This is about the most recent version of LibreOffice on Windows 10. I can’t speak for other versions.
My daughter worked hard on her social studies essay. I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write… but I didn’t remember to manually save her social studies essay yesterday, and for some reason the ThinkPad rebooted, LibreOffice crashed and we lost the whole thing… because autosave was not automatically on when I installed it.
No, recovery didn’t work. We just got a blank file.
I rewrote it for her based on the information we had and what I remembered and tried to make it sound like what a 13-year-old would write because it was basically my fault and she did do the work. I did have her sit with me as I wrote it in case she didn’t like something I wrote, but it was sort of cheating. I’m okay with that cheating since I know she worked hard on it.
First, though, I went into the settings and turned on autosave.
I like LibreOffice, but why the hell is that not on automatically? Honestly, I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t want their documents autosaved, but I’m pretty sure most people would want that.
This isn’t fucking 1993. I shouldn’t have to remember to save a document anymore and it shouldn’t be lost forever because of it.
Like I said, I like LibreOffice. I don’t really want to trust documents to Microsoft or Google. But this was really annoying.
As I told someone else, I let her do it when it isn’t a long essay. With an essay, it would literally take hours.
Ignoring that this would get faster with the practise of typing it themselves:
How quickly are people writing essays these days? I’m a decently fast typer and it always took me a couple of hours to write a whole essay at that age. Once I was a few years older and was diligent in drafting a really good outline first I’d maybe get it to under a hour at the computer, but the speed of typing was never the bottleneck.
Again, it can take her a full minute to type a sentence. She is an incredibly slow typist. This is really the first big essay she’s ever had to write and I wanted her to think about what she wanted to say, not hunt and peck for ages.
Look, maybe you don’t have kids. Maybe your kids are good typists. My kid has just started down this road of writing real essays and I have decided that typing speed is far less important than critical thinking when it comes to her education. You are free to make your own parenting decisions, but I would appreciate you not questioning mine, especially when you are not able to see the full picture when you don’t actually know either me or my child.
Critical thinking is a high level skill. High level skills must be built on top of low level skills, and people learn thing better when they write themselves. The mechanics of putting the words to paper are an important part of the WRITING process.
While I won’t debate your decision, please be sure that 1. You recognize how rediculously important learning to type properly is for today’s kids, and 2. That she may not want to learn, and is slow because of it. She may need a reward system, and a defined set time to learn. Good luck, and I hope it goes well for you.
All it takes is a few minutes to give chatgpt a good prompt and the copy and casting to the text document. 🧐
Are you going to type her emails and reports when she goes to work some day?
No?
Only the long ones?
Do you think maybe it might be better, if she is going to write an essay at her age, for her to think about what she is going to say and put it in a comprehensible and logical way than slowly typing things out letter by letter so that each sentence takes over a minute and she can work on her typing skills in other ways which require less creative thought?
No. All the other kids in her class are typing their own essays. Why isn’t she?
Which other kids would those be? She’s in online school.
And, as I said to the other person, feel free to do what you want with your own kids, but I feel that when my child is writing one of the first essays she’s ever written, her ability to think about it critically is, in my opinion, far more important to her education than hunting and pecking on a keyboard for hours rather than think about it.