There is an article in today’s Wall Street Journal titled, “Gen Z Can’t Type”. Hence the title of this blog in response.
The hard working students at Maricopa Christian Academy usually begin typing in third or fourth grade. If a student arrives on our fine campus significantly below in math or reading skills, we will use the additional time to bring their math and reading skills up to our expectations first. New students who are older will begin their technology instruction working on meeting the typing expectations before moving on to the next technology skill taught.
This fun fact about the lack of typing skills with our nations students was included in today’s WSJ article. “Over the past 25 years, the number of U.S. high schools teaching typing has fallen drastically. While about 44% of students who graduated high school in 2000 took a keyboarding course, by 2019 that figure had plummeted to 2.5%, according to the U.S. Department of Education.”
Computer skills are unarguably important for all generations including the one we instruct. If our students are able to type at 40 words per minute or better, their typing skills should support them as we focus on other skills to for their future.
Here is an example of what happens whe typing sills are lacking from the same WSJ article. “Jonah Maier, 23, learned to type in seventh grade, but says he still watches his keyboard to make sure he hits the right letters. Every couple sentences he reads over his lines to double-check his work.
Typing got particularly tiring when Maier was working on the capstone paper for his college literature review about human characteristics in artificial intelligence. About halfway through the 20-page paper, he tried dictating the words using speech-to-text software.
The tool inserted too many grammatical errors. “It was so tedious,” Maier said. He finished his paper the old-fashioned way: typing it out on his laptop.“
That is why we teach typing.
After typing at 40 words or more, our students move on to learning Word level 1, then Excel level 1, then the computer language Python and lastly for now, Computer Science.
May God bless your day!
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