Absolutely true..In high school in the USA typing was not offered to me because I was on an academic stream (not 'commercial').. but they allowed me to sit in on typing classes in my free time...I believe it to be the only useful thing I learned in high school. I've been a journalist and writer for decades.
101
I took typing in 9th grade and I thought I would never use it. Little did I know that the computer age would require me to type. In retrospect, typing turned out to be one of the most valuable classes I ever took.
94
I used the $72 netted as a Wall Street runner during the summer of my 17th year (a long time ago) to buy the only typewriter I’ve ever owned, a marvelous Royal portable. For the next three weeks before starting college, I sat hunt-and-pecking “Now is the time . . . etc.” until I decided I qualified as a typist. That practice (plus Eaton's corrasable - Google it) got me through higher education and a lifetime of forming words on paper.
25
With the encouragement of the guidance counselor at my high school, I also took a typing class the summer before I started college so I would be able to type term papers fast. I asked her if I should take stenography also, so I could take faster notes in class, but to that she said, "No. Then you'll be stuck being a secretary and you are too smart to just be a secretary. You'll figure out your own shorthand for taking notes, but you need to know how to type."
Typing has been an invaluable skill since then, in college and in the working world.
49
Thanks, Frank, for the lovely reminder of my beloved dad (Ph.D. Stanford) who insisted that his kids learn how to type. My first typing "job" was to type clean drafts of his dissertation for $.25 a page. He taught us another skill as well: even though we were a household of four kids with not much disposable income, he promised that we could have anything we wanted as long as we first saved up half. My first purchase - a beautiful mint green portable Olivetti.
61
Frank, I refused to take a typing class in high school, as part of my feminist pride. This was the late 1970s, and I was certainly NOT going to be pigeonholed into a “ woman’s “ Job. So what happened ??? I joined the US Army after graduation. My MOS
( Military Occupational Specialty) was 98C, Cryptologic Traffic Analyst ( yes, codebreaker ). This was a very selective, two part, two location, 6 month long training course, with a 60 Percent failure/dropout rate. Requiring TYPEWRITTEN Reports. So, every day, after the very intensive, Top Secret Classes, I and other idiots that couldn’t type had to attend typing class. It was torture. But I gained a lifelong respect for all secretaries and admin assistants. So, I gained basic typing skills, under extreme pressure. I also gained something more important. I finished the entire course with the number ONE score on the two day final exam. Number two was another Female. Number Three was a very handsome, intelligent Male. I married Him, very shortly thereafter. He’s still my Husband, the Engineer that I occasionally write about. He could already type. Thanks for bring back some very happy memories.
134
Now I understand. Be critical of Trump but not too critical. You're that type. Resting hands on home row indeed.
3
Maybe your Mom wanted you to see how the other half (women) lives, who were only allowed to use this skill in the service of others, not so much themselves. Doesn't look like it worked, since this is all about you.
7
I have mixed feelings about this typing advice, Frank.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, there is a lot to say from learning to type, with speed and accuracy. But there is a lot to say for trial and error, editing, too.
Thanks to computers, we can edit, save and share our writing.
In junior high, I got a few lessons in typing, but is was torture.
Now, thanks to computers, I can take rough notes and edit them.
I am not a perfectionist when it comes to writing and editing.
In fact, Voltaire said: "The best is the enemy of the good."
===============================================
Now, we have a president who won office, precisely because he is so imperfect. Trump's outrageous Tweets resonant with milliions!
3
nice, and true. you rock
21
Ditto, ditto, ditto!!!
18
Thank you, Frank Bruni . . . and thank you, Mr. Lesko, who taught the very same morning class in the summer of 1965 . . .
27
I love this column. Thank you, Mr. Bruni. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in Denmark, to Ravel’s Bolero when my father was C.I.A.Station, working undercover. As his daughter, i was tasked with blending in,which included learning to type on a Danish typewriter to Bolero. Years later, working as a journalist, knowing how to type as fast as people spoke, was invaluable. Thank you for sharing your memory. Lovely column.
Lise Olson
33
We also typed:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
Yes, now is the time for all good men and all good women to come to the aid of their party.
Quicker than the brown fox can jump over the lazy dog. Good men and women, aid your party now.
64
Great piece, Frank! Just what we need for these lazy days of summer.
I also learned typing. It was my senior year in high school. It was only 1/2 a credit and I was one of the few boys in the class. Also, in NYS back then, you had to actually take a Regents Exam for typing which was pass/fail.
And I couldn’t agree more - learning the discipline of typing on an IBM Selectric was a great work and life skill I’ve been using ever since.
It’s right up there for those of us in accounting who had to learn how to use an adding machine. Just like the F and J keys, that is why there is a raised bump on 5 keys.
14
Thank you for the story, Frank! Typing is a skill that I'm grateful to have each and every day. I'm reminded, too, how gender roles were still associated with typing to some extent when I started...
When I was in junior high, I took home ec. I was the only boy in cooking and sewing. All the other boys took wood/metal shop. Some of them taunted me: "Why are you taking that class with all the giiiirrrrllls??" they scorned. "Because when I grow up and get a job, the last thing I'll need to do when I come home on a weeknight is *weld* something!" I quipped. Indeed, to this day I have yet to encounter a household chore that requires the use of a welding rod. But some of those boys, now in their 50s, still end up with pink socks every time they use a washing machine...
Similarly, I was anxious to take typing in 12th grade. Besides writing college papers, I knew it would be a handy skill on my resume should I apply for an office job. For graduation, I asked for a portable typewriter. "What do you want that for?" my grandmother asked, "If you get an office job you can just ask your secretary to type it for you!" "Grandma," I replied, "I'm probably going to BE someone's secretary!" And indeed, I got my first office job during college as an administrative assistant. Ironically, my boss was a woman - who couldn't type!
46
Yes, yes! There's a right way to type 120 wpm for your whole life, Frank Bruni! Those of us who went to "speedwriting" (" f u k rd th, u k g a gd jb & mo pa!") and touch-typing school for 6 wks after graduating from college set out to start the first of myriad exciting and boring jobs and writing tasks forever into the future which is now the past. Rote-skill up the yingyang. My kids never learned typing, but they are journalists, writers, and on friendliest terms with the megatech world of today. Pencil, gel-pen, paper are still go-to tools just in case the cyber-universe fails. Fab pic of you typewriting at 17 by the illustrious Ben Wiseman re your path to typing discipline. Faraway places with strange-sounding names awaited us. People who love writing are the happiest people in the world!
8
When I was in high school preparing for college my mother made me take a typing class so I would “have something to fallback on.” That low expectation, negative and sexist reason made my 16 year old self blow off the class. I wish I could type better. I get the job done but it isn’t pretty. There’s positive motivation and negative motivation. Bruni’s mother did a good job.
32
Same story, 16 years earlier. I had one empty slot to fill in my class schedule of my senior year in high school. Mom said, "Take a typing course. You'll never regret it." She was right.
Doing things right. Humility. Learning how to plant myself in a chair and stay there until the job was done -- properly. I still hear Mrs. Belkin's voice: A, S, D, F, J, K, L. semi. My fingers still move at times while I'm listening. Knowing words is a great way to have the world make sense, and typing was a great way to come to know words.
29
I'm of the same generation, in my case sent to boarding school with a portable typewriter but never given the privilege of learning to type. Trapped forever in a world of hunt-and-peck, my Sysphian burden is passwords. I constantly screw them up by exceeding password reset minimums with typos, forced to create new ones that are doomed to equally short lives. As our lives are increasingly digitized I'm part of the generation of bad typists prone to single-finger overuse injuries desperately searching for solid dictation software.
17
I learned to type in 1960—when I was 16. I was a sophomore at Boston’s English High, a (then) all-boys bastion. The class was mandatory.
I, too, soon tired of “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” (try typing that into an iPhone to post a quick comment to the Times when 99% of others are at their comforting iMacs or PC’s).
But typing helped me to order my thoughts into (at first) sentences, then paragraphs. Then, lo! I began to read with a clearer understanding of books. I stopped skim-reading and, with the discipline learned from the boring, numbing finger exercises, began paying attention to what I read. Everything slowed down, as football coaches like to say. Things began to make sense. It didn’t matter whether it was the Spanish Inquisition or Owen Wister’s The Virginian. I “got it.” I became interested in subjects (Politics; Civics; Government) that used to put me to sleep. I went from a B student in the 10th grade to an A student in two years. I can’t begin to describe the surge in personal confidence this skill gave me. I fell in love with words; it was if (1) reading comprehension and (2) reading appreciation were the twin intellectual goddesses I’d been swooning to meet.
My top speed only reached 77 WPM/5 (errors), a not particularly outstanding performance. But it was something I learned to do (with instruction) on my own. I never for a moment considered typing “girls’ work,” either.
The old portable, heavy Underwoods will always remain a part of me.
108
I did the same thing between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I was a journalism major and it was apparent that my typing skills (I had none) needed tons of work. So I took a summer night class at a local community college back home. I hated that class, but I loved having completed it. Every now and then I think fondly about that time 40 years ago. Up until now I would wonder why. Now I know why. You articulated it, Frank. Thanks ...
18
Gave up half my lunch period in 8th grade to learn how to type. It's a skill that has never failed me. Great temp work when I needed cash. Editing our college newspaper. Writing scripts now for films. Best part is the look on my teenagers' faces when I knock out something with dazzling speed. It was worth all the hurried sandwiches way back when.
24
Your story is so much like mine. My mother insisted I take typing and shorthand so I would have “something to fall back on” just in case I didn’t make it through college. Well, I surprised her and graduated with a BA degree. But, typing has been integral to my life. First, as a teacher and then as a writer. Sometimes those mundane skills are what help us the most as we navigate life. Oh, and the line we typed was “All good men come to the aid of their country.” Patriotic as well.
19
I am a doctor. To be admitted to medical school, I had to study trigonometry, calculus, physics, and organic chemistry. In high school, like Frank Bruni, I also took a typing class at my mother's suggestion. Although I'm not sure I agree with Bruni about the virtues of mastering a tedious skill because it requires discipline to deal with the tedium, I am absolutely sure that typing has been of much greater value to me than any of the other required coursework.
25
Same vintage, same class. Thankfully I could take in in 9th grade as a regular course in my jr high. It’s served me very well as an academic writer and even today my entirely automated typing is still way faster, and more error free than everyone around me, including my students.
13
My children learned to touch type via a Micky Mouse computer program in about the third grade - well before the high school age I learned. They practiced the fun program and drills as their skills moved them up level after level. They both built amazing speed and accuracy as they grew up, chatting with friends and playing games with others online. Their typing speed gave them an edge in every job.
12
Wow - brings back memories of taking typing in high school in 1968. The skill hasn't left me and stood me in very good stead throughout the ensuing years. To this day, I remember the "home row" but if you ask me to recite the locations of the other letters, numbers and symbols, I'd be at an absolute loss. And yet my fingers MAGICALLY know exactly where to go. I think the word, the phrase, the sentence and voila, it appears on the page seemingly on its own volition. There's power in that. As long as I can remember how to type and it comes out in comprehensible English via my flying fingers, I know my brain remains intact.
32
By 8th grade I was struggling with math in our little rural school. My mother sent me to live with friends in the city so I could attend summer school, catch up in math, and (at mom's insistence) learn to type. The carrot was a ticket to the Beatles concert in Seattle, so I went without whining. What I learned in my summer vacation: 1) To embrace uncongenial skills (typing and math) because they would be part of a useful adult life, and 2) To give up mindless worship of rock stars because it was silly and undignified. I remember that summer as a first step towards independent adulthood (and yes, I too typed my way through jobs that supported me in college and grad school).
8
It was just recently when my much younger sister-in-law with daughters in elementary school was lamenting to me the lack of good training in long hand cursive. Like typing Frank, I can't tell you how important beautiful cursive writing had been to uncounted careers in the past. Thanks for the apolitical column.
21
@Robert Pohlman, I worry about that, too. One hundred years from now, will there by anyone left who can read handwritten letters? The original Constitution of the United States of America? The original Declaration of Independence?
18
A lot of us of a certain age will extol the virtues of learning a skill like typing, but I liked the other underlying message of this piece. Today, kids applying for college or the ubiquitous internship, seek artificial ways to highlight their uniqueness: they attend Ivy League summer workshops, believing that their attendance will score them admission or they learn how to backstrap weave in Costa Rica. However, sometimes just working at a less than glamorous job or taking a typing course will not only teach you how to make change and sit up straight, it will also expose you to a demographic that a lofty education may isolate you from. After a summer of working at a Blockbuster, my son re-evaluated the need to go to college: he knew he didn't want to work at retail all day on his feet. Before I started teaching, 100 years ago, I worked at an A&P, before computers told you how much change you owed the customer. I not only learned how to make change, I learned how to deal with the customer who did not understand the philosophy behind the Express Lane and I still bag my own groceries when I shop Later, after I graduated from college, I worked at a department store so with the discount I could update my wardrobe. The full-time people I worked with were funny and hard-working. I also discovered, as someone in my 20s, I could be friends with people my parents' age. Life lessons can come from the simplest and most unexpected places. Even secretarial school.
