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Comment by losteverything | Hacker News Reader

Anyone remember taking Library Class?

Learning card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, how to use microfiche, film strips, difference between fiction and non-fiction?

Part of cycle: home ec, industrial arts and keyboarding (elec piano)

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Yes. And this was in 1998. Feels ridiculously irrelevant. Just like my third grade teacher who was adamant that we would only ever be able to write in cursive and in black ink in high school, college, and the workplace, and that to write in manuscript with pencils was not something any respectable adult would do...

I doing some work in a school just a year ago that still taught cursive to their students. I asked why and their response was pretty much just "because that's what you do in third grade." I don't get it.

"[...] These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/

Some educators specializing in dyslexia treatment point to research around cursive handwriting being a helpful tool:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/connecting-dots-role-cur...

You only learn to write cursive in third grade in the US? So you learn to write "print letters" first and then cursive? In Hungary we only learn cursive, and in first grade. As one gets older they generally move towards a mixture of that and print letters, though. Still I find some form of cursive to be much faster to write compared to print letters.

And even though I don't write huge letters and pages of text in handwriting, I do take notes and write scribbles to organize my thought very often. It's not like typing has replaced all use cases of handwriting.

I worked in LibTech for 6 years, and despite crafting a system that was easy to use and intuitive, some of our university library customers still wanted their students to go through training - and produced hard copies of their own user guides to the discovery service, despite us releasing new features every few weeks.

No, that was stuff we just learned as part of general coursework (at secondary level, integrated into the English curriculum) starting in elementary school, not a specific class.

> difference between fiction and non-fiction

Wait, was that actually part of a curriculum? Surely if you know what "fiction" and "non-" mean you can understand the difference between the two.

Yeah. Not like definition but when and where to find a book

F by name, located in a separate area; NF by number. Etc.

Sample assignment. Diary of Anne Frank. List all areas of the library that have information about the subject (and give name title author(s) etc. And list why you would use that source.

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