Miss Jacques' Typing Class (1978-1980)

February 26, 2023 | Self

[SamAdams76]

Miss Jacques’ Typing Class

The 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.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

At my high school, we could take extra classes during the summer so, knowing I was going to college, one summer I took typing. I became a quick and accurate typist. In the fifty year since then, in school and work and just goofing around, I have logged a gazillion keystrokes and written volumes. Even though, like you, I recognize the value of the skill, I have no recollection of the class itself.

[jocon307]

Great story, wonderfully told! Thanks for a very enjoyable read on a Sunday afternoon.

[Notthereyet]

LOL

I learned on a manual.

We were not allowed to use any electric typewriters at my High School until reaching the 12th grade.

Complete insanity.

We had to relearn to type because of the force we’d been using on the manual typewriters.

I don’t recall any boys in my classes.

What I do know is that upon working at GTE/Verizon/Frontier was there were many young men who taught themselves how to type. They wanted to get into the corporate world or at least off unemployment and took courses at local colleges. Had/have great respect for those young men!

[Prince of Space]

My dad was born in 1920 in southern Illinois, and in 1937 he got to go on a field trip to the Windy City because he won a regional HS typing contest. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1940 and, because of his typing skill of 120 wpm on a manual typewriter, he was immediately assigned to the clerical dept. He insisted that kept him alive in WWII. He used to tell the story that in Okinawa when the officers were playing poker and ran out of money, they used him as the pot!

He was mortified that I majored in music in college. He had tried to get me to take typing all through HS instead of choir classes but I refused. Ironically, when I was about 30, married with kids, I stumbled upon the field of medical transcription as a way to WFH and avoid daycare. I then spent the next 26 yrs typing for a living. I had to spend one summer learning touch typing in order to bring my skills up to speed. I was kicking myself then for not listening to dear ole Dad 20 yrs earlier!

[DugwayDuke]

Tired of Taxes wrote: “Your father must have been a wise man. Growing up, I remember young men were not interested in learning to touch-type. Today, most young men grew up typing on a computer.”

I never gave it much though. Dad said you will take typing so I did. Before I retired, the younger engineers were amazed that I could type like I could.

[PLMerite]

I too took typing in HS (class of '78). Only boy in class, didn't do me any good.

Typing however did me much good. Training to be a Morse Operator, manual typewriter mill.

Put "miles on the dials" of an R-390.

Led to better things and a great career.

[SamAdams76]

That was the same in my high school. Electric typewriters were for seniors only, who had already had at least a year on the manuals.

Yes, it was quite an adjustment as the pressure required was much less with the electrics.

[SFConservative]

Thanks for a great story, very well written. And no typos! ;-)

[Sequoyah101]

My goodness Sam, that made a big impression on you to type so much. Good story though. What prompted you?

I too took typing against the grain. Some unknown told me I should. Being mildly dyslectic I transpose a lot so my net wpm is lacking but I can bang away at the keys with the best of them. Like my brief try at piano playing, my ham fists and beefy fingers don’t serve me well. Keyboards don’t seem to last very long, touch typist I am not. I absolutely marveled at Denise and how she simply tore up a typewriter. She and her parents were all smart. It takes some brainpower and brain hand coordination to type fast and correctly.

I first, then my sister and much younger brother took typing. All from the same teacher over the span of 13 years. Each of us was judged by our class as most academic and each of us made our first C in typing and each of us struggled to bring it up to a net B but did so. It was the only thing separating us from straight As and Valedictorian in our small town high school. Somehow we still managed to produce an engineer, physiologist / computer science / English lit major and a medical doctor.

Over the years being able to type, no matter how poorly, has served me well but I still must languish at 65ish wpm though I have flashes of speed from time to time when AADE takes a backseat. I recall one evening my manager was struggling with the word processor to do a deadline report and I offered to do it for him. Next morning the report was on his desk and we made the edits and sent it on up the line. He thanked me and I said, “Only in America can a knuckle dragging drilling engineer do these things.”

