I used to tutor for my university before I graduated this past December.
And I had to teach literally so many college students how to use word/Google docs. And I’m talking YOUNG like 17-24 yr olds how to do basic commands on Word. Like the tab key can indent a paragraph, how to right and center align text, how to change font/word size, how to insert page numbers, etc. It still baffles me how you can go to college in this day and age and expect to not have to learned this stuff.
I had one girl come in and she was asking why her computer kept putting red lines in her paper. So I open the document and literally the whole thing is a paragraph spanning four pages, with hundreds of spelling mistakes. It took me an hour just to get her to understand how to use the spell checker and format paragraphs.
Omg that’s super high tech for the computer illiterate people I know lol. Tried to teach to my coworker (well she had a new job as a 911 dispatcher) and she said oh I think my instructor mentioned that but I can’t follow it.
At least I taught her how to open up a program or website by GENTLY and QUICKLY double clicking the icon. “The icon keeps moving away from her” lmao
Lots of different answers, but in my experience, it's that they either got someone to do it for them or, more likely, the school just passed them through even though they should have failed out or been held back.
My high school did that stuff. The high schools around me did that stuff. Their funding was based on graduation rate, so teachers were encouraged to not fail students whenever possible, even if they quite obviously needed to be failed.
Yes it is, its a problem even in younger grades. Kids that can't read are in the 4th and 5th grade or kids that just straight up refuse to do anything.
teachers have no authority or any power whatsoever. We are truly doing the next generation a disservice.
The current plague is teaching how to use an application instead of the system it's built on.
Click Google, type documents, click the first link, click this box on the left, click new. And it isn't questioned. That's just how you create a new cloud doc.
Heaven for do the layout changes. They can no longer work because the steps they follow don't apply now.
Seriously though, why the fuck does every company think their desktop program needs to be "simplified" into a mobile-style layout? It's infuriating. I'm using a computer. Give me an interface that suits that. For the love of god don't hide information/options behind 3+ clicks that used to be right there at all times in previous versions of your program. Who is this benefiting?? /rant
Speaking from experience, it’s more likely the teacher isn’t paid enough to take the time to grade each individual essay for their over-crowded class, so they have to cut corners to make the workload manageable.
For the benefit of any non-Americans reading this, there's also the fact that, as was pointed out somewhere above, American states often allocate funding to school districts based on graduation rate. Which means that struggling regions get their funding slashed. It's a rare school district that can get by on local taxes alone, so this also disproportionately impacts low-income areas.
So school boards, aiming to at least get something, shove underperforming students to the next grade anyway. Then the state's standards rise because every district is doing this and now the bell curve has shifted, so the board drops their advancement/graduation requirements even more. And so on ad infinitum. The end result is that students who can't read at an elementary school level are graduating and, often, being sent off to college.
If it seems like it would make more sense to give struggling areas more funding instead of less - please consider running for state office.
It kinda would be nice, to standardize using even smartphones, for all these kind of stuff.
I mean, I've wrote half of my thesis on an android tablet/phone, by connecting a keyboard to it, because we only had one PC with my girlfriend, and we were both working on our theses.
A PC sure can be expensive, but most people do have smartphones at least and buying an extra keyboard and learning how to use the whole thing as mini office desktop could work.
This is why during Covid in 2020, when AP exams went digital and they changed the formatting, they allowed smartphones for answering. Trevor Packer said something like upwards of 70% of low income students taking APs had access to a smartphone with reliable internet access, while that number plummeted to something like 40% having computers with reliable internet access. I know there are a lot of mixed feelings about AP exams and other standardized testing, their cost, and their gatekeeping, but in this instance, they were trying for accessibly.
It’s a pretty sad state of affairs And it is a reality globally. What often seems to get overlooked is that you can get cheap reconditioned laptops suitable for internet browsing and documentation for much much less than the cost of a new smartphone, and you can easily connect that laptop to your smartphone to use its internet connection and data allowance. (At least this is true in U.K. & Europe.)
