“Where’s the R Key?”

A mom of one of our students called us yesterday in a panic as she exclaimed that her 12 year old son has no idea how to properly use the keyboard! She explained that now that she has been helping him with his remote schooling assignments that she’s actually had the opportunity to watch him type, and she was beside herself to realize that her son uses his left-pointer finger to hit the shift key for occasional capitalization, while his right-pointer and middle-finger do the rest of the work. She said that he literally asked her ‘where the R key was!”. It amazed her to watch him hunt & peck his way around the keyboard with relative ease, but with such great inefficiency…and no concept for 10-fingers site typing and the home keys, or home row.

She realized that her son literally had no idea how to properly use the keyboard to effectively type with both relative accuracy and speed. She was horrified.

“At Silicon STEM, we see this all the time,” I assured her. She said that she thought that her son’s school was teaching typing skills! The reality is that we have found very few schools to teach keyboarding anymore, mainly because it is a boring class to teach – my teacher friends tell me that they expect the students to figure it out. I don’t think parents know this fact.

Knowing how to type and to properly use the keyboard is truly a life skill. It is something that people do everyday either on a computer, tablet or smart phone. It’s as essential as wearing a mask – it’s survival for the technology age.

As a computer science teacher, I often hear from students that they simply don’t like to code. But what I’ve come to realize is that they really just don’t like to type! I give automatic As in my classes for any student who can beat me in a 1-on-1 typing competition…and I’ve given only 1 A in the last three years!

Check out some of our upcoming Summer Camp programs that teach basic keyboarding skills! These are week-long 1-hour a day crash courses in typing to get your student started on a skill that will truly last a lifetime.