Posted on 02/26/2023 1:27:28 PM PST by SamAdams76
Miss Jacques’ Typing ClassThe most useful class I ever took in high school was the two years of “typing” with Miss Jacques during the late 1970s. Typing I and Typing II. The skills I learned during those two years got me through a successful four-year enlistment in the Marine Corps and accelerated me through my management career in the business world during the 1990s and beyond.
It almost didn’t happen though. On my first day in class, I was one of the only boys in a sea of girls and almost walked out in shame and embarrassment.
Let me explain. Up to this point, I felt I would make it as an car mechanic so I was taking automobile repair for my main elective, which consisted mostly of changing the oil for the friends of the instructors who brought their cars in for free service, also gapping spark plugs, adjusting and replacing timing belts, fixing tires and going to Dunkin Donuts or White Hen Pantry to get coffee and snacks for said instructors and friends. Most of my classmates didn’t really participate and “skated” through the class entirely, sitting the back drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups, listening to Led Zeppelin, goofing off and pulling pranks (mostly on me). They looked like Andrew Dice Clay or John Travolta from the “Grease” era. Eventually I decided that I did not want to work at Jiffy Lube or Sears Auto Center after graduating. Working on automobiles for a living ended up having no appeal for me. It seemed to be a noisy, smelly, greasy and thankless job. Plus my future co-workers, based on my classmates, looked like a bunch of losers.
I wanted something different. Now High School for me in the late 1970s was a sad joke. It was an inner city school in Boston in a lower working class neighborhood. Think “Welcome Back Kotter” (a 1970s sitcom set in Brooklyn) with drab brick buildings, a cynical faculty, mostly timid teachers just looking to survive the day, and finally a lot of troublemaker punk kids that would never amount to anything.
So for my Junior year, I decided to take TYPING I with Miss Jacques as my elective. A double period class. When reviewing my choices with my guidance counselor, Mr. Murphy, he scoffed at my choice of elective.
“Typing class? That’s for girls who want to be secretaries,” he said with total disdain. “Why don’t you take something in the industrial arts like woodworking, machine tooling, or something like that” But I was determined, so my guidance counselor shrugged his shoulders, waved me out of his office and so typing class it was for my junior year elective.
Now another one of my career dreams back then was to be some kind of hipster “gonzo journalist” and I envisioned myself at a typewriter in a future day, a Hunter S Thompson type, banging out an article for Rolling Stone with a long, thin cigarette in my mouth and a tumbler of Chivas Regal by my side. Or maybe even a writing job with National Lampoon, my favorite magazine at the time, where I might later become a writer for Saturday Night Live and maybe help write a script for a Chevy Chase or John Belushi movie.
I looked forward to my upcoming typing class. I wanted to be one of those people who could type at a high speed without even looking at the keyboard. It was a skill I had much admiration for and at the time, it seemed unobtainable. I might as well have fantasized about being a slugger for the Red Sox, knocking home runs out of Fenway Park night after night.
Before long, my junior year began and I will never forget my humiliating first day of typing class. Now the classroom for Typing I, which I didn’t find out until the first day of classes, was located on the third floor in a section of the school I had never been in before. As I passed down the unfamiliar hallway, I came to the horrible realization that it was the “girl’s” side of the building. This was where the Home Economics and Cooking Skills classes were conducted. As I progressed down the corridor, the smell of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies permeated the air with the giggles of girls all around me. One of them asked me if I was lost. I finally found the typing classrooms at the very end of the hallway. Nary a boy to be seen so far in that entire section. It was a very disconcerting and even emasculating moment for me.
Inside the Typing I classroom were four rows of 7 or 8 desks, each with a well-oiled manual Underwood typewriter sitting on top. So far, there were only girls filing into the classroom with me. Trying to hide my embarrassment, I headed to the back of the classroom where I could hide myself while I pondered my next move.
“Please fill the open seats from front to back,” came a shrill, commanding voice out of nowhere. It was Miss Jacques (pronounced as sh-yaka), a stern looking, no-nonsense kind of woman, obviously French, likely well into her 40s at this point. So I took a seat among the girls, who had already started checking me out and smiling at me, as I sat there nervously, like a fish out of water.
To my considerable relief, a couple of other boys sauntered into the classroom smirking among themselves and one more boy drifted in after that, a rather effeminate boy who I had in my homeroom. He got teased a lot because he looked like he was wearing makeup and eye liner all the time and his favorite band was the Bay City Rollers. Even so, I was relieved not to be the only boy in the class after all. But we boys were still outnumbered in the class by girls by about a 7 to 1 ratio, even counting the effeminate one. For Miss Jacques was not conducive to having boys in her class at all and she discouraged them from the get go. She saw them as foxes in her little henhouse. Either slackers looking for an easy grade or a misguided socially challenged potential Romeo looking to desperately pluck a coveted girlfriend out of her stable of career-minded future secretaries.