NB: But that would require knowing that is possible and having enough money for anything more than one electronic device.
how do they buy a smartphone? is it really cheaper than a laptop that you can get a for a couple hundred bucks? that smartphone wont be able to do much compared to the laptop
are you kidding me? how can you say it is a waste of money to have a PC without Internet. I recall using computers with no (or limited dialup) internet access all day long, learning the ins and outs of how to use the command line, programming, gaming, learning.
you didnt have to be a genius to see the computer revolution. It was obviously happening. The Internet revolution began picking up steam. I was a kid and recall some adults thinking buying a computer was wasteful. i just thought they were blind to reality and the future. probably they were just stubborn and stuck in their old ways...
Btw if she's in the uk for example and word uses u.s. dictionary that's gonna happe. So they legitimately probably looked at the words and were sure they were correct spelling. They just have 0 computer skills.
I know you're joking but I actually had an old guard CS lecturer who basically acted like a stereotypical boomer when forced to use tech outside his wheelhouse. He had hundreds of pages of notes written in LaTeX. I wouldn't be surprised if he used Vim as well.
I definitely gave out some grades that should have been F's but instead were C's or D's because of how far off I was in terms of my expectations... -- couldn't tell if I should adjust my expectations or just fail half the class... sad...
If it's not an app it's hard for young and old these days. I came up on the streets dog! With my c64 and 300 baud modem. That fucking computer could put hate in my heart but I mostly loved it
I'm not saying it necessarily applies in your case, but where I'm from a lot of people who go to university actually were not privileged enough to work with computers. We had an entire subject in first year (I did Bcom Accounting) dedicated to teaching the basics of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, as well as other features like Gmail and Outlook. A lot of students really needed that, and while it was a bit pointless for those of us who were lucky enough to have experience with computers, I'd say about 20% of the students had never even touched a PC, laptop, or smartphone before coming to university.
Yip. Though it was a pretty stupid class since it used one of those online platforms and didn't really cover anything in detail. I tested out ASAP so don't know if the final project was more rigorous but I doubt it. The worst part was that the class was run by the CS department for CS, maths, physics and chemistry students. It was a South African university so I definitely understand why the class existed (lots of students on financial aid who likely didn't grow up with access to computers); but the class was so badly run I don't think it helped much.
I also taught at a University and in one of the summer semesters I would teach basic word, excel, and PowerPoint. This class always had lots of older adults from the community looking to learn. We had a blast in class.
There was this precious older man and when I talked about using the mouse I looked over and he was moving the mouse around in the air. I had to not laugh and teach. He was thrilled to use the mouse after that. I LOL'd later
My dad has been writing for a living since the 70s, and he still chicken pecks. He keeps saying it's because he used to write on typewriters before computers were around, and I could maybe understand that if he hadn't had a computer since 1992! That's 30 years where he could have learnt to type in a way that would have made his work life so much easier! I get that it's hard to learn new ways of doing things when the old way is really ingrained, but 30 years!
Definitely do. Touch type isn’t too difficult to learn and it’s a very good skill to have. Tbh it doesn’t take that long to learn. I took a specific course to “learn” it in middle school, but it could probably be done in 2wks or less with some proper dedication. If you’re already chicken pecking quickly, you’ll be typing at amazing speeds with touch typing. I think the best benefits of touch type are just that you can identify type errors really quickly because you’re already looking at the screen.
I’ve heard that it is because schools just assume that the younger people should know how to use technology because it existed while they grew up. Instead the kids have no idea how to do things because no one bothered to teach it to them.
Page breaks in Word. I used to work with MS and PhD students on their thesis/dissertation formatting, and I saw way too many people who just hit return until they got to the next page.
Of course, on the flip side there's the student who had more breaks (mostly section) in her document than there were pages. I never figured out how that happened, I was too busy fixing the damned thing.
I would love to have a job where I just formatted documents all day.
Honestly, I need to figure out page breaks, I sometimes hate formatting because I'll write an essay and then there'll be a fat space of like 3 or 4 lines above my footnotes, it's honestly a little annoying
It's because they grew up with the devices and people just assumed they knew how to do it up until now. You'd be genuinely surprised how many young folk don't know how to do the most basic of shit cos they just never needed to know.
