedback loop just wasn't there any more[1].)

Spoiler: Random WPM test (click to show/hide)

You can call the PDB-functions straightforwardly, but you have to keep in mind that they always return a list, even when this list contains just one element.  Colours are represented by a list '(red green blue).

(set! new-layer (car (plug-in-pagecurl 1 img drw 1 1 0 1)))
(gimp-palette-set-foreground '(255 0 0))
(gimp-image-add-layer img (car (gimp-layer-copy drw 1)) -1)

Thes commands are not always equivalent to their GUI counterpart.  For example: When creating a new layer, this layer is neither<time's up!>

Well, at first sight I've changed the original "Colors" to my own native "Colours", and I know I backspaced around the first mention of the list notation, to correct an obvious error on the way past, but the rest looks Ok.  Except for "Thes".

Let's take that as... <counts words, punctuation being taken as whitespace and digits and markup being discounted> 79WPM.  But then it was a little bit random, just happened to be the most copyable web-tab (out of a rather bad selection, for this exercise) over on one of my other computers' screens.

I'm fairly likely to type "mroe" instead of "more" (although I think that would happen with home-key disclipline, it's just whatever finger it is on my left-hand getting to the 'r' marginally before whatever finger it is on my right hand reaches the 'o' that should ideally come before it.


Anyway, I wasn't here to talk about me, I just seem to have done that anyway.

Very strange state you have, OP, although in some ways I like that they consider this important, although I'm not sure they have (or can have) concentrated on any particularly important aspect, and it sounds like it's a glorified secretarial course.  Computer skills take many forms, of course.  When I started (beyond my home use), nightschool lessons in "Computer Literacy" was the only real thing I could do, which concentrated on Word Processing, Databasing, etc.  And things like Word Wrap were a luxury, and SQL was a pipe dream (at least to us, and the databasing application we were taught).

Since then I've been through Computer Studies courses, programming in BASIC (which I already knew, from home, but you can still learn something) and then onto Pascal (where I had to unlearn a lot of what I'd ever thought I knew, given how BASIC isn't really a good introduction to mainstream programming... and, actually, Pascal's not brilliant either, except for going down the Delphi route towards GUI programming ).

The computing courses I've seen in schools (I've been an exam invigilator, which on occasion has had me supervising an ICT course's examination session) appears to be more a DTP course.  Of course, they keep on saying how they want to bring programming into it (Raspberry Pi forever?  No, wait, that was Strawberry Fields... ).  Of course, not everyone will be a programmer. Hell, I've been at it for three-and-a-bit decades in one form or another and wouldn't class myself as an expert (mainly because I can never stick with a language long enough to get it to 'perfection'[3]). Indeed, I think you need to start to know your way around the keyboard.  Not actually touch-typingly (though if you can, it can but help), but certainly how to work out what can possibly make what they want happen[4], whenever they're sat in front of the PC.

Of course, a lot of it is mouse-control.  Although I can give directions on how to do most mouse-based things with a keyboard, albeit that tabbing around a web-page until you get to the right link to 'click' on with the appropriate key-press can be time-consuming, especially if it's a web-page with an extensive side-bar/top-bar/etc list of links that need travelling past to get to the one they actually want in the main-text...

So, anyway, I'm a little unsure how they can make compulsory "computing".  Once you get anywhere useful (beyond the absolute basics, that anyone not wedded to an X-Box controller can work out without an entire term's lessons), you're into specialisations, one or more of which a particular student might need, but not all.  There's Layout and Design, there's basic scripting (long before programming, if not already known by those who already do hack together stuff in their free time), mastery of the Office suite is perhaps the modern-day successor to Handwriting within the realms of English (or <insertyournativelanguagehere> (and, to some extent, what used to be the hand-drawing of graphs and figures for mathematical/scientific subjects).

So how/if it all works, even from what's been said already, I don't understand, although I also don't understand (although often observe, in various depictions of Stateside academic life) about the apparent compulsive Drivers Ed classes.  Well, they seem to be compuslive.  Buffy Summers had to do it, as well as seemingly every other High School student that ever got dramatised, that I can bring to mind.  Usually to comic effect, of course. And you have to do an advanced course when you go to Police Academy, even if you're obviously already not going to be suited towards driving.  This might also be considered towards comic effect.  Depending on what you thought of the Police Academy series of films.

But I'm straying from my point, I feel.  And doing what I normally do, which is to go a into the Stream Of Consciousness mode, aided and abetted, I imagine, by the light from the other computer screens diminishing as various screen-saves kick in, leaving me focussed on this one...


Oh yeah, and on the last point I (currently, ninjas are expected) can see having been made, while I reply, I remember a job advert along the lines of "Must have five years experience with Windows 95."  Back in '96 or '97, that would have been.



[1] ....noitaraperp tuohtiw [2]sdrawkcab gnipyt ta retteb hcum m'I

[2] And not cheatily "key, left, nextkey, left, etc".  Holding the sentence in the mind and then running the words backwards, and for each word run the letters backwards.