Once the late bell rang, Miss Jacques took immediate command of the classroom. She slammed the door shut and proceeded to state that she ran a serious course for students interested in a secretarial career and that if any of us came here looking for an easy grade, we should leave the class right now. Within minutes, we were already feeding blank sheets of paper into the typewriters and learning about how to center the paper properly, use the carriage return, set up margins, and whatnot. She had us removing and re-installing ink ribbons and performing routine maintenance chores. As she was putting us through our paces, she was imperiously stalking up and down the rows of desks, correcting us individually as she saw fit.
When issuing instructions for the classroom, Miss Jacques would invariably address the class collectively as “Ladies” or “Girls”, underscoring the fact that this was intended to be a class for young women only and that any boys present there were an aberration that must be driven out. Though every so often, she’d dramatically pause after “Ladies…”, scan the classroom, fix her eyes on one of us boys and add “…and gentlemen”, before issuing her next instruction. This invariably drew a ripple of giggles from the girls in the room as they reveled in our predicament. I guess from their point of view, the shoe was on the other foot for a change as usually it’s the girls who need to fend for themselves in predominantly male environments.
After a day or two of this, all the boys except for myself and the effeminate one (who I now considered to be a girl) dropped out of the class. By the end of the second week, some of the girls dropped the class as well because they either couldn’t keep up with the fast pace of the class or they could not stand Miss Jacques’ brutal critiques when she felt full effort was not being given. A couple of the girls were even reduced to tears. Miss Jacques was unforgiving and strict. Certainly an anomaly in a decaying urban high school of lowered standards overall. I immediately came to respect her.
I never did learn much about Miss Jacques personally, even though I would have her for double periods for two years of school. I knew that she was unmarried (hence the “Miss”) and I also knew that she was highly respected among the local businesses around town and a virtual guarantee of a job for any of her students with her personal recommendation.
Despite the initial embarrassment of being in a “girls” class, I stuck with it as I felt that I was learning some useful skills for a change and I found that I did not actually mind being in a class of all girls. They were all well behaved and diligent in their desire to learn. If only we had this attitude in the other classes I was in.
In fact, I rather blended in as I had at the time shoulder length hair in the Andy Gibb/Shaun Cassidy style of the day and as I had my head down on my work most of the time, a casual observer of the classroom would not even notice there was a boy in it. As for the girls, these were the nicer, prettier girls in the school, no troublemakers among them. (Miss Jacques would not tolerate one anyway). The majority of them were expecting to get secretarial jobs after graduation so they were serious students who didn’t goof off.
I also had a manual typewriter at home so I was able to get in some extra time to practice outside of class. This allowed me to keep pace with the girls and to Miss Jacques’ surprise, I was quickly typing up to 70-75 words a minute, putting myself in the top tier. Miss Jacques developed a grudging respect for me and came to consider me one of her “girls”, which was actually intended as a compliment, but a bit difficult for me to accept. At the end of the year, she had so much respect for my efforts that she invited me to take her TYPING II class for my senior year, which would be with the IBM Selectric typewriters - the big leagues - which was perhaps among the most high tech equipment my antiquated and underfunded high school had back in the late 1970s.
Also, I should mention at this time the initial razzing I got from my fellow male students for taking this class in the first place. It was not “cool” back in the day for a boy to take up typing in what was clearly a course meant for future secretaries. It was almost like a boy taking Home Economics and learning to be a housewife. Fortunately, because my typing class was in the girl’s section of the school, I was able to get to this class without being under male eyes. I don’t think any of them ever caught on that I took TYPING II because I never mentioned it to anybody and fortunately the girls in my class apparently never gossiped about it to others.
Miss Jacques was the only typing teacher in the school at the time. She had two TYPING I classes in the room with the manual typewriters but only one class in the room with the electrics. This is because less than half of the students taking TYPING I go on to TYPING II.
That TYPING II was a serious class, meant to prepare young women for the actual workplace as secretaries. No more of “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” speed typing nonsense. You were expected to already be an expert typist for this class. So right away, after we learned the operating basics of the IBM Selectric, we were put to real work. Each desk had an INBOX and an OUTBOX, much like what a secretary would have in an actual office environment. The INBOX was crammed with assignments from an imaginary boss. Mimeographed copies of hand written instructions and roughly scribbled business letters that you then had to make sense of and put into professional business letter format, which would go into the OUTBOX.