47
I took typing in HS, way back in 1964. I learned to type at home on my Grandfather’s manual Underwood. The best part of typing was the ability to write almost as fast as I could think—helping me write long letters to my best friend, at least one a day. This before email or cell phones and when long distance telephone calls were expensive. It also gave me the ability to create incredible stories to share in my letters. Letters sent through the mail, not the internet, were a family tradition as the stacks of old letters that were sent between my father, his father, his brothers and sister attest to. Typing also enabled me to earn money as a young adult and then progress to keypunching and data processing which paid pretty well back then. My papers when I went back to college in my forties were typed and legible to my professors and might have helped me garner the A’s I received. My thumbs just don’t do the same thing on these teeny tiny keyboards!
13
@Rachele E Levy I took my Grandfather's Underwood to university with me--I'd drag it into bed with me to tackle late night essay writing. He used it for his sermons, I used it for my first real thinking. And my typing kept me on the buttered side of Mammon all through grad school. What grand machines those were!
8
Ah yes, I had a semester-long typing class in the 7th grade (I'm now 75) which may have been the most important class of my life: it provided an easily transported skill that I could rely at the drop of a hat (unemployment) or put to use for financial gain while rearing children. An all-round boon!
10
My parents advised me to take a typing class in between eighth grade and high school, as an easy and useful way to get used to being in high school. I didn't like it, and never became a top typist, but knowing how to type helped me throughout college and then later, when I became a writer.
But if we are talking about the discipline of concentrated, solitary practice, then playing an instrument is by far more interesting and satisfying than typing, and I'll take an hour on the guitar or piano over an hour at the computer keyboard any day.
9
Weeding of crop fields is done mechanically or chemically, unless you do it by hand, which I did for a forty-acre soybean field during my fifteenth summer. Each dawn for two weeks I rose and bicycled from our midwestern small-town home to the field and spent the day under the arcing summer sun, methodically walking every other row, bending to sweep the Johnson grass and morning glory vines from under the beans, which grew from shin- to knee-high during my time among them. At the end of each afternoon I bicycled home to deliver my newspaper route before my customers came home from work. I reflexively reached for the weeds under their hedges as I passed each yard. I have wished for the Zen focus of that job in every one I've had since.
21
I, too, benefitted from the learning opportunities provided by "drudgery and humility."
As public school teachers--and people of faith-- who believe in the benefits of humility and perseverance, we made every effort to inculcate (inflict?) these values in our (millennial) daughter. They appear to be serving her well.
6
I learned to type and take Pitman shorthand in high school and still use both every day (50 years later). These skills opened doors and pushed me forward with every job I had. In retirement, every organization I volunteer with appreciates how I take & prepare the meeting Minutes. Thank you, Frank!
9
Hah so true. My wife and I are excellent at keyboarding aka typing and learned in high school exactly as did the author. Best skill ever! My wife voluntarily increased her speed listening to the radio and typing word for word what was spoken. We forced our daughter to learn when she was in elementary school, perhaps 4th or 5th grade. Her school set up a computer lab and she was frustrated with the exercises. So we looked around for a Mavis Beacon lesson book and discovered it was now a floppy disk - remember those? The exercises were animated and way more creative than the panoramas mentioned here but worked just the same. We forced (I mean encouraged) her to do it for 15 minutes a day until we no longer had to force her. She soon typed faster and more accurately than her Mom or me. Highly recommend this skill for kids before they become hooked on iPads - which my wife refuses to use!
6
Okay, I didn't read all the comments. However I've read enough to be reminded of the fact I should have taken typing class in 8th grade more seriously. But I was born in 1953 and was exposed to the image of "the typing pool" in many a b&w movie. Women lined up front to back and side by side fingers flying. My entire being would shudder at the monotony, the tedium. The idea of sitting, hour after hour, day in and day out. Only one way to avoid that fate? Don't learn to type. Regrets?...I've had a few.
18
Literally I could have written your post including the birth year of 1953. I refused to learn how to type because I didn’t want to be a secretary. Fortunately by the time I graduated more fields opened up for women and I was able to work in business in managerial roles. However it is a big regret that I was hobbled by my poor typing skills for such a dumb reason. As a result I took an online typing class (which was excellent by the way - Manhattan Community College) at age 64. It appears that you can teach an old dog new tricks. How I wish I learned in high school...
10
@e., let me tell you, working as a secretary for years while going to college part-time and not having to take out student loans to graduate in 1981 and then go to law school full time for 3 more years working only summer jobs was thanks to my ability to type accurately and fast. If there were such things as "white out" and white tape to cover over typos back in those days, you sure couldn't use them in a typing test when you applied for a job as a clerk or a secretary. Its easy to have "speed" on a computer keyboard these days, but the accuracy - I'd still match my "keyboarding" skills at age 67 against a 17 year old and believe I'd come out on top :)
5
In high school my guidance counselor told me that typing was for secretarial students only. I informed him of my college plans and asked if I could send my term papers in to them for typing.
I was one of the very few boys in that class. That was the best part of the class, but I also learned how to type.
I only wish I learned steno my note taking would have been amazing. I was forced to improve my unreadable cursive writing.
7
I was "forced" to learn typing too, 60 years ago, by my high school in Bucks County, Pa. Those of us in the academic (pre-college) program had to take one course in the "commercial" program. Most took typing and learned to work with ten fingers on a keyboard for a lifetime, even if they weren't very good at it.
Some years later, as a young lawyer, I found relatively little use for the skill; we had secretaries to work up the product we had produced in longhand or by dictation. At the time, I wished I had taken the shorthand option so that I could effortlessly take comprehensive, accurate interview notes without distracting the interviewee.
In junior high the boys also had to take an "industrial arts" course. That was sufficient to reinforce my early recognition that if I was going to make a living it would have to be with my head rather than my hands.
6
In the 8th grade, I wanted to take art. My father told me to take typing...something about it would serve me better later. (I was in typing class when the first American went into space.) Twenty years later I became an artist. I'm glad I learned to type well. Art came to me when I was ready to do it well.
9
I strongly agree with Mr. Bruni. When I was 13 one of my aunt's bought me a small electric typewriter and a book that taught typing. I spent over four months learning and practicing, and although I developed some basic skills, it wasn't until the next year that I was able to take typing in junior high school. I was the only male in the class which was one period every day for five months, and I eventually became somewhat proficient. This skill and the discipline I learned has been helpful to me for over 60 years. In particular, it has taught me to concentrate, not give up, and that correct practice will eventually pay off, which is an important attitude for someone like me who still plays golf, the most difficult of games, on a weekly basis. I also read, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which taught me a number of important life skills, most particularly that when you hit a "sticking" point in an activity the best strategy is to relax and not give up. Thank you Mr. Bruni.
10
Next, Frank, write a column on learning penmanship. I grieve already for the loss of flowing cursive handwriting to the definite boundaries of typing and printing. Oh, when I was a child cursive writing was a real class, a class where you learned Palmer Method, practiced loops and loops of overlapping circles to the end of the line and then once again on a new line to the end of the page, where you also practiced up and down zig zag lines that melted into paragraphs of fringed blotches, where you were reminded constantly to move your whole arm in sweeping motions across the page, and where you were told to loosen up, relax, create lovely patterns of sticks and circles, and where you then tried to transfer this fluidity of lines and curves into a readable alphabet, into words. Cursive writing was the basis of an art form, the ground of being of calligraphy, the source of signatures so lovely they belong in art galleries. Why must we shelve part of our artistic souls for the robotic qualities of yet another mechanistic facet of progress?
36
@marilyn
You just wrote the piece you wanted Frank to write, and it was lovely. It was lyrical and evocative of what you love about the art of penmanship. Thank you Frank, for raising our memories and instigating our imaginations.
16
@marilyn With your note I was suddenly back in third grade with Mrs. Jensen, where we learned cursive. She taught us the Palmer method, basically, although DeNealian cursive was starting to be taught in schools then (early 1970s). Thanks for the wonderful recollection, and yes, I still write in Palmer cursive, even on my iPad.
9
I recall that my dad first let me use his typewritter for the first time in 1975 when I was still in Middle School. It was one of the great privileges of my life. I learnt to type on my own, and soon became a small fascination in the urban West African communal yard where we lived, as I would set up in front of our room-and-parlour unit and type away for hours to the admiration of our neighbors, most of whom associated typewriters with the large downtown offices across the great lagoon.
I don't know how much discipline I learnt, but your well-written story evoked a fond memory. Thanks.
5
Thank you. My typing class was half a semester in high school. The other half was drivers education. I have the same gratitude for both. And I can still type what people are saying as fast as they are saying it, often with the right punctuation! I had a huge crush on a guy at the time, and typed his name over and over on my lap, on my desk, everywhere. I still do. If only he ever knew that my fingers remember him!
8
The summer before seventh grade I went to a half-day "camp" at the local high school where kids could take 3 hour-long classes a day for 4 weeks. I signed up for a baking class and an etching class, and my mother insisted that I also register for a typing class.
Although I wasn't excited about taking touch-typing, I still remember the name of the teacher -- Mr. Ranhofer -- and I am still a proficient typist, although I don't remember the names of any of the other instructors, what recipes I prepared, or have any of the glasses that I etched that summer. The class wasn't exciting, but it was useful, and at the end of the summer, I knew how to type.
Now, my daughter has learned to touch-type in the fourth grade with an online typing program that was required homework. I could see her frustration as she made errors, but also her pride as she developed the skill.
Typing is a skill that almost everyone needs nowadays, and it's hard to imagine sending my children to spend a summer learning to type as I once did. I do, however, wish I could send them to learn proper penmanship -- today's youth are proficient typists and print-writers, but they can hardly sign their name or read script!
7
I learned to type in middle school in the late 1970s (from the same guy that taught shop, by the way).It’s come in handy ever since, though not on this iPad I’m pecking on. Typing is one thing, but unfortunately few people actually know how to write effectively, concisely, and most importantly, with the Oxford comma.
7
Another skill that's fallen by the wayside is cursive writing. It also involved laborious practice over time and was great for developing fine motor skills. These days many kids are growing up unable to write or read cursive. Makes you wonder how they'll decipher old letters or documents of family or historical importance.
9
Taking typing classes in high school proved to be very beneficial for me. I became quite proficient, too. One day a representative for the telephone company came to our typing class to speak of career opportunities at his company. When I got home I asked my mom if I could take a day off from school and apply. She agreed and called out sick for me. I went to apply, took the typing test (passed!), and ended up getting interviewed by the gentleman that came to our typing class! He remembered me and was so impressed I took a day off from school to apply I ended up getting a job there as soon as I graduated. Thirty-nine years later I’m still working there!
17
I took the typing class in 1970 as a third year high school student, and was the only boy in the class. The school had a mess of upright Royals and two IBM Selectrics. My parents and the teacher thought I was nuts, but I still did it. Typing’s been berry berry good to me; I’ve had a great career as a software entrepreneur. I attribute a lot of my success to the hard nosed teacher who kept saying “do it again, this time faster and right!”
My only regret? My handwriting has become atrocious.
It’s interesting that Apple’s iPads are losing their place in education to Chromebooks. The reason is obvious to people of my generation: typing is an expressive skill, it’s needed, and it can’t be practiced on a touchscreen.
I’m glad to know others had the same experience.
12
I took a few community college courses in typing and Gregg shorthand ( never learned shorthand, though) because as a female high school dropout with a GED I had no chance to get a decent job without knowing how to type and format a business letter, a report, etc.
I got that first office job over 40 years ago and I've managed to stay employed since then, but that's it. I find this article and all the rhapsodic comments about typing very amusing. I don't type that much for work anymore, but I remember my days as a young secretary and it wasn't all that much fun when you had to do this for a living.
4
“Never learn to type, and never learn to iron. Someone will make you.”
— my mother (a whiz at both)
4
Ah so, Mr. Bruni. Interesting. Very interesting.
Well sir, I never went to secretarial school. But I DID take a course in typing. As a freshman in high school--from 1963 to 1964. My goodness!. Senator Goldwater ran for president in the fall of that year. Well--let's not go there.
Valuable? You bet! And I may as well cut to the chase.
It enables me (loud chorus of groans here)--it enables me to sit clattering away, sharing my thoughts with all and sundry. AT GREAT LENGTH. Others have striven for a telling brevity. Ten words--conveying ten tons of thought.
