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.
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.
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.
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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.
That’s a great story Sam.
I made decent money typing up papers in college for non-typers. 125 words a minute.
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.