When I was in college being able to type was a boon to typing punch cards for my Fortran programming but I still transposed a lot and it cost me dearly since each trial run required as much as 24 ours turn around to find out you failed. Back then cards were turned into the mainframe operator to be fed into the thing and you then got the output from a cubby hole with your name on it. Failure was easy to recognize, the output was usually just a few pages

In the first drilling group I joined after college I pitied the secretaries the multiple revisions of the various work procedures we wrote that had to first go to the engineering supervisor / manager then to the operations superintendent each time having multiple edits, most times with the individual changing his own changes. Losing great secretaries is one of the silliest things that new times have brought to us.

The hemisphere president of one company had an admin who knew about as much about running the show as the boss did. I made it a point to get as well acquainted with the important admins as I could. That too served me well. I never got state secrets from the best ones but I did get lots of help and insight.

In presenting a business plan for a new entity I had a slide on compensation that included admins in the bonus program as equals to the top levels (it was a start-up with all the team being hand picked and equally critical). The CEO was incredulous, “secretaries too!?” he remarked. I replied that I’d like to see him do his job without Mrs. X. Fact is, I doubt he could have but he ran on her like junk iron anyway. Must have paid well because she put up with his crap. He was a detestable and sanctimonious putz and I never did manage to hide my disdain for him. Some people stay alive only because it is against the law to kill them.

Time to feed the cats.

[Tijeras_Slim]

https://www.mottmedia.com/product-page/spencerian-penmanship-set-six-books

After years of having my penmanship deteriorate I am now doing this and recovering the ability to write beautifully.

[imabadboy99]

My typing class in HS really sucked but it greatly helped in my future jobs and just in general. I learned more in that class than i did in all of college. College is just busy work and a waste of time, but too many grifters are making a living off of enslaving kids with a lifetime of non-dischargeable debt.

[dragnet2]

You and I had some distinct parallels.

[firebrand]

Anyone ever try to type on an IBM Selectric? The one where the letters are all different widths? Be careful you don’t backspace fewer times than you should when erasing and then start typing again. A lower-case I was like one space but a W was like five.

In my interview for my first job I was asked if could use one. I didn’t even know what it was but said yes.

When I went to the YWCA to look for one, aha, it was there. I practiced on that for the whole two weeks before my job started. The teacher kindly kept everyone else away from it by telling them Miss So-and-So has a job starting next Monday!

Thanks for the memories.

[dragnet2]

By the way, I now type 122 wpm, and that’s with one hand.

[madprof98]

Loved this post! As a freshman at an all-boys high school, I was put into a typing class where all the other guys were senior football players. I decided the only way to cope was to type faster and more accurately than any of them. My folks rented a machine so I could practice at home, and I became the typing superstar. Used it all through high school, college, grad school, and college professorship. Most useful skill I ever learned.

[SamAdams76]

I was extra careful with this post because having typos on a subject like this would be bad form indeed!

Miss Jacques would not have approved.

[21twelve]

My mom made me take typing (a guy, in High School). Mom and pop business - and dad didn’t type! After I started working I told her how much I appreciated her for making me take it, lots of report writing, etc.

She was also great with English and grammar. In my box of keepsakes I have a copy of a letter that was written to them from the newspaper asking them to place an ad in the paper.

All of the errors (a bunch!) were circled and corrected by my mom. She sent it back to the paper with a note at the bottom saying something like “Why would I want to place an advertisement in your paper?”

[x]

I hated typing class.

Does anybody really need typing classes now to type out what they have to say on a computer or does the skill just come naturally with time?

[gitmo]

I taught myself to type as a young boy using an old manual typewriter. In High School I went to the typing class and found out my typing was better than the teachers. So I took a different class.

[SamAdams76]

These days, they are called "keyboarding" classes. My two sons went through them, not in high school, but junior high, as touch typing is much more important now that everybody has computers.

However, most people learn how to type these days through online courses. The basics are still the same such as home key position. But no more ink ribbons, correction tape and such.