My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.
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.
Side note : You say she's a bad typist so you type it for her. But how exactly is she going to learn how to type then?
Maybe just let her do things poorly and learn
Maybe just advise her to learn piano. Does wonders to one's typing habits.
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.
All it takes is a few minutes to give chatgpt a good prompt and the copy and casting to the text document. 🧐
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.
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.
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.
I found with the few 'public speaking' presentations I did during school, writing down what I was going to say made me more diligent about information/points to bring forward and what phrasing to use. I suspect all this time spent on one specific thing greatly helped commit the topic to memory and by the time of presentation I didn't need to rely on prompts to get my point across.
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.
Ohh sorry, surely your daughter is the only child enrolled at the online school.
Care to respond to the rest of my post?
I don't know how so many snarky comments are getting upvoted here. Barely an ounce of empathy to be found in this entire comment section.
It isn't hard to understand why you'd focus on the content of the essay rather than the mechanical process of typing it out. Clearly you're letting her type shorter things, so she's gonna get better over time even if you type for her on these longer essays for the moment.
Sorry you lost the essay. But I'll look on the bright side and say it sounds like you're doing a fine job working with your kid on their homework, and ideally this is just a growing pain as you use FOSS in the course of their education. I use LibreOffice too and am sometimes similarly frustrated at unintuitive or unexpected design choices.
Thank you, I appreciate the comment. And yeah, she will get better over time. This is one of the first essays she's ever had to come up with and I think the first where she's had very little in the way of detailed instruction.
I think that if writing takes a lot of effort it naturally makes people think more about what they’re going to write.
That's a very neurotypical way of looking at the world.
As a side note, typing well isn't something that can easily be learned by simply typing more. If her typing is a concern (and it may well be since she'll be typing much more in college), it may be helpful to search for some typing courses. My impression is that there are some free online ones, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.
I never truly learned to type, though I had a few weeks instruction in school, and did a few levels of Mario Teaches Typing when I was a kid. None of it really stuck, and typing remains an exercise in hand-eye coordination for me. I topped out at around 70-80 WPM if I'm composing rather than copying, but that's been good enough for a lifetime of office jobs, and certainly for writing school essays. There is definitely a lower ceiling if you don't get proper instruction, but simple practice is still helpful.
Perhaps, but that's a relatively spectacular case. If my memory serves me correctly, the average typing speed is around 40 wpm. And sure, that kind of speed can get the job done but it definitely won't be a good time. My elementary school was pretty forward-thinking in this respect. They signed us up for computer literacy and typing courses that would last for multiple years that we would do in computer class. I think everyone in my class was hitting at least 50 wpm by middle school. I was typing a solid 70 wpm.
Anyways, I think there are certain aspects of typing where having guidance could really help. I know people who chicken-peck because that's just how they've always done it and they've never broken that habit.
Then let it take hours. That’s how you learn. She’s not going to learn to remember to save regularly if you just sweep the mistake under the rug and do the heavy lifting for her the second time around.
When I was learning Dvorak, I decided I would use it all the time. Even if it took me hours to write an essay. I now type 120 wpm. Practice works.
The only way I learned how to type growing up was from instant messaging my friends. All of those ridiculous typing programs didn't help. One random thing that might help is a different keyboard, or, different profile keycaps!
I love me some mechanical keyboards and I like the tactile feedback from "brown" switches. The last one I built I found out about the wonderful world of keycaps, specifically keycap profiles. I fell in love with MT3s as they are a little "cupped". My fingers sort of fall into the scoops and get enough tactile feedback to stay on the key and they just feel nice. I haven't looked at cheaper membrane keyboards in years, but I remember you could pull off the keycaps and put different ones on those, but I have no idea how they are now.
If you are interested in mechanical keyboards, you can usually buy a sample kit that has all of the different switches and you may be able to find something similar for keycaps.
I guess what I am trying to say is a different keyboard, or even keycaps, may help her learn. Though I do realize that this stuff is expensive too. As someone who is on a keyboard everyday, it became a tool to invest in.
https://drop.com/buy/drop-mito-mt3-cyber-custom-keycap-set
No need to go crazy with the first one. That first step from laptop keyboard or membrane pack-in is the biggest jump you'll ever make in typing experience. a brown-switch gamer board with the RBG turned off and some cheap Amazon "CSA" style keycaps might be all you'd ever need. Of course, even that type of thinking can lead to certain... rabbit holes.
Just want to say, what a good parent for actually giving your child a hand in school work. The work load has become so insane for children.
Thank you, although in my case, it's required. My daughter is in online school. It's a public school run by the state, not a private school, so she has real classes with real licensed teachers via live videoconference and the assignments are graded by the teachers. They require a parent to be a 'learning coach.' Mostly to keep the kid on track.
But I also know my daughter has very little patience for bullshit, as I did I when I was her age, so when they say things like "to learn about biological cells, draw a picture of an imaginary factory and show the different parts of the factory and label how they work" (an actual assignment) and it isn't being graded, it's just busywork, I tell her we can skip it. I wish I had someone who let me skip that nonsense. Like you said, the workload, or in this case the expected workload is insane. And most of it isn't conducive to learning. Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn't going to help you learn what mitochondria are.
Meanwhile, she's getting better grades than she did when she was in public school. It's working out pretty well.
That sounds like it's an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they're not judging the kids on what they know or don't, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they're going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn't need to do it, I don't think it's stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.
Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren't, though.
Oh that sounds like a much better situation. I only found out public online schools were an option in my second to last year of high school, when the bullshit work load had already been waning. Doing it mostly online now for college and it's so much less stressful. Wish you both luck. 🤞