I’ve encouraged Lily to work on typing skills… We are presently going through this program: hhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3c6tfr#zgkpn39
She’s bored.
I described my 8th grade Keyboarding class, 1st period, already knowing how to type, with Mr. DRONE-n-SLEEP. Literally, he’d tell us to sit, cover our hands, flip to page, get through page, and then he’d sit and drink black coffee and doze off for the next 50 minutes. His little bell would chime 3 minutes before the period ended, at which point he’d awaken enough to tell us to press submit, put our boards away, turn off the monitors (which were monotone, I might add), and the ticking of the dot matrix printer that output all our contributions for the day would start whirring.
This was the teacher that so loved his work that he even devised a way for us to correct our own – as the following day, and ever third day after, we’d come to class and find our printouts at our stations. Before typing (or not typing at all that day if we were too slow at comparison) we were to go through each line we’d typed over the last two days, compare them to the book/appropriate pages (yes, flip book) alongside our monitors, and mark off whatever errors we’d made, then resubmit the documents for a grade. If our accuracy and speed fell into the top 10% of all his class periods (there were 8, as he did the same exact thing every hour, every day, 8 periods/classes a day), we literally got a gold sticker on the chart on the wall.
I explained to Lily just how hard it was to have had THAT class, first period. She says, “Well, didn’t you have your coffee?” Um… so we had the discussion about how food, drink, gum, bathroom, blankets (that room was always freezing – it wasn’t a heated space because it wasn’t supposed to be a classroom and the little space heater Mr. Drone had was only sufficient for him), etc. were not permitted. I couldn’t even sit on my leg on my chair – nope, both feed had to be on the floor, hands under the canopy on the keyboard, eyes straight ahead for 50 minutes straight.
Did I mention I already knew how to type at this point…
Whatever. And she, while pretending to type in a pattern/rhythm similar to what she hears Russ and I produce, tells me that typing is useless and she has no reason to learn any of it… except, an hour later, she is complaining about not being able to type fast enough to respond to her friends in Minecraft chat.
