Do you learn touch-typing in schools? (Or at all?)

37 comments

1. I’m a french millennial and I learned it but it was more about using word than typing efficiently (even if we were given some advices). I can type very fast without looking easily but that’s just because I had the opportunity to practice a lot.

   We were far better than kids today (I teach them) simply because they are more used to touch screen.

2. My husband (British born and raised) and myself (American born and raised) both learned to touch-type in school. His teaching stuck with him better than mine – when we learned, my hands were too small for the keyboard so I didn’t really learn it properly and can’t do it now, whereas he still can but most often does not do it.

3. i remember in 1st grade in elementary school that we played some typing learning game and it tracked your words per minute

   that was like 15 years ago tho dont know how its like today

4. 31 and I was at the point where most schools had phased it out in Belgium. It was just assumed kids would pick it up while using computers in their free time. I had it 2 hour a week one year, but can’t do it at all.

5. No.. I’ve heard my parents were taught it in the 1960s and 70s, but that was on an old fashioned typewriter.

   I know in the 90s you could do a private course and I know several friends that had it. I’ve never done it, started using the computer when I was 4 yo (1991) and practically created my own method.. I can type fast but not with 10 fingers.

6. In the Netherlands, we don’t learn to touch type in school. However there are companies that teach to touch type as an after school activity.

   They always seem very aggressive in their marketing, shoving kids flyers in their hands when they leave the school ground. I’ve never seen that kind of marketing from the clarinet instructors or the football coach, it is something specific to the touch type people.

   The touch type people were already there when I went to school 30 years ago and they are still there on my kids’ school (different part of the country) so it seemed well ingrained in the culture.

   I never went there myself (and not planning to sign up my kids) so I wonder they are as predatory as they seem.

7. I’m British and had touch-typing in school, so I don’t think that is a universal thing for our country.

8. Was offered as extra curricular activity course through our school. We did it on actual typewriters. It was also quite expensive. My mother insisted I learn it back then. Out of our class, there were just two of us who did it. I’m very glad I did, but most people didn’t. A lot of people my age who didn’t study and so never had to use it are still typing using their digit finger only.

9. I went to school in Germany (BW) and learned it at school.

   Germany consists of several states that are semi independent and education is state level so the state does matter here

10. I had to look up what touch typing actually is (pisanie bezwzrokowe?). I don’t remember ever learning anything of the sort in school (I’m 23), and if we did, then I can’t remember it. We did have our typing speeds tested in elementary school, but that was more of a fun exercise than anything serious. If touch typing just means typing efficiently without looking at the keys, then I’ve always been able to do that. I’d assume it to be a pretty common skill, especially among Reddit users – though maybe less so for people who grew up using mobile devices. I’ve noticed some of my peers actually find it easier to type on their phones.

11. Went to school in Ireland and never had any typing classes. We only ever used computers for like 1hr a week and only for a year or so, but that was more to learn how emails and Word works. Noone in my class used laptops to type up notes ever, even in college we wrote everything by hand. As for homework, typing it up was common once we started getting longer assignments from like 2nd year of college onwards.

    I exclusively used my phone for everything until I started doing longer college assignments at the age of 19 or so. I never learned how to type with all my fingers and probably use between 4-6 at a time (I still can type pretty fast though). On my phone I can type with my eyes closed.

    I graduated school in 2016 so not that long ago.

12. People don’t learn it in secondary schools here in Ireland. I know people used to learn it in secretarial colleges in the past, because my mum used to teach it. But I’m not sure about today, I think people just teach themselves

    I DID learn it all those years ago, I’m in my sixties now, but I learned on an old typewriter where my baby fingers could barely hit the keys, so I didn’t really practice. But when computers came along it was like riding a bike, it all came back to me. And now I always touch type and couldn’t do it any other way. The problem is that I learned KWERTY and when I switch keyboards (I write in German and French) I have to look at the keys but my fingers are twitching to type what my instinct tells me to type!

13. I had a touch typing course at school in the mid-00s, though I don’t think it was strictly compulsory.

    I got a Lion King touch typing CD for my 11th birthday which helped too haha. Pretty sure we had a Mavis Beacon CD as well

14. In the Netherlands I learned touch typing at school. It was part of the curriculum. This was in 99 or 00.

15. Yeah, I learned it in school.

    But it was not part of the usual curriculum, but a special, extra class one could sign up for.

16. Yes, I had a small electal in high school. Probably the most useful class I ever took.
    It has saved me countless hours of labour through the years.

17. I learned to type fast when I was in my teens in the 2000s. And it was necessity, not any class. When I got into work, my guy friends would compete using these Websites that count your strokes

18. I grew up in Wales and was taught to touch type, in my first year of secondary school. I almost never look at a keyboard more than 25 years later, unless I’m looking for a rarely-used symbol!

19. We could choose it as extracurricular (I did, and benefit from it every day, don’t need to look down at all).

20. I’m 30 and when I was in 6th grade (so about 11/12 years old), we had the option to visit a touch-typing course after school once a week for half a year. I remember that I hated it and tried to “cheat” by opening my ponytail so the teacher couldn’t see my eyes looking down at the keyboard from the side. But of course she noticed.
    I never really used touch-typing after that and I can type quite fast anyway without looking at the keyboard all the time or using all 10 fingers.

21. I’m 40 and I learned to touch type from using MSN messenger to talk to my mates from school. There weren’t any formal lessons or anything like that.

