Unschooling Typing Skills

I graduated from high school in 1983. Computers were just beginning to move into schools and homes. My family had a rarely used typewriter, so when I signed up for typing class my junior year, I was vaguely familiar with the keyboard.

My best friend and I competed for top spot in the typing class all year. I don’t remember who ended up being the fastest by a word or two, but we could both type over 95 words per minute by the end of the year.

That’s pretty fast. It doesn’t approach the world record of 216 wpm, but it’s pretty fast. Last time I checked, 33 wpm is the average speed, and over 50 wpm is considered a professional typist.

Today, my home has more keyboards than people. My four children have grown up keyboarding, as most children do these days, hunting for letters and symbols and pecking them out with a finger or two. I’ve purchased a couple of typing programs over the years and encouraged their use, but we’ve never been consistent about it, so I now have two teens who are pretty well established in their improper keyboarding skills.

Nova, at sixteen, is a writer and uses the keyboard constantly. I tried hardest with her to instill proper keyboarding technique … she’s the oldest; she always gets the brunt of my worry. Though she is not the reason I first decided to try unschooling (I decided that before she was born), she is one of the biggest reasons we have continued with it. I realized early on that any attempts at coercive education with her would end in miserable failure, and possibly the messy demise of one or both of us.

So we’ve stuck with unschooling. When Nova was, oh, eleven or twelve or so, I purchased a fun typing program. I showed her how to use the typing program, I explained the reasons she should learn proper keyboarding techniques, and I encouraged her to use it, but I didn’t force it.

It was a little fun for a little while but never interesting enough. She typed “properly” with ten fingers when actually using the program, but she matter-of-factly informed me that when the program was turned off, she immediately reverted to the six-finger method she had devised and already preferred.

Now she is sixteen and I know she’s set in her typing ways. After all, she has “practiced” the wrong way for hours every day for years now – much longer than I practiced to learn to type 95 wpm with my ten digits. But she doesn’t hunt and peck – she clearly knows where the keys are and types without looking. Types pretty quickly, in fact, with her six-finger method (thumbs, indexes, and middles) … though she informs me she does use her pinkies to hit the shift key, so I guess technically that is an eight-finger method.

So this afternoon I thought, what the heck. Let’s see how fast she can really type. I found a little free typing test online and asked her to try it out.

Seventy-four words per minute.

She doesn’t use her ring fingers at all, or her pinkies to hit any key other than the shift key, so she types all the letters and numbers using her index and middle fingers. But I took the test and used all ten fingers and my own speed has dropped to around 80 wpm, so I don’t think I’ll complain.

Now I just have to make sure she knows how to pronounce “qwertyuiop” and I can quit worrying about her typing skills.