Not this child! I get e-mails from people--family and friends mostly. These e-mails run two or three lines. Maybe a little more.
I reply to these e-mails. At length. Anecdotes swarm into my brain. Long quotations from Milton. Past adventures--delightfully piquant and unusual--from the long life of you-know-who. I am amazed I have any friends at all.
Or any that choose to communicate with me via e-mail.
OR, Mr. Bruni . . . . .
. .. I read a column like yours. In The New York Times.
And I have an irresistible urge to share my own adventures in typing.
Oh yes. Around forty five years ago, I took a Master's degree. Had to do a thesis to get that degree. Well sir--THAT was a piece of work. But at least. . . ..
. . .I didn't have to PAY to have it typewritten.
I typed it myself.
Seriously Mr. Bruni--thanks. Good article.
(Bet you typed it out yourself too! Am I right?)
12
Thank you, Mr. Bruni--well said.
3
I’m 62. Is it too late for me?
4
@Woodson Dart No it is not too late. Many years ago, a friend who had just earned an Ed.D degree took a job with at a major Federal agency to ready the facility and staff to change over to computerized medical records. The most reluctant staff were the doctors none of whom could type. She arranged for keyboarding instruction to be given at the end of the day. Most of them learned and many were not young. So YOU CAN DO THIS!
8
I wish I could type without looking.
1
I took a high school typing course (8-12 am, one month) like that described by Bruni. Everyone should. [Though it doesn't really sink in until one starts typing a lot]
5
I also learned how to type during summer school when I was in junior high and it was a skill which stood me in good stead in college. Although I remember the the typing drill “pangram” (thanks for the new word Frank!) -The quick brown fox... , the other sentence we had to type over and over, and which is apparently known as a “line filler,” was :
“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,” or its variant “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
Maybe if we stuck the entire GOP Congress in a typing class and made them type that sentence thousands of times, the meaning might dawn on them, but I fear they are too far gone. However, for ordinary Americans who want to take back our faltering democracy, now is definitely the time “to come to the aid of your country.” VOTE!!
19
Mr Bruni, yes, yes, typing class! My high school class in junior year was in 1963 ; we had big, loud/ clacking “Olympia” brand typewriters. My mom, long gone as well, was a legal secretary and strongly urged me to take the class saying, “you won’t regret it!” I was prepared to be bored but if I may brag, was typing 60 WPM in months. Being an all boys Catholic high school run by priests, I wasn’t subject to the feelings of embarrassment and teasing that a couple of my friends endured in a p a class comprised otherwise of all girls.boys sch ugh
In college, my one year of high school typing class paid off.
On my Olivetti electric typewriter that my parents had bought for me, I always had extra cash in my pockets typing term papers and doubled my charge if guys (almost exclusively) brought me their handwritten papers at the “ninth hour.” Thank you for the memories and that at 70, I am grateful I can still do 60 wpm, on a PC keyboard in my home study. Love every one of your articles.
7
@Steven my wife as well typed papers in college for extra income! Plus got her first job there earning an additional $.25 above minimum wage because she could type 90 wpm. She typed every financial aid acceptance and rejection letter sent to SUNY Stony Brook applicants at her college work/study job, each with three carbon copies!
2
My best friend and I took a single-semester typing class during our senior year of high school in the late '60s. We were the only two "college prep" students in the class, and we were merely trying to avoid some other class that our counselor had recommended. My friend turned out to be a whiz at typing, and I was pretty good. (Not as good as my aunt, though, who typed reports at her job at Dun & Bradstreet, and whose fingers flew so fast they were almost a blur.)
That summer my parents bought me a small manual typewriter to take to college. While typing my second paper for class, something malfunctioned and the carriage was stuck. The only way to get it to move was to hit the spacebar after typing each character.
T[sb]r[sb]u[sb]e[sb].
So that's how I typed for the next four years. I didn't want to tell my parents that their generous gift was a bit of a dud, because sending me to college--even though I had earned a scholarship for half of my tuition--was a genuine sacrifice on their part. The slow clack, space, clack, space, of my typing drove my roommates around the bend, so they would always leave when I had a paper due.
I graduated magna cum laude. I never did tell my parents about the typewriter.
6
I spent a summer teaching myself to type with a pilfered book from a sibling’s typing class (yes—there once was such a thing). I was obsessed with it and all the goofy exercises. The clacking of the typewriter, changing the ribbon, examining the keys—it was so fun. I timed myself with an egg timer, used lots of paper and probably drove my mom nuts typing all those exercises. Home row, numbers, the smell of the ink/ribbon. I was a real pro! When I started college I couldn’t wait to buy my own little Olivetti...so funny! Thanks for some good laughs and memories Mr. Bruni. The fence and the fox are still out there somewhere.
7
This column sure brought back memories. Old Underwood typewriters. Ribbons that got tangled up but you reused them anyway. Those things that jammed up.
Those were the days.
4
Of all the classes I took in high school, typing has proved the most useful with Spanish a distant second. fff jjj fjfj ddd kkk fjdk. I remember the drills well.
2
Like you Frank I am forever grateful.
I have a similar story to many of you. In the late 60s my mother made me take 2 classes in High School - typing AND band. I joke that I never forgave her for one of them as I went on to be a high school music teacher when I moved Oz...the typing I forgave. I was also the only 'college prep' student in my sophomore secretarial typing course on the Underwood manual typrewriter with no letters. Thank goodness for the little raised bits on the F and J! It is a skill I have never regretted. It got me through summer jobs in NJ and the thousands of school report cards I have had to type over the years. I'm glad computers stuck with QWERTY keyboards!
My biggest issue today with my iPad is the on-screen keyboard that does not allow touch typing. I quickly went out and bought a bluetooth keyboard that I use whenever I have a lot of typing to do...like now! Oh, and for the life of me I can't play the piano...my fingers have to move too far away from Middle C!
Sometimes mothers DO know best!
7
Like most others, I don't regret for a minute the hours of typing class with my teacher witch and I am now almost fluent on the AZERTY European keyboard also.
3
Hundreds of thousands of words that have kept me relatively sane and laughing during this horrendous Trump era were composed on this machine.
Thank you Mr. Mencken.
Thank you Corona Typewriter Company.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/sun-magazine/bal-bs-50things-m...
4
Loved this piece! Reminds me of my mother, bless her to this day, for insisting that I take “typing” in high school, or maybe junior high, in the 50s. All the lessons Mr. Bruni mentions were the same, and they are as true today as then! Including: “listen to your mothers!”
4
Hanging above my writing desk is a framed copy of a long ago high school award for typing, something that is today as natural to me as breathing. My championship speed then was "200 words for 10 minutes at least three times with no more than five errors." Marian B
10
Here, here and thank you
6
People Magazine has it all wrong. The "Sexiest Man Alive" is a guy who types over 60 words a minute !
7
I can't agree more with you - I always tell people that the most valuable class I ever took in high school was typing. I still remember Ms. Singletary repeatedly saying - and reprimanding - "home keys, students." The only downside is that I have just about forgotten how to write in cursive! But is that really still needed other than for a signature?
4
Yes, I remember the feeling of accomplishment as my typing speed increased due to my fingers appropriately dancing on the keys. Fresh out of high school and entering college, my skills gave me numerous options for employment along with further studies in the world of business. Ultimately, with the fondest of memories, in starting a pr company with a friend, our first purchase was two selecteic typewriters, positioned on each end of a long coffee table in our first office, located in an empty warehouse, the sound of typing was music to our ears!
3
Thanks Frank for a wonderful piece and a trip down memory lane. Another discipline, I might add, is learning to play a musical instrument. It takes infinitely more time and is much less boring.
5
My mom had always taught traditional subjects in K - 8, but when her school system laid off dozens of teachers in 1983, she salvaged her job by convincing the superintendent to let her become the typing teacher in the middle school - the one position that needed to be filled! (She had originally planned to become a business secretary, and thus she took several typing courses in high school in the ’60s.)
When I was in eighth grade, my classes happened to be held in all the classrooms surrounding her typing room. I can still hear her booming voice: “ASDF semi LKJ GH!” Over and over and over again. And you think *your* mom embarrassed you in middle school!
She forced me to take a six-Saturday typing course she also taught and I practiced nonstop in between each Saturday. It was one of the most valuable courses I ever took (and I have three graduate degrees!).
53
This reminds me of a great job I got while in college. A friend I met through school got me an interview for an overnight job at our UPI state capital bureau. The post was to be an overnight telegrapher, typing up stories in paper tape on a Teletype machine, to run four machines at once for regular news breaks between midnight and 7:00 a.m. Their only question was, "Can you type?" I lied and said yes. It was harrowing to learn it all on the job, but I managed to do it. And it turned into one of the best jobs I've ever had. When I eventually went into corporate public relations years later, I was endowed with the nickname "Teletype" because I could put out news releases and other materials on IBM Selectrics at a rate of about 160 words a minute. (Maybe I'd better read this one more time to make sure there are no typos.)
4
In the 1980’s I had a secretary, as they were called in those days, who graduated from Katie Gibbs. She was polished, professional, bright and extremely competent. There was little if anything she could not figure out on her own. Many of her contemporaries bristled at the volume of work she could accomplish is a short period of time. I was much smarter because of her capabilities. Today we have PA’s. Their title is more politically correct. Few, except those who started their careers as secretaries, can compose a intelligible letter, even with spell/grammar check. I had a PA with a college degree who couldn’t figure out how to book a flight. Give me a professional secretary any day.
4
One reason that the long, painful acquisition of skills is frowned upon is the ever-lurking fear that they will become obsolete, and soon, either through software or advanced manufacturing. What if Mr. Bruni had mastered typing and then never used it again; would he be so boastful? This creates a conundrum since companies want only the most technologically savvy employees but that means a futile, dispiriting quest to remain current, the kind of world that only gives Tom Friedman goosebumps.
There have been many articles lamenting the end of car culture in the US and although some of that is just due to screen-zombism, part is because a teenager cannot learn about mechanics from a modern car; they are too complex to be souped-up or even repaired without a roomful of diagnostic machines. Our exposure to mechanism in general has declined. Open up a clock and you have some chance of understanding how it works; open up an iPhone and, aside from invalidating your warranty, you will learn nothing. About the only areas in which it is still possible to achieve mastery without this worry is in some archaic craft like pottery, weaving or swordsmithing. As for me, I'm going for a PhD in flint-knapping.
1
What a beautiful essay ! Mr. Bruni took an apparently boring subject, and came up with a wonderful set of ideas and memories. Bravo, maestro !
2
Why don't video games count? They require hours of concentrated effort and dexterity. just asking.
Ahh! I wish we all had taken Short hand training also. Great way to make notes in meetings.
2
As a playwright, I miss the typewriter, not because I was a fool for typing, but because you finished. After a first and second draft of a 50 page play, I'd mark it up for the last time and type it perfectly after that, including those wonderful (manually centered) words: THE END.
I didn't want to type the whole thing ten more times, which is what you had to do, if you made corrections that changed a single page length. Curious to think about what Shakespeare would have written on a computer keyboard, because without a doubt it would have been different.
3
My first job after to learning to type in high school was classical ballet dancer. You’d think that typing would be utterly useless in that field, but no. I typed programs and schedules and now, decades later, typing has proven to be a far more enduring skill than my long lost arabesque.
4
I learned to type in 1981, when i discovered that my training as a pharmacist would not readily land me a job unless I could type faster the hunt-and-peck method that carried me through high school and the curriculum of a health science track. Early mornings I would trek from my off-campus studio through winter term murk to reach the typing class. One morning I was taught a lesson in humility. I sat behind the same fellow every day. That morning I smelled something dreadful. My God, does he not bathe? I thought. He smells worse than a barnyard. I grabbed my typing desk and scooted back a few inches. Still the pungent barnyard fragrance. I move backwards a few inches, again, and again, until the rear wall of the classroom prevented further retreat. I reach down to retrieve something from my back pack and discover the olfactory assault has intensified. It's caked to my own shoes, a souvenir of a shortcut through the field on the way to campus.
A lesson I try to remember to this day: check your own shoes first.
4
Frank Bruni's brilliance as a thinker and great writer enables him to take a small topic that seems unrelated to anything significant, place it in a larger context, and show how it is related to the big things that really matter. If that rare talent was fostered by his mother and his typing teacher, I say thank you to both, and to the NYT for providing the platform for him. When I took a required typing class in my all-girls public NYC high school I had no clue how crucial that skill would prove. I earn my living as a ghost writer, continually interviewing people. Capturing conversations quickly and accurately, as I effortlessly type while listening, allows me to circumvent the time and cost of transcribing audio recordings. Interesting that a skill women were encouraged to learn so they could become secretaries has given a boost to the careers of so many women of my generation -- the one before typing would become almost innate.
