Touch typing is a crucial skill that students must learn before they enter the worlds of high school or college. Most middle schools offer a class that teaches students how to properly type. Despite some unpopular opinions, typing teachers are a commodity in education and they have an important role in preparing our children for the real world.
The ultimate goal of touch typing is to achieve an automatic and accurate understanding of writing using a keyboard. Our students have to learn to type without having to think about where the keys are on a keyboard. This takes a significant amount of time and there is a science behind how it is done.
Our students achieve this automatic understanding through what is called muscle memory. They learn to remember where their fingers go and then they can simply type based on how they remember where their finger should hit the next key. As the students achieve muscle memory, they begin to use different areas of their brain rather than having to think about locating keys, they can think about what to write next.
While touch typing is a crucial part of the middle school experience, it is also a skill that kids will use for a lifetime.
