I’m right in the middle of the youngest millennials and the oldest Gen Zers. While I learned how to type by keeping my hands on the home row in middle school, using a combination of an opaque orange plastic over the keyboard and assorted edutainment typing games, I also learned it was easier just to hover above the keyboard entirely with wrists resting against the desk. I was faster that way – I already had a computer at home, and in browsing the web and talking to fellow children on chat room games, I learned how to get the words out quickly. Ideally without typos. Homerow slowed me down. Glancing down between the keyboard and up to the screen ensured the best mix of speed and accuracy, something home row typing does not allow smaller hands. Reaching for P or Q, trying to make emojis, trying to do anything ~unusual~ like LeetSpeek using the homerow technique was… difficult.
Is homerow typing dead? They still teach it – the alternative is letting kids develop their own systems for typing quickly, something that would almost certainly result in the majority of them pigeon-pecking the keyboard instead of actually learning the placement of the keys and their hands over them. That’s nothing. That’s not fast, efficient, or even easy – staring at the keyboard is exactly what you hope to avoid no matter what you do.
Then again, if speed is all that matters, all that really matters is practice, and if speed matters so much it overrides whatever system an individual could come up with for themselves, maybe it would be worth offering up new keyboards. The Dvorak layout is notably faster with practice than the standard Qwerty! The Qwerty keyboard was designed in a time where the keys were mechanically striking the page, in typewriters – an arm would swing up and hit the ink ribbon when a key was pressed, stamping the letter onto the paper. Two arms swinging up too closely together could jam your typewriter, which could potentially damage it. It also made you stop typing to fix it, slowing you down. The solution, then, was to space out the letters in such a way as to slow down the average typist and keep them from pressing two keys right next to each other in quick succession. This skeuomorph is kept arbitrarily – it’s what everyone trained on, so it’s what comes by default, even though it’s no longer what’s fastest.
If it’s not speed, but accuracy, then sure – homerow typing is okay. But it could be better. Realistically, all you need to type accurately is some sort of hand orientation relating to the keyboard (even just holding your pinky over the shift key would enough). The excessively rigid way of teaching homerow typing gets students ¾ of the way to where they’d be most comfortable, but maybe if it wasn’t so rigid, we’d have developed a better system than the current one.