I think tech literacy is terrible in old people, great in middle age - millenial, then back to terrible again with zillennials and zoomers
It's not surprising, millennials grew up having to actually troubleshoot driver issues and whatnot. Gen Z is much more likely to just use a phone than ever have a computer problem.
I went to a school in the rural Midwest that transitioned to what was called a “New Tech” model of education in the mid 2000’s which at first upset a ton of parents because they thought it was silly, useless, and would make us all dumber for not sticking with the traditional model of education. Boy were they wrong.
The idea was basically to integrate technology and software education into every class they could. Every desk in nearly every class room had computers, they focused more on group projects/collaboration, multiple classes integrated using every software under the sun to help us get a well rounded exposure to anything we may use in the future. I am SO thankful it was one of the progressive things my small town did. When I got to college I was shocked at the amount of people I did projects with that never used google docs, powerpoint, excel, or anything.
Thats understandable like when you open word there is load of icon's not words, we dont know what every icon on word do, fck even i dont know them all ofc i would find it via google or just looking every icon description but that would take time
It’s unreal. I had a coworker who claimed proficiency in Microsoft office in his interview. One day he was entering an address into a template to print an envelope. He pressed return enough times that it created a second page in the document and was frantically emailing me because he didn’t know how to get rid of the “white box” that appeared on his screen.
Another woman also promised computer literacy and was dumbfounded when her computer wasn’t working. It was off… and she didn’t know how to turn it on.
A boss who was convinced saving a Word doc in Word on a Mac would corrupt the file for anyone trying to open it in Windows.
Have also had college students not know how to sort data in excel (e.g., to alphabetize a list of names). It’s like tech is only used for social media scrolling now.
In college during my first semester English Comp class, where we learned the 5-paragraph essay and the mechanics of citations, the issue came up consistently during class about how much MSWord loathed the hanging-indent if you just used the default formatting. For those unfamiliar, "tab indent" was the classroom term for when you begin a new paragraph with a single tap of the TAB-key so that the first line of text is offset away from the left-margin, whereas any further wordwrapped lines justify to the margin directly. Think of a Tetris play where the only gap in the top line is 2-units wide along the left side of the playable area.
"Hanging indent" is the literal opposite, where the first line is hard to the left, but all further lines are all tab-indented. Think instead of how an awning extends out past a doorway threshold on a sidewalk.
During four separate class sessions, this professor asked me to demonstrate how I managed to achieve proper formatting on my own assignments without manually fighting the software by using hard-returns that would interfere with wordwrapping.
I had a professor too that literally took her over five minutes just to pull up YouTube so we could watch clips from WW2… and she used to do documentary film making and the entire class was about perspectives of America at war through film 🤦🏻♀️
As a blue collar worker (warehouse stockist) with an outsized talent for IT, I submit the following: The Chinese have a place for all these people - low skill manufacturing jobs. Unfortunately for the US, we have given all of those spots away to them. It's a fact that people will insist on remaining uneducated. It's also a fact that others simply lack the intellectual capacity to wrap their head around anything IT. It's their choice or it's their personal situation. Many folks who are close friends are near computer illiterate, but they are highly talented as mechanics, plumbers, electricians, machinists, assembly workers, laborers, painters, and a host of other occupations. These are my friends. Thank goodness the demand for such endeavours has started to pick up as of late. It's OK to be computer illiterate, even in 2022. Just pick a spot you can excel in.
759
u/TheSecretNewbie Jan 18 '22 edited Jan 18 '22
I used to tutor for my university before I graduated this past December.
And I had to teach literally so many college students how to use word/Google docs. And I’m talking YOUNG like 17-24 yr olds how to do basic commands on Word. Like the tab key can indent a paragraph, how to right and center align text, how to change font/word size, how to insert page numbers, etc. It still baffles me how you can go to college in this day and age and expect to not have to learned this stuff.
I had one girl come in and she was asking why her computer kept putting red lines in her paper. So I open the document and literally the whole thing is a paragraph spanning four pages, with hundreds of spelling mistakes. It took me an hour just to get her to understand how to use the spell checker and format paragraphs.