There were things like sales results that in those pre spreadsheet days you had set up tabs for and put in neat columns to create tables that would be transferred to transparencies and be presented at meetings. You received time cards that had to calculated into salaries and typed onto payroll checks, stubs, and ledgers. Office memos and announcements had to be typed into proper formats and placed in OUTBOX. And on and on.
During all this, Miss Jacques would stroll up and down the rows, perusing your Outbox and critiquing your work. Often your work would be rejected and you’d have to do the task all over again. Very little guidance was given by Miss Jacques. You had to basically figure this out for yourself, referencing the textbooks showing generally accepted formats of whatever you were working on.
By far, this second year was the most demanding and challenging class I had in high school. I was the only boy in this class. Even the Bay City Roller sissy from the previous year had moved on to something else. Most of the girls already had jobs lined up by the end of their senior year. Such was the pull that Miss Jacques had in the community. As for myself, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, which is a story in itself as I fully intended to join the Navy but was intercepted by a Marine recruiter when I went to enlist because the Navy recruiter was taking a lunch break.
I wish I could tell you I found a girlfriend during this class but I did not have the time to even speak to one other than “Hi, how are you?”. From the instant class began, Miss Jacques commanded absolute silence as we began our tasks. The only sounds allowed were the clacking of keys and the rustle of paper.
At the end of the school year, Miss Jacques took me aside and told me how proud she was of me as being not only one of the very few boys to make it through both of her classes, but one who excelled. She told me that if military life did not suit me, to come see her and she would be happy to get me started in a secretarial career. I thought that was a nice gesture and the first time she ever spoke to me as almost an equal. I wanted to give her a kiss but knew that would be very inappropriate (though she was nice looking in a stern, sort of dominatrix kind of way).
So to the Marines I went and after boot camp, I found myself stationed in Camp Pendleton, CA as an aviation radio repairman. The 3rd Marine Air Wing. Not long after arrival, I saw a Gunnery Sergeant struggling to type out the newsletter for our unit (MASS-3). It was painful to watch as he “hunt-and-pecked” the letters and kept reaching for the white-out as he made mistake after mistake while cursing under his breath the whole time. Finally he gave up in disgust, ripping the paper out of the typewriter, balling it up and tossing it in the trash. He looked at me, just a Private First Class at the time, and saw I had been watching him. “If you think you can do any better, take a crack at it” as he stalked off.
I sat down, fed a sheet into the machine, and proceeded to type out the handwritten content that was placed beside me, along with a copy of the previous newsletter (to show what the format should look like). For me, it was like riding a bicycle. Within a few minutes, I had four or five other Marines standing around me with their mouths open. “Look at him typing away, he’s not even looking at the keys!”, one of them exclaimed, “How the hell does he do that?” You would think I was Houdini, performing a trick of magic.
So I became the unofficial “scribe” of the unit. All the time sensitive typing work came to me, whether it was fitness reports, memos to the CO or embarkation forms for an upcoming deployment. This skill set kept me in air conditioned comfort while my fellow Marines were out in the heat doing PT or other undesirable busy work. I also got a couple of meritorious promotions out of it as I was pulled into every field operation (i.e. Gallant Eagle) that was happening in the Mojave Desert and became well known by all the officers in the unit, who learned to come to me when they needed something done quickly with regard to paperwork. I even took dictation as I could type about as fast as somebody could talk. I just cranked out the typing and let all the others take credit for it. For a short time, I was the youngest E-5 (sergeant) in the entire Marine Corps (or so I was told by my CO) as I made lance corporal and corporal at 19 and then sergeant when I was still only 20.
Miss Jacques would have been quite proud of her student.
Fast forward to the business world of the late 1980s and early 1990s. By then, I was out of the service and starting a management career. When I got promoted to field supervisor in 1989, reporting directly to my branch manager, I felt like a big shot, with the branch manager’s secretary at my disposal who would not only take my phone calls, maintain my appointment calendar, write all my letters and correspondence for me but also remember to buy flowers for my wife on Valentines Day and such. But those days were speedily coming to an end.
By the early 1990s, branch managers in my company were getting DOS-based IBM workstations shipped to them with copies of Word Perfect 5.1 and Quattro Pro 4.0 (an early spreadsheet program) loaded on them. We were also introduced to something called email. Word quickly came down that branch secretaries were being phased out of the operation with a centrally located “Admin” team to be based out of corporate HQ.