[3] Although partly because the language landscape keeps being remodelled. Although I've had Perl under my belt for 15-20 years, off and on...  But that's more (to me) a Prototyping language.  Admittedly, hardly anything I care about actually leaves Prototyping.  The stuff that does is always made "good enough", but never as good as I know I could make it if I was actually interested in it.  Whereas the Perl stuff keeps getting modified/re-used and occasionally rediscovered after having forgotten about it for ages...

[4] When I've taught older people (older than me!), fresh to the ways of the electronic revolution, hints like "you can use the CapsLock key to type uppercase, and it's useful if you want to TYPE LIKE THIS but most of the time (and even for the prior example) I would just hold the Shift key down.  It's harder to forget you've got it on and find yourself messing up and writing 'And so I WENT ON A CRUISE, IN WHICH i ACTUALLY BUMPED INTO MY FIRST WIFE, mARGARET!'..." are ones I always try to impress upon them.  And I can even tell them what they might possibly find useful to do with the AltGr key[5].

[5] Primarily, for the casual user, type the € sign, and é and its fellow vowels-with-acutes (although Ctrl-Shift-4 will do as well, Ctrl-Shift being analogue to the AltGr anyway), should they actually avail themselves of their retirement to go and visit (or at least write to, or about) France and the like...

[Mr Space Cat]

Dwarf Fortress and PC games in general improved my typing skills.

I'm still "slow" and don't have the stupid proper posture but I am fairly familiar with the standard qwerty keyboard and can type at a consistent rate with few mistakes so long as I'm, eh, looking at the keyboard to still see what I'm typing.

I'm always neglecting the mouse while typing and try to move the around cursor with shift+numpad arrow keys to correct my many typing mistakeds. Damn big fingers.

DF has however instilled this habit in me. It's actually pretty efficient at times.

[krenshala]

Dwarf Fortress and PC games in general improved my typing skills.

I'm still "slow" and don't have the stupid proper posture but I am fairly familiar with the standard qwerty keyboard and can type at a consistent rate with few mistakes so long as I'm, eh, looking at the keyboard to still see what I'm typing.

I find myself looking at either what I'm typing, or what I'm reading to type in.  But then I've been typing on the computer for 25 years now (my high school taught typing on actual typewriters!).

I'm always neglecting the mouse while typing and try to move the around cursor with shift+numpad arrow keys to correct my many typing mistakeds. Damn big fingers.

DF has however instilled this habit in me. It's actually pretty efficient at times.

Heh, this is why I prefer using vi for text editing.  It lacks all the mark up you get from "modern" word processors, but you can fly through corrections and repetitive commands with it.  Makes keeping notes and such way faster when taking advantage of all the keyboard commands that expect you to have your fingers on the home-row ... once you get used to using hjkl as your movement keys.

[Starver]

Heh, this is why I prefer using vi for text editing.

We're not going to have problems if I mention that I was always an Emacs person, are we?

(No, don't worry, I've now forgotten pretty much everything useful I used to know about it, due to too long being pandered-to by notepad and its many cross-platform clones[1] that started to become the easiest things to call up at a moment's notice.  Similarly, any knowledge I had of how to use Edlin has evaporated...  I'm going to try not to step into any time-anomalies, anytime soon.)


[1] Although some of the clones are almost as powerful, with a little of regexp knowledge, far beyond the baby-steps that MS has half-heartedly sent its own product in that direction.

[tahujdt]

It's more of a combo of the home-row and hunt/peck methods, my hands move all over the place, but stay on the main keyboard.

Sounds like you type like a pianist.

I'm a pianist, so yeah, that makes sense.

 I learned, naturally, absolutely nothing about either typing or information tech.

Besides the tying thing the main thing that we are supposed to learn is
*drumroll please*
"buddabuddabuddabuddabuddabudda
How to use Microsoft Word!
*Yayyyyyyy*
In fact, while I am typing these words, I am supposed to be learning how to use clip art. Or type symbols. Or something boring.

[Rutilant]

It's more of a combo of the home-row and hunt/peck methods, my hands move all over the place, but stay on the main keyboard.

Sounds like you type like a pianist.

I'm a pianist, so yeah, that makes sense.

 I learned, naturally, absolutely nothing about either typing or information tech.

Besides the tying thing the main thing that we are supposed to learn is
*drumroll please*
"buddabuddabuddabuddabuddabudda
How to use Microsoft Word!
*Yayyyyyyy*
In fact, while I am typing these words, I am supposed to be learning how to use clip art. Or type symbols. Or something boring.

I didn't realize clipart use could be taught.  I thought use of clipart was an uncontrollable and unfortunate tic?  Like internet Tourette Syndrome?

[wierd]

Heh, this is why I prefer using vi for text editing.

We're not going to have problems if I mention that I was always an Emacs person, are we?

(No, don't worry, I've now forgotten pretty much everything useful I used to know about it, due to too long being pandered-to by notepad and its many cross-platform clones[1] that started to become the easiest things to call up at a moment's notice.  Similarly, any knowledge I had of how to use Edlin has evaporated...  I'm going to try not to step into any time-anomalies, anytime soon.)


[1] Although some of the clones are almost as powerful, with a little of regexp knowledge, far beyond the baby-steps that MS has half-heartedly sent its own product in that direction.