5
Two observations. First, what Bruni describes is a symptom of the overall infantilization of US culture, where everything needs to be fun, parents are their children's friends and childishly buy into any half-baked idea on how to "enrich" their children's lives they read in a magazine or hear from other, similarly afflicted parents. Nonsense about "motivating" and "finding passion" is much easier than discipline and understanding that sometimes "boring" is necessary. The second, in many ways more troublesome observation, is that so many readers took this Op-Ed to be about typing rather than a metaphor for a larger societal issue. Such concrete thinking only makes our infantilization that much more obvious.
While I love this column and could include my own thoughts on shorthand as a needed skill for college, I have to note that the sentence is not a pangram as 'x' and 'w' are missing from the sample sentence.
1
QWERTY article, Mr. Bruni! Unfortunately, my summer school experience of learning how to type was not as fond or fulfilling as yours. I could never discipline myself enough not to cheat, thereby seating myself in the last row of the class and just getting by.
Flash forward to today, however, and you'll find me a typewriter collector. My current favorite is a 1938 German Naumann Erika model in deep maroon fully refurbished to its original condition.
To me, it's as priceless as a vintage bathtub Porsche!
2
Sixty years ago, I took boring Latin classes.
I wish I'd taken typing.
Thirty years ago I asked a very successful Director
of International Marketing, how he got his first job.
He replied "I could type and I wrote the contracts."
ancient Canadian
1
In the early '80's I attended a Catholic girls high-school in San Antonio, Tx. Typing class was offered & was taught by a strict former secretary....she could spot an error on our copy before we had taken our hand from it when turning in the assignment. The "typing lab" was relegated to a large room in the former boarding wing of the campus. The sound of 30 plus IBM, black, selectric typewriters precluded the classroom from being on the main corridors. Various flipcharts showing margin alignments, etc. were attached to the chalkboard. We all learned to type & were happy for it. The sisters made sure we had a bit of indoctrination in typing class....some copy was prayers for the rosary. Aside from the practical skill learned in typing class, our teacher allowed us to chat a bit during class......I contend that this training is for multitasking.
2
In 1958, I took typing in high school along with a room full of other girls (no boys). Thirty-something years and a PhD degree later I was on the faculty of a medical school where my department was headed by an arrogant guy who was prideful of his elite high school and prestigious Harvard and Yale diplomas. One day shortly after we all got our first computers, I walked into his office and found him hunched over the keyboard slowly and painfully hunting and pecking.
7
And from the other point of view..... as a young (14) feminist I made a point (and my parents did not dare challenge me) to NOT learn how to type. Now, everyday, as I stare at the keyboard composing medical records, I wish I had learned to type, really type....
3
Oh, Mr. Bruni, what a wonderful piece of nostalgia. Thank you. I went to secretarial school in the fifties, and with the skills I learned, I never wanted for a job and eventually graduated to a career as a medical proofreader and copy editor. Some of the commenters lament the loss of cursive writing. I would call it a curse that this is now almost obsolete. When my first two granddaughters were born --they are now 16--I wrote a journal/scrapbook of their first year of life detailing their progress and achievements and expressing my great love for them. Sadly, they' can't read it. What am I to do with those?
2
Frank,
Your mother was a wise woman. I never took a typing class because i taught myself at age 12 from a typing book one bored summer.
It still pains me to see grown people hunt and peck on their computers, no idea why they can't figure it out.
Thanks for your column.
2
Frank, our moms thought same way, same voyage in Texas except manual typewitrer, lucky you electric. You said it right, discipline and a skill for life. Thanks for reminding.
3
This is such a good essay. I feel the same way about how children learn multiplication as Bruni feels about typing. Rote works!
4
Celebrating rote - arithmetic tables, writing skills, memorizing poetry, sports drills - learning to focus - the key to success.
6
I went to high school before there were electric typewriters with correcting keys. I don’t think there were even any rudimentary wet copying machines then, because all I remember was carbon paper and those goofy wheel erasers connected to a brush.
It never occurred to me that if I had taken a typing class, it might have been easier. I have added that bad decision to a long list of others made during a misspent, fun-filled youth.
3
Totally get it Frank. Note that Northrup Frye, giant in literary criticism, was teen-age typing champion in New Brunswick. I have Frank's experience of being lone male in typing class in Grade 9 Burnaby B.C.: did okay. And, here I am. Peter
1
My mother hauled herself out of dire poverty into the middle class being a legal secretary, and insisted my brother and I learn to type. It saved his life in Vietnam when his group was asked who could type and he raised his hand--the rest were killed. He went on to become a General's aide. I put myself through college as a secretary. Both of my kids had keyboarding classes, of course. Best life skills class there is.
5
In my day, there were high school typing classes. And there were two types of students. There were those who saw typing as an aide to a higher vocation and there were those who saw typing as the vocation itself. There was an undeniable difference in attitudes between the one half and the other. Learning typing skills to write at the Times and learning them to be employed in a secretarial pool are two entirely different things. Writing about the class in the Times without speaking of the difference is a lost opportunity and a sign of missing the essence.
Thank you so much for a wonderful piece that incorporates nostalgia, practicality and a mother’s wisdom. When I was a junior in high school my mother “suggested” I take typing as an elective. I was highly insulted and huffily said I didn’t need a fallback in case college didn’t work out: “I have NO intention of becoming a secretary”. But the suggestion became a non-negotiable stance. She said typing was “practical” (ugh!) and then added the ever-annoying, “You’ll thank me someday”. I was (secretly) appreciative when I began to have to creat term papers or longer research pieces when I was in college and grad school. I did at some point thank my mother for “suggesting” the typing course. I should also have thanked her for not saying, “I told you so”.
4
Very familiar story. In the mid-sixties, when I has a high school sophomore, my father bought me a Smith Corona portable and a book called Typing Made Simple (which was the precursor to the For Dummies series). I didn't want to waste precious school course hours taking a typing course, so I spent one summer working my way through that book. By my junior year I could type, and by college I passed the Kelly Girls typing test so I could get temp work during vacations. Now I'm a freelance translator, and typing has been the skill that has undergirded my career. I read the foreign sentence, compose its English equivalent in my mind, and my fingers automatically do the rest. What a sense of power and accomplishment! And how sad that kids today aren't being encouraged to discipline themselves in order to acquire these kinds of "dumb" skills.
3
Mr. Bruni - thanks for writing the best opening sentence of an Op-Ed piece in the Times. Ever.
5
Strunk & White was among the books given to this high school freshman in 1955. If it had only been accompanied by a required course in touch typing, the completion of subsequent professional as well as academic endeavors would have been made so much easier.
How much easier? In hindsight, I would have traded it in a nanosecond for Senior Room access with its pool tables and the only place where seniors could smoke while lining up a bank shot.
Of course the Music Man pointed out that "trouble" with a capital T rhymes with P, which stands for Pool. Also, the noxiousness of smoking had yet to have been disclosed. So it wouldn't have actually been a give-up at all.
Still, it's unassailable from my education and experience that in that era, typing would have been an easy add-on which would have paid out-sized dividends for a lifetime.
2
Bravo, as almost always, Mr. Bruni; a wonderful column. I suspect however that many of the commenters are missing the important point. This is not a column about typing and its practical value. It is, rather, about the value of being well-taught, learning, and mastery.
Perhaps the most significant sentences in the column: “I often hear, in these pedagogically permissive times, that there are many routes to solving a problem or mastering a task, and that’s true. But sometimes there really is a right way, and it’s learned through complete submission and unquestioning practice.” While rote-learning is often disdained, many – including some current educators – believe that in early schooling and for basic skills and knowledge-base; learning the material and doing “it” right is vital. Problem solving and creativity come later.
Not understanding this has a societal and political component as well. If everything is “relative”; if all “feelings” and “beliefs” and most lately, “truths” and “facts” are equal and valued; why should we expect harmony? All systems – including ours - move toward entropy. Stability (progress) is maintained by the input of energy (work) and vector (direction).
3
I found it peculiar that Bruni did not learn to type till he was 17.
I was a student in the public schools, and in the seventh grade we were given typing and a foreign language.
This brings back a lot of memories...starting in middle school in '67. I can remember my typing teacher standing up in front of the class saying, "asdf...jkl;" over and over again. When I cheated and looked at the keys out of the corner of my left eye, she would promptly come by with a bent piece of cardboard to put over my hands on the keys! It was the best way to learn, and soon I didn't have to look at the keys any more. I actually went on to take some secretarial classes in college and can remember back in the day of triple carbon paper, having to erase through all those carbon copies, eraser shields, and correction tape. Liquid white-out came later as did the WANG word processor during my Kodak days. I also have my Dad's old Smith Corona Clipper typewriter he used in college (1940's) that has a black inked ribbon and manual return! Typing is one of the best skills I have today. And I laugh at my spouse trying to type with two or three fingers and calling it "typing." Today it's called key stroking, and everyone should learn!
2
I am an academic and over the decades have done a good deal of (academic) writing.
There was a time I wrote by hand and then gave it out to be typed (That dates me).
Over the years I got good at 2 fingered hunt and peck.
My wife, also an academic who has written a good deal was, like Mr. Bruni, sent to a secretarial course as a teenager, just in case... after all she was a girl (Go know she would turn into a professor).
She types at the speed of light.
I should have taken such a course too.
4
My sister taught me how to read music when I was 4, and I managed to get through the first book of accordion lessons on my own (ok, I'll wait for the laughter to die down.... accordion??? - hey I was 4!).
From age 4 to 40, I practiced every day (mostly piano, which I mercifully switched to at age 13). One of the most consistently moving experiences of my childhood was the moment a previously incomprehensible piece of music suddenly became crystal clear.
I still remember the first time this happened. I was 7, and my music teacher gave me a march written by an obscure Eastern European composer in the late 1800s, a piece with some particularly dissonant harmonies. I dutifully plugged away, note by note, for several days, and then - miracle of miracles - one day I started to practice and I **heard** the music.
*****
As a psychologist, the practical stress and pain management skills that I teach require people to "practice." The recommendations I offer at the close of my psychological evaluations also, to be effective, require ongoing practice.
I to have found that for the most part, very few people have a sense of what it means to practice, daily, with the patient understanding that results they desire may be days, weeks or even months away.
42 years of twice daily meditation has deepened, infinitely, my sense of the value of practice. I wonder if the increasing interest in meditation among children might revive the essential importance of such dedicated practice.
1
The one progressive thing that my high school did was make typing a required course for all students - boys and girls. After that, all essay homework had to be type-written.
5
I was tops in my high school and college graduating classes. I took an elective typing class in college and earned my lowest grade of my school years. I just couldn't get up to speed.
To this day, I am slow to type on my computer and depend on spell check to correct regular errors.
I admire speedy typists and wish I had developed that skill.
Thanks for the interesting column, Frank.
2
It is close to mandatory to learn the mechanical skill of speed typing in today's age of computers, whether you are a writer or not. Everyone is typing.
Think of the skilled, speedy key stroke as a talented brush stroke to be used to convey words and thoughts. There is a reason for the phrase, 'I lost my train of thought'. If you are a writer the pen cannot keep up with the flow of words speeding through your mind like an express train, you have a much better chance with learned keyboard skill.
Sometimes another train of thought speeds into the station right behind the first that was lost, like an express train to your thought destination, but not always. A writer needs to keep the flow going as far as expressing emotion, conveying beautiful thoughts, or getting the information out there clearly and concisely. Journalists need to be accurate and fast.
In addition to speed typing skills far too many Americans need to brush up on spelling and grammar as well. The spelling errors are ridiculous and even bastions of higher education are misspelling words right on their degree certificates. It is a national and unnecessary disgrace for Americans to be treating English as a second language, one they are ignorant in.
Granted as a lover of words I wanted to learn everything about them as far as origin, meaning, and proper use in a sentence.
2
In NYC in the early 60s, a typing class in 7th grade was mandatory. I think in all my years of public schooling, that class was the most useful one I ever had. So thanks to the NYC Board of Education for teaching me to love and respect QWERTY at Campbell Junior High in Flushing, Queens, and for The NYTimes for Frank Bruni in general!
2
I was a cub reporter, 19, seated in front of a manual Underwood. The city editor encouraged me
to work on my typing, so I got a library book and put my fingers where Frank says the fingers go.
Practicing whenever there was a quiet moment, I learned to use them all. A sentence I typed
over and over again, as an exercise, was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." Why? It's lost on me now. Maybe a reader knows.
2
I too enjoyed this article and the memories it brought back growing up in England in the 1960s; the ancient Imperial 66 typewriters in high school; the quick brown fox; Pitman shorthand etc. My teacher (Miss Smith), somehow saw something promising in a less than stellar student and set me off on a trajectory which ultimately resulted in my obtaining the equivalent of an undergraduate degree. A dream my poor parents had long abandoned.
