📱 Touchscreens are intuitive. Word processors aren’t.

Let’s teach Office software like any other academic standard.

Quick! What's the keyboard shortcut to bold text? To insert a link? To insert a new page.

If you watch toddlers surf touchscreens, you might assume teens could surf basic office software like experts.

Yet they can't.

This assumption paralyzed me for years. Just typing a letter or essay or dialogue in a 50 minute class meant 5-10 minutes of relentless questions each class hour.

• How do you change the font?

• How do you center the title?

• How do you add a page?

Except I lied. They didn't ask these questions. The documents were so sloppy, the results forced the questions. (How do you start a new page? Hold the space bar!)

Two steps forward, one step back.  Three right turns make one left turn.

Time added up. We spent more time engaging computer literacy than actual literacy.

So I scolded students assuming they'd had a typing or computer apps class like I did in the mid-1990s and early-2000s. But they hadn't.

Years later, I feel bad.

I reviewed when they needed teaching instead.

Recalling a 2003 Microsoft Office course, I wrote a quick paint by numbers, follow the instructions workshop on Google Docs. We talked about navigating the interface, understanding the buttons, and basic keyboard shortcuts.

The results astounded me.

We finally spent more time honing literacy than computer literacy, and more time engaging ideas than fretting formatting.

But how did they make it through middle school lacking such basic skills? I have a few ideas.

• We just assume. If toddlers just understand touchscreens, why don't teenagers just understand technology? It's easy. (This was me.)

• Standards stunt thinking. When we ONLY teach standards, we exclude scores of smaller, arguably more important skills. So maybe they can write but they can’t type. We mistake presentation for proficiency here.

• We don't know. We can't teach what we don't know, and if teachers don't understand technology, students won't either.

That said, I don't blame my colleagues. I'm sure English teachers point fingers at me and scowl, "Why don't they know..." that next year. By definition we can’t see our blind spots, so I assume I have many. Specialization always comes with sacrifice.

And yet another question gnaws at me.

Which comes first—computer literacy or literacy?

• General Illiteracy: If they can't read text, they can't understand interfaces. If they can't understand interfaces, they just hit buttons. If they just hit buttons, it all looks random.

• Computer Illiteracy: If they can’t understand interfaces, they just hit buttons. If they just hit buttons, it all looks random.

They both look the same, but with one missing step.

Proficiency problems look like presentation problems and presentation problems look like proficiency problems.

What troubles me more? Nobody talks about it.

Let’s go full circle: Toddlers intuitively understand touchscreens. Once they get cause and effect, flashy buttons and trial and error render reading irrelevant. Just remember which symbol does what. The same works with teens. Except for when the software requires more literacy skills than button mashing, the problems finally rear their heads.

However, this seems like another blog post entirely, so maybe next time I’ll write about literacy problems and learning management systems.

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