Many managers were panicking when they realized their personal secretaries were going away and they were expected to do much of their own typing and paperwork, which was still at the time considered a feminine skill. Now they had to submit requests to the “Admin Pool” at HQ and it might take days if not weeks before receiving their neatly typed performance reviews, business letters and other necessary paperwork. As for receiving and returning emails, they were on their own. My own branch manager at the time was totally befuddled with this computer and he couldn’t find the ampersand or dollar sign on the keyboard to save his life. So I took the time to master the applications and become my bosses “secretary”, since his was now done away with. I became the go-to guy to run the branch P&L, core metrics reports, sales figures and type out the performance reviews for the employees.
This put me in the driver’s seat to replace my own boss as branch manager for Boston Metro, which happened in 1994 timeframe as he decided to take early retirement. My fellow branch managers from around the country mostly struggled with this part of the job and often came to me for assistance in running their reports, writing business letters, and putting together business presentations for their regional VP. Speaking of regional VP, that would become my job about a decade later. This entire career path driven not by some advanced college degree (that I never obtained) but by my ability to do a “secretary's” job well.
So in conclusion, those two years of “typing” with Miss Jacques in high school ended up being the most consequential and beneficial decision I ever made with regard to my education.
Thanks for the enjoyable post.
Skills are skills, and one should collect as many as possible throughout life. You never know when they’ll come in handy.
College programming & early jobs where I was primarily a programmer taught me to type. My high school typing class was so bad I can’t even remember one thing about it.
Typing was a requirement in the college prep track, so I took it before graduating high school in 1969. It came in very handy later on, especially in Computer Science courses, when typing away on a keypunch machine. I also pulled in a few bucks every now and then typing term papers.
In college I took a class in creative business writing covering many types of business letters which was usefully for many years.
With this knowledge, a wrote a Demand Letter to a Massachusetts judge on behalf of an employee (I was back in Texas then). The letter worked and the weight MA law was removed from my employee…he got his car back, license plates and driver license with no money spent.
I played football in high school, took all the science and math that was offered as my interests were science. My handwriting was as bad as my science and math were good, they were good. I realized I needed to learn how to type and this was in 1963. About 25 girls and two males in the class. The other dude was gay. Oddly, he was the best typist in the class.
That class served me well.
“So I became the unofficial “scribe” of the unit. All the time sensitive typing work came to me, whether it was fitness reports, memos to the CO or embarkation forms for an upcoming deployment. “
Geez, the information you must have picked up along the way…
It’s actually funny that someone else articulated this. I reluctantly took typing in HS decades ago to fulfill some mandatory BS requirement, and it proved to be the single most valuable skill I learned up to that point until I learned how to solve systems of simultaneous equations. Now, thanks to my decision, I can program in the dark.
I’d say the ONLY classes I took in school that actually benefit me long afterward were Reading, basic math, and typing. I was the only boy in the typing class in 1970.
Great story-thanks!
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!
Wow, what a wonderful and caring teacher. No wonder you remember her with gratitude.
Vietnam was such an awful war. All wars are, but Vietnam was really awful. Not knowing who was friend or foe half the time, never being sure all the time, who was civilian or enemy combatant dressed as a civvie (or friendly). And, of course, all the horrors and brutality of war. But add the not knowing who was really who, and it takes it to whole ‘nother stress level.
I am so glad for your sake you were not drafted.
I went to an all-boy Jesuit high school in the ‘60s and was required to take typing first semester freshman year.
Most valuable thing I learned in high school.
My handwriting had always been terrible, and when computers came along I excelled in learning to use them, mainly so I wouldn’t have to handwrite anything anymore.
That and auto shop kept me from losing my mind in high school. The ability to type has remained useful, knowledge of 70's era automobile mechanics, not so much.
My 12 yr old can blaze on a keyboard…but he cant write cursive (sign his name) I flipped out when I realized this. He will soon be able to write cursive but he seems to regard the exercise as being as daunting as I considered learning to type.
Certainly I made more use of the typing class than any other high school subject (I learned maths at home, thankfully). However, my typing teacher would flunk mr if she saw me typing again with just one finger (cellphone…..). Ha!
I use to stay after school and teach my 7th graders how to write cursive.
Now, is the time, for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
:-)
Great story.
You should submit it, for media publication.
Better yet....start a collection of short stories, by SamAdams76.
I’ve read schools no longer teach cursive. And found that terribly sad. Good for you for making sure your son learns it! I hope it’s not a dying art.
What?? Seventh graders?
My six year old grand is writing AND reading cursive....as a hobby.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.