Thank you Frank Bruni. I hope your mother knew the impact of her “dare” And thank you Miss Smith. And Mum and Dad, I’m sorry for all those “could do better” report cards.
4
No shorthand, Mr. Bruni? You were given typing lessons on an electric typewriter? We were given a glimpse of one at secretarial school and then it was whisked away. It was the roaring summer of 1969, in London, where I had been sent into exile, and without a pence in the till.
Before your parent wisely sent you on your course, you already had a vocation to write and a gift. Did anybody ever tell you that you must not confuse typing with writing? By the bye that is a great photo of a Bruni teenager by Ben Wiseman.
Now a retired paper-pusher and plodder here, when once working in a moment in time for an investment banker in the world of politics and big deals, he would bring in a draft speech in his handwriting on long pages, and it was off to the steeplechase races.
Eventually there were boxes to be seen on the desks of my colleagues, and I decided that learning how to use a computer might come in handy and speed up the process. My boss was impressed by how much faster his work reached his desk, and I felt it was not necessary to give credit to the age of technology.
Now. If you find yourself on an island, your readership is counting on you to continue writing. A little boy on an Indonesian island, when asked what was his greatest wish, he answered 'a pencil'.
From an admirer of your work, at 55 words a minute, on the best of days.
3
My father escaped combat duty in the Marines during the Korean War because he was one of few men who knew how to type.
6
I love that this beautifully-written, utterly charming and personal piece about the infinite value of learning to type is as much a tribute to Bruni’s pragmatic, dedicated, brave and wise mother as it is a treatise about why mechanical life-skills are so important. In senior year of Catholic high school (1970) enrolled in the college prep track, the nuns decided to sway girls like me into a practical course, euphemistically labeled “Notehand and Typing for College.” It was impossibly hard and frustrating but I worked my way through college doing temp clerical jobs, which I would not have landed were it not for my fast typing skills. Bruni is a gem, I love his columns, and this one is one of his sweetest.
5
Best class I took in high school was typing. Mrs Bruce would call out “A S D F J K L Semi” in her incredibly nasal voice which I can still hear in my head. Years later I became an appellate lawyer composing briefs on my computer as I typed instead of dictating them like the older lawyers did. I never learned to play the piano but typing for me feels like I am doing so.
2
I'm so there! Took summer typing class in the 1950s (!) and earned$$ in college typing PhD theses (carbon copies, horrors!) and later doing thousands of phone interviews for my job. Brings back great memories of school classroom smell on summer days and the clack clack clack of those keys!!
3
The real point is how important it is to listen to one’s mother!
6
A wonderful read!
2
Posting this comment in memory of Mrs. Lowe - my typing teacher at JHS 45, the Bronx, in the 1960’s. She was serious about typing. I became a good typist but never mastered keeping my elbows tucked in. I am still trying. The neighborhood gangs didn’t frighten me, but Mrs. Lowe....
2
Yes, Mr. Bruni, repitition, boredom, discipline, and rote practice are distant memories in American schools. That's why so many of my students protested when I wrote notes on the board (a slate board) in cursive. "We can't read that", they'd cry". "Too bad." I'd tell them. "Learn."
3
Back in the 50s at my upscale suburban high school, we were offered 'college typing'. I guess it was called that so as not to be confused with preparing for a job where you would be, well, just typing. The teacher would pace the rows between the desks, hands clasped behind his back, intoning 'a s d f semi l k j g h' for what seemed like forever. Boring, yes, but like bike riding, you never forget how to do it.
3
I could have used a typing class! Back in the 1970s, I was able to find clerical work because it was commonly believed that "girls can type". I didn't have a clue! That was back in the days of carbon paper, so mistakes were obvious. I carried a large shoulder bag, into which I placed my mistakes, to take them home to throw out where the boss couldn't see. It was a classic case of "fake it till you make it"; eventually I got to be a decent typist. I played the sexist stereotype to my advantage.
4
If only auto-correct could learn how to type accurately.
2
The penalty for a "typo" on a typewriter was relatively severe-- having to stop, use Wite Out or get rid of the entire sheet of paper.
Computers essentially eliminated that with the delete key. My kids put all their assignments on the school "portal" so they never even print anything out. Times change!
2
Yes, yes, yes. But for seemingly endless repetition and blindingly boring labor leading to a wondrous end, try learning how to play the piano.
1
Keep those fingers flying, Frankie! We'll keep our eyeball scanning. That's the point, right?
1
I took typing senior year of high school because I was told I’d need it for typing my term papers in college.
Best skill I ever learned, not just in the job world but also in college. I had a little side business charging 25 cents per page for those students who, poor things, didn’t know how to type, much less as flawlessly as I.
And I charged $1.00 per page for anyone who just handed me a stack of index cards and begged me to “turn it into an 8-10 page paper.” We sat side by side as I typed and we discussed verbiage and I proposed suggestions for lengthening the term paper. I was insulted if my customer wanted lots of footnotes and bibliography; I was a pro!
This was almost 50 years ago and when computers arrived I had a major advantage over my male colleagues who scoffed at typing as “secretarial work.”
Three cheers to Frank Bruno’s mother and for a son listening to his Mom!
4
That's fine. A lot of us have similar stories, although we don't get paid to write columns about them. I washed dishes at restaurants and swept floors at a garment factory. Not necessarily terribly useful skills for later in life, but a great opportunity to meet a different kind of people than one does in an academic career.
1
I'm 95 now and I still remember taking a typing class instead of a study period in high school. I was the only boy and I wa considered a "sissy" because only girls took typing. As a result I talk a civil service test and got a job in the OWI while I was in college. which led to other jobs after the War.I was able to type my Master's Essay "Politics & Television" on the 1948 election.
6
I, too, was forced by my mother to take typing at the local vocational school the summer after my first year of high school. I was reasonably articulate for a teenager but had terrible handwriting, and my mother was convinced that if only I could type my "word hoard" would be unleashed.
Mom was right. The reasonably articulate teenager became a reasonably good adult writer, largely because I can put the words down as fast as I think of them. And I have paid it forward: I dragged my daughters kicking and screaming into the typing world (except that by then they called it "keyboarding" -- whatever). They have since thanked me.
I can't speak to the more philosophical lessons Mr. Bruni claims to have learned from his secretarial school experience. But if he had left only knowing how to type, it would have been enough.
2
I took a typing class in High School back in 1977, on mechanical type writers. Today I use a computer, of course, but I still type with all ten fingers, the way I learned it way back when.
No doubt: this is the best skill I ever learned (apart from cooking and driving). It has saved me innumerable hours during my student day as well as later. And to this day I pity people who can't type blind and with all ten fingers...
4
I'm thrilled to discover that I share a life experience with Frank Bruni (one of the reasons I decided to become a paid up subscriber to the NYTimes); in my case I was 13 and my mother decreed that I HAD TO know how to touch type. Every day after school I had to do my 30 minutes of typing. Speed and accuracy later gave me employment to help me pay my way through school. I'm glad I thought to thank my mom in time!
57
Wonderful story.
In a spontaneous act of discipline that was virtually unique in my childhood, I taught myself to touch type the summer I was 12. I had a book, and worked my way through the book, practicing hour upon hour.
I agree with Bruni's assessment of the value--so much more than being able to type almost as fast as I think, or as fast as people talk. It's also useful in learning that applying yourself to a rote skill, patiently and repeatedly, yields rewards.
Wonderful piece!
1
What a lovely story!
I had my ten year old read this story as a pre-condition to getting back his computer, with the stipulation it can be used only for typing or chess (with music in the background), but no U-tube or video games.
2
Agree 100%. I took typing in high school and was able to type not only my college papers, but was paid to type the papers of others as well.
Upon graduation I spent the summer at Katharine Gibbs school in what was then the Pan Am building, now Met Life. Typing, steno and business English for eight hours a day for eight hot weeks the summer of ‘77. We had to have short, unpolished nails, wear stockings, no pants, and only closed toe shoes! Miss Tuzzo, a former nun was our typing teacher, and she ran a tight ship. While other liberal arts grads had trouble finding a job, I had multiple opportunities, many interviewers offering me jobs on the sole fact that I was a Gibbs Girl!
The organizational skills I learned at Gibbs have served me well over the years. Students today would benefit from the structure secretarial training provides. And there is nothing like the clickity click of a real typewriter. I still have my high school graduation present of a powder blue Electric Smith Corona!
4
Good piece. I went to college in 1982, too. That was back when public schools were still offering typing classes. I took a typing class at Muirlands Junior High School, and it was one of the best classes I took, certainly one the most valuable. a, s, d, f, j, k, l, ; were drummed into my head. I agree with Frank Bruni that there's something to be said for rote learning.
7
What your essay on typing reminded me of was submitting to the discipline of playing scales- something most vocational or avocational players have done. It is mind numbing and taxing until you reach a point where it becomes automatic and your fingers just go where they should without having to think about it and then later with a fluidity needed to play well.
Show me a player who submitted to the discipline of playing scales and I will show you a solid musician. Most who do not never reach their full potential despite inborn talent. Playing solos really requires knowing your scales.
As you age, playing scales also maintains your dexterity.
7
While others s got cars & other splashy high school graduation gifts, my practical parents gave me a manual typewriter & the same hot, boring typing class + a gap year in England before architecture school. What a gift it turned out to be. I raced through my A-levels papers & soon had a small, steady income transcribing for my classmates. This continued through university. In the work world, others typed for me while I edited technical documents, drafted drawings, and directed other’s drawings. Then most offices went to computers and all staff, regardless seniority, were required to do their own scribing & drafting. So, back to whizzing along at 65-75 wpm!
3
I never learned to type properly, and this lack has hampered my professional life to the extent that I must type every day. They offered typing classes in my high school, but I never availed myself of them, unfortunately. Mr. Bruni, your mom sounds like a smart, practical woman. I wish I had raised my children to be as diligent as you seem to be.
I need to look down at the keyboard at times, which slows me down. I write poetry, and always start my drafts in longhand in a notebook.
However, I learned to speak, read, and write Spanish fluently, which required many hours of focused study. But that was so I could read the poetry of Antonio Machado and García Lorca.
1
I love this story!
I took typing because that is what girls did in my high school. I learned on a pre-electric manual typewriter and became the 2nd fastest typist in the class (there was one young man in the class that was the fastest). When electric typewriters were born, I was amazed and typed even faster. When computers became the norm, I was already a whiz at the keyboard.
I never found typing boring and am grateful on a daily basis for learning it so young. My poor husband, who was in high tech management, still can't do much more than hunt and peck...
3
Yes I agree... I also walked uphill to school both ways. The kids these days have no idea.
4
I took typing during senior year in high school. One giddy spring afternoon I hit 70 wpm on a Royal manual.
Typing has paid off ever since. Typing papers in college for my friends paid for my beer. Typing was golden when word processors, then PCs, hit the market.
Programming, then computer network administration, became my career. Typing was the foundation.
7
Great article. I too benefitted from typing class way back when. And people still don't generally know how to type properly and efficiently. Most of my coworkers do the peck-peck single-finger method. Now if we could teach our students how to really write well, plus type well, they would be on a successful path!
4
I bribed my son to take typing as a senior in high school, the last time it was offered, in 1985. Just as my father had pushed me to take typing in high school. Most worthwhile in both cases. My grandchildren in elementary school seem to be getting some instruction in correct keyboard positions, I am glad to report.
2
This really strikes a chord, and takes me back to a WWII and postwar schooling, which demanded a lot of tedium that still pays off in the 21st century. Our eighth grade typing class was just one in a string of boredom sessions that began with endless copying of print letters in first grade, penning an infinity of perfect ovals for cursive writing in fourth, meticulous attention to formal outlines in sixth. Happily, I can still corral ideas into a reasonable I, II, III form and my handwriting is legible and occasionally a thing of beauty. Needless to say, QWERTY is an old BFF.
3
I had a similar experience, except it was 50 years ago. I spent a professional lifetime in journalism, and typing helped. I really regret, though, not having also studied shorthand which would have made all those press conferences a breeze.
My husband still types in that very precise, fingers perfectly positioned way they teach you in high school. It cracks me up.
2
Great article ! I think that nowadays people are trying to create the same type of experience with coding classes for their children. However, I don't think that training in coding opens up a route for the imagination as typing and writing does even though it may provide entry-level employment.
1
My mother also made me take typing in high school, in 1984. I complained -- why? I'm not going to be a secretary?! But she was the rare woman in any exploding but nascent field, computing, and she knew what was coming. To this day, I always give her credit for helping me to learn the most useful professional skill I ever mastered. Like you, it has made me much better at every task in my field and I am forever grateful for my mother's sage advice. While it can be hard for a daughter to admit that her mother was right, in this case, I must give credit where credit is due.
