Did You Take Typing?

[SteveDallas]

Originally Posted by Brianna

I (and all my ilk

You have ilk?? Can you introduce me to them?

When I was in 10th grade my mom decided I shouldn't have two study halls*. So she made me take typing. I came in in the middle, so I had some catching up to do, but I did OK. Our typing classroom had a bunch of old manual typewriters. (This was in 1982 I think so the manual ones were really old hat.) The angle of the keyboards was pretty steep, and you had to exert a fair amount of force just to get the key to work. So, if you got to the point where you could do 40 or 45 wpm on one of these monsters, you could flat out fly on an electric typerwriter or a computer.

It actually helped me a lot. Not only did I learn to type fast, we also had to do things like footnotes. (You haven't lived till you've manually spaced the footnotes on a typewritten page.) This definitely gave me a leg up in typing my own papers, as well as those for other people (which got me a bit of pocket change in college). I consider it ironic that the advent of word processors that will do all your footnote spacing for you on the fly coincided with footnotes going out of fashion in favor of endnotes.

*Yeah, two study halls. The day was split into eight periods. I was taking American Lit, AP Calculus, Physics, AP European History, AP French, and PE. It sure sounds like an adequate amount of work to me, but all mom could see was "TWO study halls?? Every day???"