22. I am from 2001, Poland, and I don’t think I had ever learned how to type (not even touch type, just type) on a keyboard at school. This was something I just picked up at home.

23. I imagine it varies from school to school. I taught myself how to touch type but I feel it should be taught in schools more

24. I’m Dutch, and did have typing lessons back in the early 2000’s when I was around 11 years old I think. Those were lessons to both learn to type blindly (I guess that’s what touch-typing means? By not looking at your keyboard and having the F and J keys as anchor points) and also to type pretty fast. I don’t know how common it is anymore, but in the little village I lived in back then, it was quite normal.

    There was this older lady who just had a room in her house with 8 pc’s, so she could teach that many kids at the same time for a lesson, and pretty much everyone from my town that was around my age went to her for lessons.

25. I’m 34 and didn’t learn typing at school. We had a few sessions about using Word, but they weren’t focused on typing as much as formatting. Most kids were busy playing with the little ball inside the mechanical mice we used before modern laser mice.

    I studied languages at university and moved to different countries so I learned to use AZERTY, QWERTY, QWERTZ + ancient greek and devanagari. And more recently I’ve been using a Latvian keyboard.

    I also briefly tried the bépo keyboard because it was a bit trendy at some point, but I didn’t find it useful at all. I would have had to travel with my keyboard, just to have a keyboard that is a bit better for French, it wasn’t worth the hassle.

26. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but we were taught touch typing on the computer they had recently put in the classroom. Everyone took turns, while the other kids had a regular lesson. I was around ten years old, so it would’ve been the mid 90’s. It might have been a holdover from the typewriter days though, cause friends and relatives who are a few years younger, never learned it.

27. I did, when it was called mechanography. It was extracurricular, and it was in the early mid 80s. Of course there were no personal computers, back then, but type writers.

28. nope, not a thing in Poland (at least not when i was in school)

    I only had one “FYI you guys can practice speed typing with this website” during one substitution class

29. I’m from NYC USA. In 1991, in 6th or 7th grade, we had a mandatory typing class. We used real typewriters, but I aced the class because I’d been typing on computer keyboards since I was 6 years old (and mom was a secretary).

30. I didn’t really learn it back in school (but that was 25 years ago). We did have computer classes and I do remember that we played a typing game to get the basics, but it wasn’t what I would call structured or useful lessons in touch typing. I taught myself on a typing instruction type website that after that when I started having regular access to a computer. It’s possible that we had formal instructions later in high school (we did have more computer classes), but if I already knew how to type by then I would have goofed off and don’t remember it at all.

31. >learned that touch-typing is taught in American schools

    Obligatory “13,000 independent school districts, even before individual staffing abilities and local priorities” comment whenever American primary/secondary education is brought up. I for one did not learn touch typing in school – I can still type relatively quick-ish, 70 WPM or so, but that’s through a mainly self-taught method that only really uses my index fingers for 90% of keystrokes.

32. It was offered as an elective subject at my school in the 00s. Basically you just sat for 90 minutes every week and used a typing software and then the teacher would go over the results and check on the progress. You could have done the same thing at home.

33. I did, but it was a specialised school with law and administration focus. It was shit but at least I learnt to type.

34. I am a british millenial and I think we had about one or two half-hearted classes on it, but now touch-typing seems like a very dated thing to me, like something everyone said we’d need to be employable in about 2011 but I’ve not heard mentioned for years.

35. I’m a millennial and was never taught typing in school (I had one single computer lesson on my whole school career, in 3rd grade, where we were taught typing though), and I’m fairly sure it’s a common experience for most people from my generation.

36. I’m old. I flunked typing the first time because I kept looking at the keys. Had to take it again. Finally passed. Now it’s like muscle memory and I can’t imagine having to look at the keys to type. And I used the proper fingers.

    My kids used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing at school but I can still type faster than they can.

37. I am 34 and learned touch typing in the 7th grade in a small town in the middle of nowhere (20+ years ago) – USA (been teaching it ever since computers were installing in public schools). Our first “computer lab” class was “typing exercises.” It consisted of us just typing out writing prompts utilizing all fingers, and we were encouraged to not look, but this was just a suggestion and not a requirement, the only requirement was that we had to keep our palms glued to the table and rest out fingers on the middle row. Mind you, I didn’t actually trust myself to not look at the keyboard while typing until literally 1 month ago! That was like riding my toddler bike for 20 years without ever taking the training wheels off because I didn’t trust myself. My speed increased by 20 word per minute by commiting myself to not look – it’s something you just have to try and get comfortable with – it’s like walking blind, but we can see when we made a mistake and need to physically redirect. Try it! I was job searching and realized I needed to increase my speed. So, I searched explicitly for a program that allows me to see where the letters are without actually taking my eyes off the screen. This helped me train my fingers so quickly (my right hand was really poorly trained – not surprising when you see how many obscured characters your right hand is responsible for; it gets a lot less practice because those obscure characters are less commonly used in proportion to the characters that the left hand is responsible for, and now my right is almost caught up with the speed, range and efficiency of my left hand). – I touch typed this response – proud of myself haha
    Check this out – it’s more advanced than the program I used in the 7th grade 20 years ago – this style is ideal and is what taugh me to trust not looking at the keyboard as an adult:
    [https://www.ratatype.com/typing-tutor/](https://www.ratatype.com/typing-tutor/)