5
@Leah
Ditto for me, but it was my father who told me to take typing. I was a little slower on the uptake - went to night high school after I graduated college - but I did eventually get ,er done. And the experience has served me well ever since.
Great piece of writing Mr Bruni!
1
Dear Frank Bruni, Thank you for your memory. It impelled me back to my own high-school summer typing course, to my beloved Smith-Corona manual portable typewriter (my parents' gift) to, 25 years later, my daughter's Selectric (her parents' gift), and to their unmarked disappearances under the onslaught of computers. Thank you for my own 30 minutes of memory.
3
When I look back, it was the four week summer typing course in High School that was the most helpful and most influential of any class I had. I learned to type correctly - all except the numbers, which we reached too late during the short term to learn, and to this day I still stop dead when having to type, say, 1963. For my college graduation present I received a correcting Selectric IBM typewriter in topaz brown as my gift, because that's what I wanted. Once a friend said that when I typed it was "like watching a conductor lead an orchestra." It is still the most relaxing thing I can think to do, which is probably why writing has been at the core of my professional life. In short, I know exactly what you mean, Frank. Learning to type absolutely changed my life in all the best ways. And I, too, lament the demise of typing classes.
4
How great is it that people remember their teachers’ names all these years later? A vivid reminder of the positive power teachers have.
17
The acquisition of skills develops discipline and the focus required to acquire knowledge. Hand/eye skills and memory training seem especially beneficial in our passive age. Better yet if dirt is involved.
Typing may become anachronistic. George Bernard Shaw wrote his plays in shorthand. A remarkable skill to have in one's quiver.
1
Typing is a very useful skill. My mother suggested that I take typing as an elective when I was a senior in high school. I bristled at the suggestion because I was not going to be a secretary and I was college bound. But, of course mom was right. Typing was really useful and helped me complete all of my papers in college. Then came the PC revolution and now everyone should know how to type.
Thanks, mom!
2
I sent this article to my students. While they aren't typing (they are singing), the same kind of focus, attention to getting it right, and boring discipline is involved. Thank you for your most excellent description of the Art of Craft.
6
My high school needed a teaching job for the football line coach. He taught typing and notehand. Half the semester we practiced typing. I still remember the ampersand as a highball -- 7&7.
The notehand half of the course was an abbreviated shorthand, if shorthand needed abbreviation.
I can wistfully report that every job I ever had -- from library assistant to law -- was sitting in front of a keyboard... for 52 years now.
I still have to look.
3
I taught myself to type out of a book and it has been one of the most valuable skills that I have.
But, the truly sad part of this whole discussion is the unfortunate fact that a very large portion of the population reads very little and hasn't much to write beyond items the length of a tweet or a text.
If people found a need to express themselves in a short persuasive essay, typing skills would be essential because the mechanics of producing the message wouldn't impede the creation of the thoughts.
But they don't. In general. This NYT Comments section is, for me the discovery of a lifetime because people here both read and write, often superbly well, and as a result express very thoughtful ideas, and very well. But this is not the norm.
3
Can relate to every word, even to the "mother made me do it." What still astounds me (I go way back; learned on a manual!) is the automaticity of it, how my fingers "know" without a conscious direction. Amazing, yes?
2
My first post-college action in 1980 was taking a 6-week Katherine Gibbs Entree course for college grads (all women), typing and short hand. I moved to NYC and literally every job interview I went on required a typing test. I landed as an editorial assistant at a publishing house. I went on to have a full and happy career far from publishing but I still use my typing skills through sheer muscle memory constantly, and though I never took dictation, the short hand has always served me well in note taking, and these days texting.
2
When I was 14 (1997) I failed typing and vowed never to go back to it. Fast forward about five years to my first year in college. I was sitting in the Registrar's office with my mom (weird I know, but as she was paying for it...) trying to enroll for computer science, which unfortunately was full up. The registrar says you can join the secretarial classes and specialize in legal practice. Mom turns to me and says do that, you'll never be unemployed. I did -- I mean who am I to argue with the payer of bills?
I can honestly say that I have never been without employment. I have worked for several law firms and at the end of my "formal" career, worked as a very specialized trial secretary to a well-known law firm in South Africa.
Today, over 20 years after learning to type, I earn a living as a transcriptionist working for Family Court. I work from home, when I want, how I want and for as long as I want. I have total job security (been doing it for over 10 years now) and I absolutely love, love what I do.
11
My senior year in HS I took a typing class. I too remember it as the most important and most useful class of my HS days. I would time myself to see how quickly I could zip through "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party". Certainly the young and nimble fingers of "back in the day" were far quicker than the somewhat arthritic digits I'm currently cursed with. Anyway, thanks for the confirmation that I wasn't the only one who has come to realize how important those few weeks of typing class would turn out to be.
3
Similar experience here. I attended a relatively fancy prep school during the school year but public high school during one summer to take a typing class. I'm so grateful to my mother for making me go to this class, which, at the time, I shudder to admit, I thought was beneath me.
I was quickly knocked off my perch when I mispronounced "Tucson" (turns out the "c" is silent!) when asked to read aloud an address for the class to type.
My only regret is that I skipped the last week to go to Cape Cod and, to this day, I can't touch type numbers.
My mother also made me go to sewing school when I was 12, but somehow the sewing never stuck. Still, I appreciate her efforts.
Thanks, Mom, and thanks to Frank Bruni for another great piece of writing.
6
In high school, my dad headed the group that included the typing class. He required that I take the year long typing class as a sophomore. Really boring. On a manual typewriter no less. I couldn't have cared less about all the minutiae of formatting. But I could type about 70 wpm. I went to college with an electric typewriter and earned money by typing papers in the dorm/fraternity. In retrospect, the best course I took in high school. Years later my wife and I had possession of an IBM Selectric for a few months and I typed her master's thesis. I thought I had died an gone to heaven. [As an aside, my dad also oversaw the industrial arts, automotive, electronics, home economics, and drafting classes. I did countless 'home-based internships' under his tutelage. It took years to appreciate those lessons. But short of wiring a house to the grid, there is no job that eludes me. Typing and plumbing skills - what a combination.]
9
Back in 1951 my mother also insisted I take typing in high school. In 1956 I was a laborer on road construction but because I could type I got a job indoors for the winter. In 1957 I went into the Army and was assigned to a Nike missile battery in New Jersey, but because I could type I went to battalion headquarters and worked regular hours. In 1958 I went to Korea as a clerk and found the regulations that would let me get a reserve officer commission while on active duty as a Sergeant. In 1961 I was called to active duty as a 2d Lt. I retired as a Lt. Col. in 1977 and all because my mother made me take typing.
22
Excellent piece. Some of my most salient and concrete memories are from typing and sewing classes. The focus required, combined with the tedium ending in a finished product to be proud of seems to have some relevance to what we gain. Thanks for this writing, Mr. Bruni.
5
What a great story! Yes, I too learned to type in high school and did extra duty cleaning and repairing typewriters(manual) in the class. Besides, "Quick Brown Fox" , we also had to type; "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country", as quickly as possible and without mistakes. Mistakes required "whiteout", and typists, looking for employment, had to demonstrate to employers they could type 100 words per minute without mistakes. Not long ago, I filmed a story about the last typewriter repairman in San Francisco. His shop was filled with old domestic and foreign machines. Again, a great story.
3
In high school I took typing and shorthand. In my first job, I used both, and I learned the IBM Magcard machine. Because I knew the Magcard, I was easily able to learn the Xerox 800, Xerox 850, and IBM System 6, all of which I had mastered by 1980. I worked as a temp doing word processing for much of the Eighties, and when the very first computers (the ones with two disk drives—one for the plate-sized disk that ran the program and the other plate-sized disk to capture a small amount of information—the original floppy disks that were indeed floppy and required careful handling. I spent the ‘80s working as a temp and because I was so far ahead of the curve, I learned everything that hit the market, and by the time WordPerfect hit the market I had learned (and forgotten) so many programs that even then I could no longer remember them all. It was the advent of social media that threw me out of the race—by then I was in my fifties and just wasn’t interested in Facebook and Twitter and everything that followed in their tracks. When I had to find a new job at 61, I passed all sorts of preliminary stages only to not be chosen in the end. It was only after I decided to focus on governmental jobs that things turned back in my favor, since social media doesn’t really play a part in keeping families on track or making sure people have somewhere to go when their house burns down.
I still love to type.
9
I got my first job after college because I could type 125 words a minute. Accurately. Using all 10 fingers, not just my thumbs. Like handwriting, typing is a great training ground for hand-eye coordination, as well as the concentration that Mr Bruni discusses.
5
My father is a one finger typist from way back and had me type his consulting invoices for him back in the early 80s when I was 10 years old. I didn't how to type but I was faster than he was and knew how to boot up the Atari computer, use a rudimentary word processing program and thread the paper through the dot-matrix printer.
By the time I got to high school a few years later I realized that learning how to properly type would be a useful skill in a world soon to be dominated by electronic keyboards, so I enrolled in the class as a 9th grader. I became a proficient typist and eventually could type close to 90 words a minute. I'm sure I've saved myself thousands of hours in my life by acquiring this skill. I'm not so fast now but I have said on many occasions it was the most important class I took in high school. Thank you to Mrs. Fardelmann! Learning how to sew a button on in Home Ec in 7th grade has been very useful as well!
3
My World War II vet dad was a newspaper reporter and columnist. He would pound out his articles seated at a card table in our living room on a Remington -- or was it an Underwood? -- he had both. I was fascinated. It was fun waiting for the "ding" when Dad reached the end of a line and flung back the carriage. I took a semester of typing as a high school sophomore from Mr. Stanelle. Electric typewriters were around, but we didn't have them in class. JUJ. FRF, etc., graduating to centering a heading on a page, calculating where to place footnotes, setting margins and the like. My parents gave me a teal green Olivetti portable manual typewriter when I graduated high school. It served me well for many years. I was one of the few students I knew in college who could compose term papers at the typewriter, and I was fast. Editing meant physically cutting and pasting. I did temp jobs in the 70s -- the IBM Correcting Selectric II was initially baffling to me. I kept hitting the correcting X key by accident. First experiences with computer keyboards were a problem too. My touch was way too firm, and the keys would repeat across the screen. Typing has served me well. I knew many girls who refused to learn to type because they didn't want to be secretaries. I did do clerical work, including using a manual adding machine, before I settled into my career, and was never sorry I learned to type about as fast as I think. Thank you so much for this column, Mr. Bruni. Well said.
3
The most useful class I have ever taken was my 8th grade typing class. It was the basis for numerous jobs. I'm still using the training at a clinical job when I free-text in an electronic medical record.
2
Terrific article; I’m comparing the author to other greats, Royko, McPhee, Mencken, though all very different all had a knack for capturing the deep wisdom found in ordinary life. Thank you, Mr. Frank Bruini.
15
Not only did I take typing in High School, but I loved the hand-eye-mind coordination in it fostered. Since then, it's proved invaluable--a skill I used to help put myself through college and grad school and later, as an academic author and teacher. I type much faster than I write, and boy, has it come in handy!
2
Kudos to Frank’s mother! I took the usual 9th grade typing class at my college prep high school, still using manual machines in those days. Then before my senior year in college, I spent the summer at the elite Radcliffe College, in a secretarial program for female college students, improving typing and business skills and learning a streamlined form of shorthand. For an English major determined not to teach, these skills proved useful, even though I did not become a fast typist until after years of online editing, report writing, and correspondence on a PC. I don’t know when Radcliffe stopped that program, but it was a helpful part of my career preparation and I appreciate those skills even in retirement.
My mom could type, and as a result, she was willing to learn to use email and do things like schedule plane tickets online. We gave her a laptop for her 80th birthday. My dad, on the other hand, had always had secretaries and did not type. The computer revolution completely passed him by. Sadly, although a successful businessman and athlete, he would not try to learn something new if he was not sure he could be good at it and mastering a keyboard was a step too far.
I encourage all children today to learn coding; even if they don’t use it for decades, it will prepare their minds for taking up newer technologies that will come along during their lifetimes. Typing class did that for us old timers.
8
I am surprised that typing is not a required entry level college course that everyone must take, like freshman comp. So much is done with keyboards now, but I suppose in the future everything will be voice controlled and then we'll have to take diction lessons. I also took typing and I hated the class and didn't do very well (it was early in the morning and didn't go well with a hangover), but today I'm a speedy typer and thankful for it.
PS. Best line in this essay? "If only life had a backspace key."
