Typing - the dark-horse high school course
Elude is a fun word to type. That “de” at the end just rolls off the left middle fingertip. “Elude” was today’s Wordle word. I’ve been using the daily puzzle as a way to exercise my brain and to strengthen my writing muscle: I write stream-of-consciousness for five minutes starting with the Wordle word. I do this exercise in white font so I can’t see what gibberish is coming out and, more importantly, can’t correct it. All part of a generative writing technique to get words flowing without overthinking.
Typing blind in white as well as that fun “de” combo takes me back to learning to type. It was 1980. I didn’t have much flexibility in picking grade 9 electives, many of which were simply out of the question to my 13 year-old self. No, I wasn’t ever going to take phys ed again (read my explanation of that horrid experience here). I’d already started to rail against deeply rooted gender stereotypes so I certainly wasn’t going to take home economics; at the same time, those gender roles had made me incapable of taking “shop” where there would have been a race to see whether I’d cut my finger off before nailing it to a board. Typing was one of the few electives available and while I thought of it as highly gendered activity in the workplace, I’d watched both my parents hunt and peck their way around our portable Smith Corona enough to know everyone had to type at one time or another and there must be a way to do it more efficiently. I also anticipated being good at it. I was, after all, fairly accomplished on the piano and how different could it be?
Actually, very different. We sat at massive manual IBM typewriters with blank keys - no letters, no numbers, each key identical to its neighbours but for the placement. Facing those inscrutable machines was grim-faced Miss McIvor, ruler in hand. There was nothing inscrutable about her. Female, middle aged, single, and overweight wasn’t a combination that lent itself to having power in 1980 (not a great deal has changed regrettably). She wasn’t, therefore, about to let any chance to wield it slip by her. She walked up and down the aisles, ready to publicly admonish anyone who was showing bad typing form, all while chanting “aaaa space ssss space dddd space ffff” or sometimes to mix it up “a j s k d l f ;”. Her exercises metaphorically hammered ‘home row’ into our young brains without actually bringing that ruler down on anyone.
By the end of the first term, we’d graduated to: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” that infamous sentence using all 26 letters and requiring the typist to demonstrate the greatest dexterity. With more letters involved, it also led to the greatest chance of getting all the keys balled up in the middle of the typewriter, despite the inventors of the QWERTY keyboard cleverly placing letters in a way to minimize this.* Having to stop to untangle the keys did not win Doris McIvor over. We could also piss her off by being slow, inaccurate, slouchy, or missing the second space between a sentence. Yes, Millennials, there’s a reason Gen-Xers cling to this - it’s residual fear.
I was coming to terms with possibly getting my first ever failing grade, 55% (phys ed doesn’t count). Miss McIvor was the kind of teacher I normally loved - one who liked only those who sailed through with ease and who didn’t actually require much teaching effort. What was pissing me off was that: (a) I couldn’t get the hang of this mechanical skill that it seemed everyone else was knocking out of the park; and (b) I couldn’t win Doris over.
Second term, though, it all fell into place. We moved to electric typewriters which helped a little, but suddenly my fingers just got the hang of going in the direction and at the speed they were supposed to go. I leapt to the top of the class where I was more comfortable. From home row came the upper and lower rows of letters, then numbers and characters and then one day, we were doing tables and keeping decimals in a row and all manner of sophisticated documents our boss would one day need from us.
“You want to be sure he’ll be impressed,” Doris warned us.
I snickered to myself. I wasn’t aiming to impress any boss-man. This was for me. I went on to type my way through university - my own papers, sure, but I also typed papers for others, charging $1.25/page, often throwing in copyediting and footnote clean-up, not able to restrain myself.**
When I think of how much of my life in the last 30 years has been spent at a computer, I am grateful I learned when I did. My speed is just as high as it was in 1980: between 65 and 75 words per minute, with 96% accuracy.*** It wasn’t the only class that helped me in life. I gained enormously in Grade 13 from learning economic theory from Mr. Cowman****; I have a better appreciation of English from three years of Latin from Mr. Dennis; I can picture Mr. Mali impersonating a molecule bouncing around the Chemistry class; and I feel more confident in my Shakespeare and CanLit knowledge because of Mr. Elgie and Mrs. Tiffin. But no teacher affected my daily life more than Doris McIvor. Who would have predicted!
* While this is the popular theory of why we have a QWERTY keyboard, it’s not entirely settled. Here’s a bit on it you might find interesting: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-the-legend-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-49863249/
** Even after uni, I spent hours after work in the computer lab at the UofT law school inputting a friend’s handwritten papers onto a floppy disk, foreshadowing the writing I’d be doing 12 years later on my own law papers. Perhaps I played a small part in that friend’s success; she’s now one of the leading construction lawyers in the country.
*** You can test yours too on a number of online typing tests like this one: https://www.typing.com/student/typing-test/1-minute
*** Mr. Cowman was the only person in Huron County who owned a Lada. Economics for him meant studying the left end of the political spectrum, equipping me particularly well for the life I’ve led.
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