[libstripper]

Similar thing happened to me. One of my graduation presents from eighth grade in 1957 was a manual Smith-Corona portable typewriter. I spent much of that summer teaching myself to use it and followed up with a "personal typing" class in high school. Very useful skill in college, law school, and in the practice of law.

[hanamizu]

I’ll be honest. The most valuable class I took in high school, the one that has lasted me my whole life, was typing back in 1961. Still use the skills I learned even though I really disliked the class and teacher. We used to ring the return bells (you have to be of a certain age to know what that is) to bug the teacher.

[LittleSpotBlog]

Wonderful, beautifully written piece. Thank you for sharing.

[PGR88]

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” — you type that sentence a lot, because it’s a pangram, meaning that it contains every letter in the English alphabet.

Mine was: "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."

[Sasparilla]

I worked as a newsman at a big radio station in Dallas from 1969 to 1972. Zero typing experience and electric typewriters. I had to learn fast. I dropped the typing class in college, but I developed a great 4 finger style at the radio station that lasted me through being a newsman, law school, and my practice till I retired. I’m two thumbs on the Android now.

[11th_VA]

Wait, should be the ‘Racist’ New York Times, right ?

[marktwain]

I took typing in 8th grade.

Learned the basics of touch typing.

It served me very well. At least as well as algebra, I would say.

I have used algebra a good bit.

[TChad]

Dear NYT,

See? Not everything you print has to bash President Trump! You can do it, if you try!

Good piece. I learned to type in summer school when I was 10, which was definitely worth the effort.

My congratulations to the author, who learned to type very fast. I always thought I could do that, but somehow never got around to it.

[DUMBGRUNT]

Very nice!
And add to that “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”.

“The Gods of the Copybook Headings” is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling in 1919, which, editor Andrew Rutherford said, contained “age-old, unfashionable wisdom” that Kipling saw as having been forgotten by society and replaced by “habits of wishful thinking.”[1]

The “copybook headings” to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, extolling age old wisdom - virtues such as honesty or fair dealing that were printed at the top of the pages of 19th-century British students’ special notebooks, called copybooks. The school-children had to write them by hand repeatedly down the page. However, the marketplaces were areas that dishonesty and immorality ruled. The Gods (or principles) of the marketplace represent selfishness, reckless progress, over-indulgence and a failure to learn from the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_of_the_Copybook_Headings

[where's_the_Outrage?]

I demanded my step-son take typing in High School, but was amazed to find out they did not have it, only something called “Keyboarding”. So I bought a Mavis Beacon typing program and made him do 20 minutes a day before he could use the computer. When I saw him chatting with his hands underneath the desk I was satisfied.

In keeping with that the only HS course my Dad made me take was typing, I use it to this day.

[Menehune56]

Good article, thanks for posting. It brought back memories of high school long ago and far away.

[MuttTheHoople]

Sophomore typing class 1977-78. The only elective class worth a flip....and one that I can use to this day.

[donna]

Pass the typing test for the local bank and you could move from blue-collar to white-collar overnight.

[chajin]

The two most useful courses were in 1969 when I took typing for six weeks, and 1987 when I learned my first computer programs, ProWrite and Grade Assist. Other courses were far more informative, but I typed my way through to the doctorate, and computered my way through my college career. That seems to be a common thread here.

[umgud]

#1. Typing
#2. MS Office

[miss marmelstein]

Who knew there were still secretarial schools...

Why didn’t gay boy Bruni take it in high school? Don’t they still offer courses?

The only thing worthwhile in his column was explaining the phony ritual of upper middle class white parents sending off little Johnny to a third world country to learn Swahili in order to get into UVA or some other overrated school. They’d learn more about life and America by working as a manager of McDonalds.

[Innovative]

Typing is indeed a very useful skill, regardless what you end up doing in life.

[FrankR]

I used to write a small column for the local newspaper, and one of them was about this very subject...typing. I'm going to post it here.

----------------------------------------------------------

I'VE ALWAYS LOVED THAT TYPE WRITER
12-08-2016

Of ALL the high school, and college courses I've taken, over, lo, so many years, Miss Ash's typing classes have been the most valuable, and useful, in my adult life.

I think, in today's world, they call it "keyboarding". Typewriters are kind of rare nowadays, but, they were once the staple of every business around.

I took Typing I, and Typing II, in high school, mainly as a crib course, but, actually, I already knew a little about typewriters. I remember my Mother once rented a manual typewriter, along with a book about typing. She wanted to learn to type to possibly get a better job. I think she lost interest in it after about a month.

But, I didn't!

I was probably in the 4th, or 5th grade about that time, and I got her book on "typing", folded down the top on her Singer pedal sewing machine into a "desk", set up that old typewriter, and commenced to read, and learn.

Now, I never made it to the ultimate level of "touch typist", but I familiarized myself about things like, "shift", "return", tabs, and the "home keys". The basics.