5
When I was 14 years old (in 1975), I came upon an IBM Selectric typewriter my mother had stored in our basement. I have no memory of why it was down there, but the futuristic, blue apparatus with a golf ball-shaped type head intrigued me. I loved seeing it dance as I typed -- slowly at first, but supersonically fast when I mastered typing. While my siblings frittered away the summer rollerskating around the basement, I sat on the hard, concrete floor and taught myself to type.
Nobody told me to do it, I did it because it was fun. I loved increasing my skill from 25, to 70, to 100! words per minute. I was quite good at it, a shy kid who loved playing the piano. And these two skills especially, piano playing and typing, enhanced my dexterity and self-assurance.
Computers weren't yet available, and I didn't know why learning to type was a prize, but all these years later I'm extremely grateful I stumbled upon that cool, blue box and learned a skill I'm using right this minute. Thanks, Frank, my brother in fingers for opening that floodgate of fond memories!
6
I still use the skills (typing being just one of them) that I learned in 1976 when I took the one-year full time course at Katharine Gibbs in New York City. It was tough but worth it! Any company hiring a Katharine Gibbs graduate from those days knew they were getting a skilled and professional person. I’m a mechanical designer for an engineering company now and use the typing almost every day at work, such as for drawing notes, and shorthand is very handy for keeping notes on a project.
2
I taught myself to type after my parents gave me a portable typewriter and Pitman's book for Christmas when I was 10. Incredibly useful. But now I find the same discipline in learning to play bass guitar.
1
@Kirsty Mills
It really isn't just typing. It really is any skill that has to be learned by concentrated practice. Piano, violin, guitar, drawing require hours of concentration and dexterity.
1
Mr. Bruni - I believe your mother was cut from a similar cloth as mine for she insisted that all 9 of her children learn typing - either in summer school or as a regular class in high school and this was during the years of 1960 thru mid -1970. Every one of us never regretted learning the rat-tat-tat-tat of the keyboard on manual typewriters. Besides learning an invaluable life skill, typing class also taught discipline, concentration, memory skills and focus. I think any of those honed tools are imperative and necessary in life, in general.
I saw an interview with David McCullough and he showed the manual typewriter he uses every single day. Everything he has ever written was done on that machine. WOW and then some. He continues to be my inspiration when my arthritic fingers begin to lock up and hurt beyond words. I keep going and think of him pecking away at super-sonic speed.
Great article, as usual. Thanks for the memory of summers and high school classes gone by. I think my mother's greatest motivation for her kids to learn typing was because she learned it in one of those "vocational tech" classes back in the day. She always thought it was a necessary and important skill to learn. She went on to become a legal secretary and court reporter. Not bad for just a high school graduate back in the 1930s.
5
I was doing reasonably well with the alphabet in high school typing class but somewhere along the way to numbers and upper case symbols, I made a connection that Frank never needed to: if I learn to do this, people will expect me to do it in the workforce--because that's what women usually did in the workforce in the late 60's if they weren't teachers or nurses. When I wanted to apply for a job at the university where I got my PhD in the six months before I started grad school, I was told that all women were expected to take a typing test. (That wasn't true of professional positions but they didn't tell me that at HR.) I remembered the revelation that I learned a few years earlier and looked elsewhere. I got a factory job to tide me over instead, doing quality control for a outdoor gear company and that paid a lot better than the secretarial ghetto at the University. Once computers came along I remembered the alphabetic part of the keyboard but I still have to look for the numbers and symbols. I never regretted learning them.
3
I've got a few years on Frank, and I took typing during my junior year in high school, along with several of my buddies. And because most of the class was, yes, girls. Maybe a little bit because it was recommended at our high school for the college bound, where, we were informed by the guidance counselor, the legibility of the typewritten word was expected. All those years since early grade school spent practicing cursive penmanship? They were, in college, just so much wasted time.
I probably got a "B" and just barely, with a word speed crowding the 40/minute mark...if most of them were of the 3- and 4-letter variety. Like Frank, I got faster after computers gained the upper hand, again, thanks to the marvelous backspace/delete function, the inventor of which should have received the Nobel Prize. He single-handedly dealt a near death blow to the White-Out industry. When was the last time you saw a typewriter eraser, the one with round wheel of eraser rubber with a brush attached to it by a metal strip like the front fork of a bicycle? I can't remember, either.
Unlike Frank, my friends and I learned to type (after a fashion) on what was more or less a lark. Typing class, after all, required zero intellectual effort. Disappointingly, it really didn't do much for my dating life, either. But, like Frank, I did read Pirsig's "Zen and the Art..." tome a decade or so after I graduated high school. A great book, but I never associated it with typing class. Until now.
4
Tell me truly, don’t you long to see an IBM Selectric again? I loved that machine! It made me feel like I could fly... or, at the very least, my fingers.
8
I love this! I took typing in high school, too—the benefits you outlined are spot-on. I’m urging my high school-aged kids to do the same. Only Mr. Bruni could describe a mundane typing class experience with such vivid, hilarious, touching detail.
6
Wonderful article.
I also took a high school typing course as part of my college prep curriculum in the late 50s It was invaluable in all the situations mentioned by Mr. Bruni and the other commentators, and in one other as well.
As an engineering Ph.D. working as a structural analyst in aerospace industry during the late 60s and 70s, preparing computer input data decks, often containing hundreds of punch cards, quickly and accurately was required. This was particularly true when working alone late at night on crucial analyses.
Key punches were unforgiving. One mistake and a punch card had to be discarded and begun anew. If a mistake was undetected, the associated analysis was incorrect and had to be resubmitted and rerun, at the cost of hours of lost time in those days of batch computer processing.
Time efficient, accurate, typing was essential. Without the skill acquired in high school typing class, my job would have been much more difficult.
5
My mother and three of my grandparents had bachelor’s degrees in journalism. Typing classes were a family tradition, not an option.
5
At my fancy college prep high school, there was no typing class, so I spent one summer learning to type at the local public high school. I hated and disdained it, and got a "D".
I am retiring now from a career in academe in which my brain hard-wired to my fingers interfaces lovingly with the key pad of my laptop and its memory. While aging makes so many things slow down, my typing seems only to improve. My hands retain the perfect arch over the keypad, and my ideas continue to flow.
10
When I was in high school, my mom made me take the typing elective course. I groaned at the time, but have been grateful ever since. Knowing how to type made all the difference to me in college and in my various careers ever since. Some skills really do need to be learned by drilling and practice. (See the excellent recent Times Op-Ed on making your daughter practice math.) For some reason, this idea seems to have gone out of favor in our schools and in most fields except for music training.
4
I arrived in the US newly married at 17 and ready to go to college and study Secretarial Science. (It was the quickest thing to do to get a job fast) I took typing, shorthand etc for two years. When I graduated with an AS degree in Secretarial Science, I got a job right away. My interviewer noted “no experience, great skills”. That was 44 years ago. The kills I learned have helped me my whole life, different jobs for a few years, then having my own business as a Medical Billing service when doctors did not have computers, office manager for an economist. My training helped not just in jobs but at home, lots of organization skills learned as well.
11
I took typing my freshman year at St.Ignatius in 1968. It was helpful until Apple Computer came along with the wonders of wonders of 'word processing' in 1982.
How I wished I had had a PC/Apple in college in the 70's. I absolutely loved to write, but hated the typing portion. The white outs and the redo's. It was maddening.
With the arrival of 'Word', my chains had been cut and I could soar for hours writing (instead of typing).
So, yes, thank you for the typing class Mr. Loparo, it came in handy when 'Word' came around.
1
Took me back to high school, alternating typing and drivers ed classes. Mrs. Pulley, completely no nonsense, blank typewriter keys, speed tests, and best of all, completely manual, not electric. Have always felt this was one of the best classes I ever took, especially after my younger partner at work noted my "mad typing skills". Who knew.
7
I taught myself typing in high school from a manual I picked up at a yard sale. The best skill ever. It has served me incredibly well through the years. It makes sense that kids today instinctively know how to type. But it also makes sense to me that we should teach them to write longhand. In case they ever need to write something down without a laptop in front of them.
8
Oh, thank you for bringing up the importance of learning to write in longhand - even if only taught in an art class! I shudder at the belief that longhand has become obsolete. There will always be a time and place for low-tech self expression.
2
With my college prep schedule conflicting with Personal Typing,
I attempted to take Typing 1 as a high school senior. The drive for speed and accuracy made me into a nervous wreck who next class was Physics. The typing teacher was giving me Cs because she felt sorry for me. I dropped the course at the semester mark. I bartered sewing and altering for term paper typing in college.
Fast foward 10 years and our children learned "keyboarding" in 4th and 5th grade in prep for Word and Excel classes in junior high. Both are speedy touch typists, while old mom still has to glance at the keyboard.
1
I laughed a this, yes, but...
I took did data entry 8 hrs. a day as a temp worker for months in the 70s, correcting typos in names, dates, and gender on forms. High school typing class was highly creative by comparison. But many kids today experience boring, mind-numbing teaching as a result of our lust for data. Standardized tests have changed the elementary and middle school experience dramatically. Ask a middle schooler what number gets you an A minus instead of a B plus and they've memorized it. They refresh PowerSchool on their phones again and again to see what they got on the test because they're terrified of not getting into a good college.
The problem isn't that kids are never bored. It's that we've made school a high pressure, high stakes, data-driven experience. It bores them. It dehumanizes them. So they are constantly seeking a dopamine rush for escape.
Sadly, they get blamed for not being like the generation before them who was superior for having been bored for weeks instead of years. And we blame the teachers instead of the bureaucrats and administrators.
2
I basically agree with this article but I think it sells today's youth short. Kids can and do sit for more than an hour doing certain tasks - you just have to look for them. For example, plenty of kids are into music production and sit for hours learning how to use the proper software for that. My nephews spend hours building robots. It is the tasks that have changed - and since most of today's tasks are done by computer, it can look like kids are frittering away their time when they're actually not.
2
My skill with typing has earned me a living. It got me a job as a clerk-typist and a career that eventually took me to Washington, D.C. When computers arrived I, like Mr. Bruni, just got faster. A corollary skill arrived when I got a job which involved typing a lot of numbers. When spreadsheets later arrived, I was ready and could fill them in without looking. My profound thanks goes to Mrs. Roberts who made us hold our hands correctly over the keyboard; because of her, I typed for 40 years and do not have carpal tunnel syndrome.
8
@Anita
My mother told me that if I learned to type, I would never be out of a job. She was right! I worked in high tech for 35 years, and when I had the occasional layoff, was able to work as a temp doing data entry.
4
Frank, you are a wonderful columnist and also great on TV. But given all of your deep insight into politics and humanity, I wonder if even you are surprised at how today's column resonated with so many! That was marvelous, uplifting, and kind of deep.
Love your craft; keep on typing!
9
My mother enrolled me in summer school Typing class when I was 14. It started every morning at 8 am, and it was grueling. The teacher (a man!) was a WW II vet and he LOVED the key board. Every morning, he would parade up and down the aisles of the class, dancing and singing “a s d f j k l ; … a s d f j k l ; … a s d f j k l ;” His music still resonates in my mind – some 40 years later. What I learned in typing has always served me well and made me one of the fastest typists I know. I can type faster than I think. Typing is like music, it rings in your ears. It beckons you to the keyboard. It is a craft that has proven far more valuable than my Auto, Wood, or Metal classes. Thank you, Mom!
8
I studied "Regents Typing" at a parochial high school, under the tutelage of Brother Kevin. We used manual typewriters and I scored very well on the Regents Exam. My first job interview, which involved aptitude and typing tests, involved typing on an electric typewriter. I panicked and was escorted to a paper math test which resulted in my getting a job other than the one I was applying for. After a job layoff, I was angered to be considered only for administrative assistant jobs but my early typing skills qualified me for work for which other candidates might not be qualified. Thanks for mentioning "home row" which I forgot. Often, when at the movies, my fingers "type" out dialogue as I listen. (I temped as a secretary at a major university and found myself correcting some of the grammatical errors made by higher ups. In a secretarial class, I learned that one has to learn to correct the boss without letting the boss know they've been corrected. There were no boys in that class. Typing class with Brother Kevin was co-ed. Thanks for the memories!
2
@Debra Merryweather It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who "types" without a typewriter, my fingers silently typing out dialogue and my thoughts. I thought it was just a nervous habit!
2
@Debra Merryweather My incomplete parentheses would be one point off on Brother Kevin's typing test.
1
I agree; typing class and Latin were the most valuable courses I took in high school.
6
Hey Frank, as an old and retired business education teacher,
your column made my heart sing. Rock on.
