“Should computer coding be written into high school curricula?” asks this website.
Gosh, forget about coding, let’s at first ensure that everybody entering college is aware of how to add an attachment to an email. That is going to be a huge victory over computer illiteracy. And if somebody could throw in a class on the importance of signing emails, that would be amazing.
Are the students who don’t know how to add an attachment to emails people who have not grown up with access to computers?
Because truthfully, although I did have access to computers when I was growing up (my teens), I did not have my very own email account (either personal or school) until my freshman year of college. My friend at the time helped me set up my personal email account. And then somehow I learned how to attach a file to an email and it didn’t take me that long to learn because I don’t remember the process of doing so.
Signing the email is something you learn within 5 minutes in English class, because it’s just like signing a letter. (Yes I’m aware of how old that makes me. :-P)
I believe it’s more familiarity and comfort. I got how to do an attachment within minutes; my mother and other Boomers I’ve worked with struggle with the concept mightily.
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I also don’t remember how I learned to attach files. 🙂
Yes, many of our students only have access to the Internet on campus. Just this single fact, I believe, should be enough to convince everybody that state universities are crucially important to society. Young people who don’t have even the basics of computer literacy are doomed to being a permanent underclass with no hopes of making anything over a minimum wage. It is beyond important to give them a chance to inscribe themselves into the technological society. This should absolutely be the number 1 societal priority.
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This was my experience, too.
I’ve always had computers at home — there is a picture of me that is probably from the mid-1980s, as a very small child, sitting on my father’s lap to play a game on some ridiculously huge early computer. (I’m sure he’s doing most of the playing for me.) I got my own email account sometime during high school (Hotmail) and what I remember is that it was easy to learn how to use it.
I didn’t always sign my emails, though! With Hotmail, if the user has a name associated with their email account (as I did), their name would show up in the recipient’s inbox. So I considered signing my name to be redundant, not considering what it might look like for someone using a different email program from mine.
I also used Instant Messenger a lot — it was my preferred mode of communication in college — and my mom told me at one point that my emails sometimes read like instant messages: one or two lines, unsigned, not prefaced by any salutation.
Because she seemed to think this was weird, I changed it, even for familiar emails. (I always used “Dear Dr. Whoever” to email professors, since I figured this was more formal communication.)
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My favorite e-mails is a one-liner asking me about a list we spoke about some time ago from a vague adress like xyz_overlord@gmail.com.
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Or, “hi i need my grade please thank you.” From an anonymous correspondent. 🙂
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Many of my students (who have grown up with computers) have big problems with basic formatting issues (like margins, spacings, tabs, indentations etc.
I remember one of the two most useful courses* I’ve ever had at any level of education was typing (with manual and electric typewriters) which I took in high school. Learning to touch type which has been enormously useful and I can’t imagine how people do without it.
*the other was ‘public speaking’
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“Many of my students (who have grown up with computers) have big problems with basic formatting issues (like margins, spacings, tabs, indentations etc.”
– YES. SO TRUE. Every year, I teach a new group how to insert page numbers, and they look like I have just shown them a way to travel to outer space.
I had a typewriter since I was about 5, yet I still type only with my index fingers. I do it fast, though. 🙂
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“Every year, I teach a new group how to insert page numbers, and they look like I have just shown them a way to travel to outer space.”
Exactly. Every time someone tells me how “technological” this generation is, I want to laugh. Even basic things on Google (like how to conduct an advanced search), or basic things on social media sites (like how to control privacy settings) are lost on them. And this generation grew up on Google and Social Media.
I actualy fail to see any aspect of technological navigation where this generation seems to excel. I actually don’t mind. I think part of the role of the university is to help students learn how to navigate the technological world. But this notion that somehow younger people are more technologically advanced than ever before is just not true (or it’s not true in my experience at least.)
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I noticed that during the presentation of their project every student manually scrolled through every slide of the Power Point presentation to get to the slide they needed. When I showed them the “From Current Slide” button, they were ecstatic. 🙂 So yes, I don’t see where this generation is any more technological than what we used to be at their age.
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We had a computer course at my high school that covered this stuff — everyone had to take it, and at the time I thought it was pretty bogus, but now I find I use that knowledge a lot. It was pretty much a “How to use Microsoft Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint” class, where you learned how to do pretty much anything it was possible to do in each program. Now, I can help my mom figure out how to do whatever she wants to do in Word or Excel.
I can’t touch-type though.
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What *I* want to see taught in high school is statistics! (I know it’s taught some places, and maybe even at my high school, but I didn’t take stats until college. And I still don’t feel like I have a very good command of the subject.)
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I know! I pretend to believe my husband when he says that after hitting red 10 times in a row the chances of hitting black are 50/50 but that’s only because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. In reality, I don’t believe this at all.
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Toss a coin and give it a test then! Ok, maybe not with 10 throws on one side since that will take forever, but whenever you get, say, 3 heads in a row or 3 tails in a row make a note of whether the next toss is the same as the previous ones or different.
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I took stats as an undergrad and as a grad, but I still don’t feel like I have a good command of it. What’s worse is that I got a good grade both times despite that.
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Coding? These days we have problems just making sure people graduate high school able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. And now basic handwriting is going out the window because this “technological” generation is so used to using computers that they don’t know how to write in cursive, they can only print.
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So true! It would also be nice if they had at least the basics of geography. At least, if they knew the continents and didn’t confuse them with countries, that would be fine.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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