Posted on 02/26/2023 1:27:28 PM PST by SamAdams76
I took typing in High School. Best I could ever get to was 35 words per minute.
I’m ah thinking ah that back in highschool being the only boy in a sea of girls wouldn’t have bothered me much. Don’t know if I’d have learned anything…
I took typing in the early 1970s and it was a sea of girls. That was a feature of the class. Oh, and the typing I learned has been invaluable throughout my life.
I also took typing in high school, with the ratio of boys to girls lets just say my odds were very good...... still only type with two fingers...
Our high school had a college prep typing class. It was canceled before I had a chance to take.
My Dad was born in the 1900’s. He never graduated high shcool. He worked all his life as a manual laborer in the oil fields. Hot, dirty, sometimes dangerous work. He had two sons, no daughters. His rules for his sons was they would go to college and take at least one year of typing while in high school. He missed out on an office job in the 1930’s because he couldn’t type.
He told us boys that we would take a typing class because he thought it was a good skill to know. I told the old man a year or so before he passed that I was so glad he made me take that course. It’s been the most useful class I ever took. Much more than calculus.
I took typing with Mrs. French when I was in seventh grade back in the Sixties at George Dewey Jr-Sr High School in Subic Bay.
I hated it. I lit a firecracker in class and got kicked out and sent to the Principal’s office.
Poor woman. I was having real problems at that time, and that was how I fought back. It wasn’t her, per se. She was a nice woman. I just hated school.
But I did get to go back to the class for the rest of the year, and I did learn how to type.
Very valuable class indeed.
By the time I was in law school in my early 20s, I could type 120 words per minute. Now, over 40 years later, I can barely type 60 wpm with my arthritic hands. I still use it every day though.
I learned using one of these:
LOL - I learned to “speed type” on manual typewriters back at the old Intelligence School at Fort Holabird Maryland. And yes, officers were expected to type their own intelligence reports. We called that class “Clicking with Klecka” after our wonderful civilian typing instructor Mrs Klecka.
Lol!
My high school required typing classes for both boys and girls. This was mid-1970s. Good thing, because they make you type all your papers in college. Only they didn’t tell us why we had to to take it.
If they had, I might have got off to a better start. I had a mental block about learning typing. I had a horror of becoming a secretary. I thought it sounded like a terrible job. So... mental block. Good thing family clued me in, because as soon as I found out I needed it for college, I sailed right along to 60 words per minute. Mrs. Jones was a great teacher and I’ll always be grateful to her.
Now I guess kids can type before they learn to write.
Algebra, Typing and Drafting were the courses from High School that I used the most in my professional life.
I am not a "memorizer" so I could not type, even in Jr High typing class without looking, even to today. I can't memorize something like where the keys are because it makes no logical sense. All the phone and car things that have a symbol instead of a word don't mean anything to me. I understand things that make sense like Maxwell's Equations or statistical distributions. Those road signs with an outline of a car and squiggly lines behind it and the first thing I think is "Drunk Driver Ahead". On my cell phone I just hit things until I get what I want or it hangs up. Why can't they put a word under the stupid symbol?
Mine was a mixed class. They had one manual typewriter, the rest being electric. We had to rotate using the manual.
I took both typing and Home Ec in High School. It’s where the chicks were.
L
My father could type. So, in 1938, he became the camp clerk in one of the many Conservation Corps camps in northern Wisconsin ( I think Camp Smith Lake?). It was a highly coveted job. From this job, he met my mother.
I learned typing in High School. It became a very useful skill in my career.
My high school typing teacher took me aside at the end of the class to encourage me to keep up my skills. This was 1970, ans she said it would be a good way for me to stay off the front lines in Viet Nam should I be drafted. I ended up not getting drafted, but always remembered her concern for her young men students.
That’s a great story Sam.
I made decent money typing up papers in college for non-typers. 125 words a minute.
Worked at the local large grocery store in HS and learned ten key from checking out groceries. No bar codes back then.
Helped immensely as an accountant.
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