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.
This might be true but WPM is a very stupid way to measure this argument.
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.
Which year is the dividing line for Gen X and Millennials?
I generalize millennials as too young to legally drink in the US (21) but old enough to remember the millennium. It’s not completely accurate though.
Millennials were born in the late 80s and through the 90s. 97/8 is the rough cutoff. Most of them are in their 30s now and the oldest are in their early 40s.
Those people literally do not exist. Was that a joke? I just woke up.
1981
There’s also the term Xennials , which is 1977-1983.
I guess I might be a millennial or Xennial, then.
There really is a small cohort between Millennials and Gen X where our experience is rather unique.
Hell yeah, muds taught me to type fast, too :D. Realms of despair and others. Got me into modding, too, working on a custom server.
i have 70. how.
When you fight and communicate by typing in a game, you tend to get good at it.
Still waiting for AI text prediction keyboards to correct me missing the right letter slightly
Do these things correlate that much tho? Not to toot my own horn, but I am fairly tech-proficient and have terrible typing skills. My technique is somewhere in between hunt-and-peck and touch-typing, despite regular typing lessons in elementary school. I imagine a lot of other people are like this, and vice-versa as well.
Do these things correlate that much tho?
Not at all. Is there any other profession than journalist where words per minute matters?
Court room stenographer
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Downloading random PDFs from strangers is probably a good idea. I’m guessing you accidentally posted that, if not may you explain how “calculating the flexural strength of members subject to simple bending about one principal axis.” is releated to gen-z not typing fast on psychical keyboards?
back when i was still a teenager, ww did battle ourselfes who typed faster even without a keyboard lol. We just typed on a table or something just based on our finger memory of where which key is normally on a keyboard. This days i often type on my smartphone, but you can’t rly type a lot or fast on phones so i still prefer normal computer typing for most things. But people who just chat and don’t code or similar…yeah, they probably are mostly only using their phone. my sister as an example hasn’t used her laptop for nore than 4 years, probably more… and just does everything on her phone.
Swype typing can get pretty fast tbh. But that greatly depends upon the software.
Despite the hate it got, Windows Phone’s default keyboard had a far superior swype experience as compared to Android and iOS. Probably because they didn’t try to inculcate all user words into their dictionary and used the sentence structure as a reference to rank the predicted words.Had this one been OSS, it would have been a great service. But now it has been scrapped along with the rest of Windows Phone. One of the reasons why I hate to think of what would happen to any high effort thing I make in a company.
Microsoft actually ported their keyboard to android, called “Microsoft SwiftKey” or similar. It’s a great keyboard, but apparently now has copilot ಠ_ಠ
Guess that means I’m uncle tech support forever
typing isn’t as useful a skill as it use to be. Not many jobs need it.
The natural result of getting rid of computer literacy classes.
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.
I blame the attempt to make devices user-friendly. Convenience kills skill.
Their parents don’t even give them PCs, only phones, how would they even learn?
I taught a bunch of Gen Zers back when they were in high school. None of them knew how to type well, and it was a rarity that any of them knew how to type at all. I was supposed to teach them things like Microsoft Office, but we had to start with typing and basic PC usage before we could move on to something as complicated as MS Word.
This is what happens when people don’t use computers and instead just use cell phones.
And Chromebooks. All the schools pretty much use Chromebooks, at least in my region
It’s pretty messed up that schools enforce those things onto kids. Chromebooks, while cheap, invade the hell out of your privacy and are extremely restrictive. We should be teaching kids GNU/Linux, not ChromeOS… I honestly feel sorry for the future of free software. Students aren’t taught ethics, freedom, or privacy at ALL. I was in school, (graduated two years ago), and it seemed that every teacher adapted the “you don’t have privacy” motto. Absolutely terrible. Buy the kids a Dell Latitude E6400 and put Libreboot/Trisquel with KDE on it. Let them live and help each other out with issues. It would be super heart warming to see schools adapt something like this instead.
(I understand the convenience issues, but we should start adapting, its crazy that Gen Z barely know anything about computers)
You sound exactly like my friend. But he would probably say stick to thinkpads
Are computer labs still a thing in schools?
At my kid’s elementary school, they just have a charging rack full of cheap Chromebooks and the kids check one out in the morning and put it back in the afternoon. The middle schoolers get to take them home.
European Gen Z here. My schools always had a computer lab and it was always “real” PCs, never in my life i actually saw a Chromebook.
Here they are - in more well-funded schools at least. I keep seeing the posts about children being allowed laptops even at home, but here it would be unthinkable, because kids might break them or parents might steal them.
I’m sure this varies a lot from district to district, but the districts that I have teacher friends in, they’ve been using Chromebooks almost exclusively for the better part of a decade now