But, starting typing class in high school, to my chagrin, the letters, on the keys, were all covered up! What the he....?!?

The teacher had a big, pull-down chart on the wall, identifying the whole keyboard, but we'd only get two, or three keys, a day. From there, it was typing page, after page, of, "asdf asdf asdf, asdf", ad infinitum. I did eventually learn to be a "touch typist", able to type anything without looking at the keyboard...now, if I could do that on the piano, I'd be a virtuoso.

After high school, I didn't use typing much, until one day - a bitterly cold day - in Germany. Trying to keep us all busy, the sergeant decided some of the ammo bunkers needed "sweeping out". He nabbed about ten of us, armed us with shop brooms, and we went on to the first bunker.

When I say, it was cold that day, I mean, IT WAS COLD THAT DAY! But, inside those bunkers, all concrete, it was even colder.

Anyway, about halfway through sweeping out the first one, the First Sergeant walked in and bellowed, "Anybody in here know how to type?". "I'm your man, Sergeant!", I blurted out. The Sergeant said, "Report to the Orderly Room (the office), we gotta s***load of typin' to be done!" Overjoyed at the thought of getting out of this sweeping detail, and working in a nice, warm, office, I snapped, "YESSIREE!".

Upon arriving at the Orderly Room, I did find a mountainous stack of forms to be typed, but I didn't care how big the pile was, so long as it got me out of that cold, cold, bunker.

What was to have been a week, filling in as a clerk-typist, turned into a month, leading to being tapped as the squadron "mail carrier". My job then, in addition to the typing, was every morning to drive about 15 miles, into the main Base, and pick up the squadron's mail, and to sort, and distribute same, when I returned. I even had to take the USPS postal exam, and everything. The irony was, I was actually a Missile Guidance Tech that had been sent to a greatly overstaffed missile shop, and they were farming out all of the non-NCO's for miscellaneous jobs.

After I was discharged from the Air Force, in 1968, I decided to combine my love of music, my writing skills, my training in electronics, and my baritone voice, and I enrolled at the "Atlanta School Of Radio & TV Broadcasting", become an Announcer/ Deejay. I subsequently spent over 15 years in that profession, and during the whole time, my typing skills were invaluable. I had to constantly write news stories, advertising copy, Public Service Announcements, and business letters, all, on typewriters.

While in the JayCees, I did the monthly newsletter, along with op eds, and newspaper columns and articles.

Later, working at the telephone company, I was tapped to create a 200 page technical training manual.

In the 80's, along came computers, and I got me a book, and learned "programming". I spent my final, five years with the phone company, as a "systems analyst", writing and maintaining business applications. Without typing, none of this would have been easy.

All of these things, thanks to an old, "Underwood", typewriter, and a typing teacher). I actually ran into her a couple of years ago, while out shopping. We chatted for a bit, and as soon as she remembered that I was not my cousin, Smokey, we talked about "typing". I told her about that her classes had been worth more to me than a College education... and, I mean that!

I love the fact that I can still type, the old fashioned way. I still use it almost daily in writing my little anecdotes, as well as many other tasks.

But, I find it totally ironic, that after all that keyboard training, I'm sitting here, "hunting and pecking" an "on-screen" keyboard on this I-Pad.

I guess if it wasn't for "auto-correct", I'd be putting "Wite-Out" on the screen for my spelling errors.

Old habits die hard.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

When I was a junior in HS in 1968, Dad enrolled me in a summer typing class. Being the obedient son, I dutifully attended and then, to my surprise, I found out I was the ONLY guy in the class. Wow, that was heaven. Dad bought me a Smith Coron a portable electric typewriter (in a hard travel case) the following summer as I was headed off to college as a freshman. He said I would get great use out of it typing papers. He was a man of great wisdom.

The funny thing is, when PCs began taking off in the early 80s, I remember Dad saying many times “Real managers don’t touch keyboards. That is secretarial work.” He never did use a PC or write an email to his dying day.

How could a man who looked down on typing as “secretarial work” insist his son take a typing class and buy him a typewriter? It’s almost as if he knew PCs were only a decade away. I never did ask him about that before he passed.

[lightman]

HS freshman typing class 1975.

Had a very politically incorrect homeroom teacher who advised certain types of girls to go to “SEXratary school” because they were already “huntin’ peckers”.

[firebrand]

At the interview for my first NYC job, I was asked if I could use an IBM Selectric. To borrow a phrase from the modern novel, “Yes,” I lied.

I headed straight for the local vocational school and my first question was “What’s an IBM Selectric?”

I spent the next week and a half learning how to backspace only once for the i and five spaces for the m and w-—or whatever it was. I think the model had a built-in eraser ribbon.

There was a way to switch font balls but I never got to that at my new job. Didn’t matter at that point.