Cut teeth on old crappy MSDOS myself. When it came to editing things like config.sys and autoexec bat, I peferred console tricks, like

COPY CON config.sys
(Write out the contents of the file on the screen)
(Press F6)
*1 file copied



For big files, I liked dos 5+'s EDIT application.
vi and emacs both make me cringe. I would rather use nano in *nix machine.


As for clipart, I would be much more impressed if instead of trying to teach you candy fluff of "here's how to insert a crappy vector image into your presentation to make it less professional looking!", they taught you the difference between a straight vectoral format (.cgm, .svg, .ai, and pals), a hybrid container format for either vectors or rasters (.emf, .wmf, .tiff), and pure raster formats (.bmp, .png, .jpg, .gif, etc..), or even better yet, how you can easily make those to make your own, truly original clipart images.

Clipart is a very powerful feature of WYSIWYG word processing suites, but only if you FULLY know how to use it, which includes creation.  I don't know how many times I have had the "you can't really scale a jpeg to 50ft by 50ft, and expect it to look good... no, those word clipart images are vector images..... wait, you mean you don't know what a vector image is?......ok, when a man and a woman really love each other..." type sitdown with people in managerial positions.

It's how I got suckered into making the vector data for our company quality objectives posters.

If they want to teach the next crop of MBDs how to use office software, they should also teach that very important tidbit, IMO.

[krenshala]

Heh, this is why I prefer using vi for text editing.

We're not going to have problems if I mention that I was always an Emacs person, are we?

(No, don't worry, I've now forgotten pretty much everything useful I used to know about it, due to too long being pandered-to by notepad and its many cross-platform clones[1] that started to become the easiest things to call up at a moment's notice.  Similarly, any knowledge I had of how to use Edlin has evaporated...  I'm going to try not to step into any time-anomalies, anytime soon.)


[1] Although some of the clones are almost as powerful, with a little of regexp knowledge, far beyond the baby-steps that MS has half-heartedly sent its own product in that direction.

Cut teeth on old crappy MSDOS myself. When it came to editing things like config.sys and autoexec bat, I peferred console tricks, like

COPY CON config.sys
(Write out the contents of the file on the screen)
(Press F6)
*1 file copied



For big files, I liked dos 5+'s EDIT application.
vi and emacs both make me cringe. I would rather use nano in *nix machine.

Nano is like edit or notepad, and I can see why some would prefer it.  I'm used to the vi/vim command set now, and it is clearly designed for ease of use once you know the commands, and not ease of learning the commands in the first place.  However, it is also set up so that if you can touch-type, you can fire off the commands just as rapidly as you can type, all without needing a mouse.

For those not familiar, here is an example: you want to cut lines 5 through 7, them past them at the end of the document, then duplicate line 12 three times -- the command sequest is 5G (jump line 5), 3dd (delete three lines, which puts them in the buffer), G (goes to the end), p (past after the cursor position), 12G (jump to line 12), yy (copies the line the cursor is on), 3P (pastes whats in the buffer from the yy command -above- the cursor position, : to enter command mode, and wq to write and quit the file.  So, that would be <open document in vim> 5G3ddGp12Gyy3P:wq and yer done.  Not to say other apps cannot do this as efficiently (looking at you emacs types! ) but being a keyboard monkey, its the most efficient for me.

As for clipart, I would be much more impressed if instead of trying to teach you candy fluff of "here's how to insert a crappy vector image into your presentation to make it less professional looking!", they taught you the difference between a straight vectoral format (.cgm, .svg, .ai, and pals), a hybrid container format for either vectors or rasters (.emf, .wmf, .tiff), and pure raster formats (.bmp, .png, .jpg, .gif, etc..), or even better yet, how you can easily make those to make your own, truly original clipart images.

Gods, yes. Make sure that part of the class includes "... and don't use MS Comic Sans ... EVER!".

[wierd]

*doesn't understand the comic-sans hate; functionally, it is a well kerned, high quality vectorial font. The issue is a pure issue of public perception. Personally, I get grossed out by helvetica, and all its billions of bastard progeny, because it gets heavily overused. While comic sans probably shouldn't be used for more than a whimsical note to a co-worker, due to the intended use of the typeface, (comic book word bubbles), at least it isn't literally everywhere you look. Seriously, I can tell the difference between oldschool IBM courier from the 50s, and MSCourier New, on sight. I can *tell*. I am not a font nerd, so much as I got dangerously close to being one when trying to earnestly build a proper typeface once. I know more about kerning, whitepace placement, hybrid glyph compositing, and the dreaded delta truetype instruction that I ever wanted to know, nor is healthy for humans to know. Just saying I hate helvetica way more than comic sans, because it is the McNugget of the typeface world. There is nothing wrong with sans serif faces. Nothing wrong with sharp edged ones even. But helvetica needs to be used less. I don't care how "Iconic" you think it is. Please use something else.

Like dejavu sans, or lucida console.  Please, just no more helvetica and helvetica spawn. (Like arial). I'd even accept papyrus (once, and once only.) Over helvetica.