9
On the first day of basic training at Lackland AFB in 1975 we were getting different assignments to organize our group, such as bathroom cleaners, etc. I raised my hand when the question rang out: who knows how to type? From that moment on they called me Radar and I was the “company clerk” to training instructor TSGT Patrick. It kept me out of grunge work and so long as I made sure Patrick had his can of Dr Pepper before breakfast we had a good day. I never had to type in the job.
11
I spent the summer of 1978 in Waltham, Mass., where I had a job as a secretary in the Brandeis University music department. It was the heyday of the IBM Selectric, which boosted my 90-words-per-minute into the stratosphere. The Selectric also emitted a kind of fury. One day the department chair stopped by to say that the sound of my typing brought to mind how Beethoven must have played the piano.
40
My senior year in college in 1974 I was loaned a key to a university office (on the sly) where I could use the IBM Selectric to type my many English papers after hours. The best part of that genius typewriter was the ability to correct errors without White-Out. Never typed on an IBM after that, and nothing equaled it until the personal computer came along in the eighties—just before I attended graduate school in Creative Writing.
3
In the summer before my senior year of high school, my parents sent me to Strayer Business College for four weeks of typing. What a gift! I guess I was bored, but I remember much more my secret pleasure at typing quickly. I practiced in church, typing the priest's sermons on my knees. No one noticed, but I got faster and faster! Alas, church typing did not guarantee accuracy, but ah, the speed! Eventually I got good enough to pass the government exam qualifying for clerk typist and summer jobs in my DC home. Next I was off to college and teaching, always typing something! Can typing class be life-changing? I think so!
10
I can totally identify with Mr Bruni's experience. I took a summer typing course the summer after graduating high school (this would have been 1961), and I've always thought of it as the most important course I ever took. He's right that it not only provides you with a technical skill useful in countless life circumstances but also a "structure of mind" which gives order to the thinking process. As "Steel Magnolia" writes, it has the same valuable structuring function as Latin, which I took for four years. Two comments: Mr. Bruni doesn't mention the computer gap: high school students today in the U.S. have already learned keyboarding; for me, in 1961 at college, I first encountered the electric typewriter. Secondly, structured thinking is most important today when we are constantly threatened by the chaos theory of Trump, and constantly by him and his craven minions urged to abandon all reason and morality.
7
My son is an engineering student on internship this summer. School is teaching him the engineering skills. The internship taught quite different ones.
How to recognize superior knowledge from the guy who owns the machine shop. How to recognize the value of the input from the people on the production line. How to get consensus, and who you need to get it from. How to form relationships with a lot of different people. How to complete a project fully.
Very little of it had to do with the primary skill he is learning. Life skills are not about education, they are about being able to actually use it.
A good mechanical engineer recognizes the value of a skilled welder; the technical expertise of the people who use the production tools daily. Just as a writer recognizes the value of being able to get words on paper efficiently.
I'd like to see more focus in school on life skills - how to fix a leaky pipe, change oil, make dinner, repair a chair. But we are challenged to hone other skills - how to form a logical sentence, program a computer, solve a math problem - that we don't have time to understand the skills that underpin our lives.
10
The best class I had in high school was TPU, Typing for Personal Use. Gave me a skill I've never lost. Nowadays we call it "keyboarding", but it's still TPU to me.
5
It was wonderful to read your piece today!! When I was in 9th grade, I developed mono and was confined to my room for 3 weeks. My brother had enrolled in a 'correspondence touch typing course' - which I decided to take. I can't add to what you have written about the value of the discipline and the life long skill it has provided. (This was in 1960!) And I have often felt that it was one of the best things I did. Back then, small electric typewriters were not available and I learned on my father's 1940s Smith Corona portable - which I still own!!
8
Typing was the one course my father insisted I take in high school 55+ years ago. I was mortified but managed to squeeze it among the college prep requirements. Decades later I realized, like so many other commenters, that it was the single most useful course high school course I took. Yes, the eventual degree was required for most of my jobs but the ability to touch type made routine tasks out of what would otherwise have been torture. Thanks, Dad.
19
I learned to type at the Steubenville( Ohio) Business College in 1957, during the summer before I entered 8th grade. It changed my life. Really.
4
Love this. I just had a conversation in which I said that learning to type in High School was the best/most useful thing I ever learned. I can type just about as fast as I can think. I sometimes think about all the time and effort having this skill has saved me. I run a library and I refuse to get rid of the "how to type" books because every once in a while somebody comes in, takes one of the books out, and changes his life.
22
I remember taking a typing course a long time ago. I bought a used electric typewriter in the local “Want Ad” and practiced diligently. I got a job at a local Boston publisher and worked my way up.
It is a lovely feeling to be able to type your thoughts as fast as you can think them, not looking at the keyboard, but looking at the words materialize on the screen.
Kind of how I feel playing on a piano, transcribing my emotion to the keys on the piano.
8
I am a graduate of the HoHoKus School of Secretarial Sciences, Ramsey, NJ. Required of me by my disappointed parents after I failed out of college for the 3rd time. I managed to avoid typing class in high school because I was in orchestra. Secretarial school got me in the door with good companies, the good companies paid for additional continuing education in other specialized fields (web development) and today I have a respectable paying job with a great company doing something I enjoy. So thank you, secretarial school, for giving me the boost to get me going.
9
Oh to have graduated from the HoHoKus School of Secretarial Sciences! That has to be the most wonderful school name ever.
3
My mother forced me to take two courses in high school--typing and Latin--and I was convinced she was the meanest woman on the planet. "I'm not going to be JUST a secretary," I retorted, haughtily ignoring the fact she was the pastor's secretary at our church. "And whatever will I do with a language no one has spoken in centuries? We're not even Catholic!"
The two courses, of course, ended up being far and away the most valuable I ever took. I could not only type my own term papers, by the time I was in my twenties I composed everything I wrote at the keyboard, finding I could more quickly (though hardly more accurately) record my thoughts that way than by writing them out longhand. And Latin gave me not only a "root word" vocabulary for puzzling out the meanings of English (and later French and Spanish) words I did not know, but also an appreciation of the structure of language, its regularities and irregularities--an appreciation (much like that of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements) that opened me to the possibilities of structural patterns elsewhere and, especially, to the simple elegance of so much of what I was learning.
Many years later my first thought was "Yep, typing and Latin" when I happened to overhear my own then-high-school-aged daughter speaking to a friend about something or other I had insisted upon. "Don't you just hate it when they're right?"
21
I graduated from college in 1969 with a degree in fashion design and no hope of ever getting a job in that field. After 3 years of a dead end job dressing manikins at Gimbels I took a two month course in typing and shorthand. I also learned to sit up straight, stay organized and act like a professional. These were the pre-computer days and typing had never been on my radar screen as a skill I could use one day. When I finally retired from my career in advertising, typing was the one skill that saw me through and that I'm still using today. Thank you Mrs. Shoemaker. You changed my life.
8
Typing was a required course in Junior High (now more popularly known as Middle School) in our school district on LI. It was undoubtedly the most useful class pre-college. Because of my skill and a decent electric typewriter I earned significant sums in college typing papers for my classmates. After law school and before the advent of word processors on every secretary's desk, I was often privileged to get involved in after-hours urgent matters thanks to my typing ability. Rather than feeling put-upon, I felt privileged because it often led to substantive involvement in interesting matters because I had some fundamental knowledge of what was happening without specifically being told. I'd encourage anyone to learn "touch typing" even in today's tech world. Why not?
4
Thanks, Frank, for the memories.
I was the oldest of four girls, with parents who assured me that when I grew up I was capable of doing anything I would put my mind and efforts to. And that was back in the day when girls' career choices were, shall we say, limited. Even so, when I entered high school, my father said, "Take typing. That will help you no matter what you do." He spoke from experience, since his own typing skills were confined to the well-known hunt-and-peck system.
So I followed his advice. I didn't become a high school typing whiz, but by the time I got to college I was good enough to earn money by typing papers for others who had not had fathers with such good sense. And later I typed my young husband's city planning master's thesis with six carbon copies, since of course word processors were not yet a germ in anyone's mind - we had to rent a special typewriter for that, and doing it was HARD. However, he got his degree, went on to become a successful urban planning consultant, and I went on to typing legislative memos and position papers in my work with the League of Women Voters. Still without word processing. Now typing here at my computer seems like child's play, compared to all that.
5
The grade school I went to in New London, Connecticut gave every child in seventh and eighth grades a complete two-year course in secretarial typing. We learned touch typing, letter formatting, proper correspondence skills, the whole works. I loved it. I loved it partly because my mother was a skilled typist and had a badge she won for speed typing in high school, partly because I have always liked doing things with my hands and partly because I have terrible penmanship. Little did I know that typing was to be probably one of the most enduringly valuable skills I would learn in school. I typed all my papers in high school and college and beyond. In the military, it was one thing you could safely volunteer for to get out of a lot of the chicken details. Of course, the personal computer was invented for the likes of me who need to type everything and who like to edit themselves—no more whiteout, pink pearl erasers and the like. I must add that my father was a very fast and skillful two-finger typist on his massive old Underwood. I often think of him when I work on my one and two thumb skill on my iPhones.
8
Sixty-three years ago I took a high school typing class. When I enlisted in the Army, I was told by friends to never volunteer for anything, but when during NJ basic training, the question "does anyone know how to type" was asked, my hand shot up. That simple move relieved me from any future PT duties, and put me into the position of payroll clerk, then and for the next nineteen months stationed in Oklahoma. An eight to five office job worked for me.
5
So I was one who signed up for the high school typing class, but dropped it after first day. I just did not see it as worth the time, given where my other interests focused. I guess I just could not imagine how it would help me that much later on. If only Steve Jobs was my best friend. He would have had a different perspective.
2
In high school, some 50 years ago, my Dad enrolled me in a night school typing class. At first it was a humiliating experience...I was the only boy in the class, the teacher, a female, appeared to think I had enrolled for reasons other than learning to type, and, at least at the beginning, I was way behind others in the class---my Dad had the starting date of the class wrong. To make matters worse, I had to ask the coach of the team I played on to let me go early once a week---my typing class response, as you can imagine, became a relentless locker room joke. However, as the semester advanced, I became more adept at the keyboard, so much so, that I asked my Dad for typewriter to practice on---he brought home a rather beat up one from the office store room. I practiced every night, became the fastest in the class, and in college, supplemented college fees with monies from typing papers for other students. I should add, that I have authored a number of books, all of which were crafted around the ability to position ideas/narratives into typewritten copy. Of all the degrees I have earned, the certificate I received from my night school typing class has turned out to be the most valuable.
11
Thanks Frank for a wonderful article and also too the many who shared their typing stories. A good read and a chance to glance back fondly (mostly) to our pasts in these turbulent times.
My story from the early 70's: the football coaches each had about 12 to 15 players to "supervise" over the summer. Their dual purpose: keep up with our off season training and intrude into our lives to keep us busy and out of trouble.
If you couldn't prove that you had a summer job, you went to summer school.
I took a US GOVERNMENT course and TYPING! What I learned in both of these classes has been valuable and practical ever since!
2
For the rest of us typing class veterans, Mr. Bruni's reminiscence of his own experience strikes a familiar note. As always, beautifully written and a joy to read. Great closing line!
10
Amen, Frank. I actually had a guest, who is a Professor, ask me to teach him how to type, when we both were on our computers and he heard my fingers fly over the keyboard.
He now types as you describe. I thank my Nun, who convinced me to learn how to type, even though I had no interest in being a secretary.
That one skill has helped me in every position I ever held.
Hats off to typing!
5
I’m 70. My parents made me take typing in summer school. We made our son take typing in summer school. I hope he and his wife will make our grandson take typing in summer school. Typewriters may be gone but efficient use of the keyboard is essential for computer use. And that continued to be true through my professional life as a lawyer.
5
Mrs. Bernstein’s 8th grade typing class (on old, manual, Royal typewriters) was one of the best investments of a semester, ever. In time, my typing skills rivaled my mom’s (who had been an executive secretary for years), and I was in great demand in college, typing others’ papers for $1 per page.
And to this day I can get ideas written down without forgetting them far more quickly than scribbling them in longhand.
5
I've always thought that touch typists working in IT (programmers, SQL coders, database and network people working at the command line, etc. etc.) should automatically earn a couple thousand more due to our added efficiency. But alas, no, probably because we're often women.
2
Typing class for me was the summer between 7th and 8th grades (c. 1962) as I was bound for a college prep high school where typing and home ec and shop were unheard of. It was Latin (for everyone) and lots of STEM and rigorous English. In college I typed papers, then edited and typed them and made a tidy sum, paying my room and board fees. I learned to sew as a lark when I was an adult (that lack of home ec skills) which led to an entire business selling fabric for 15 years prior to retirement. Latin? Never did use that other than to impress my kids with my rudimentary knowledge of word origins. We worship athletic skills; other skills, not so much. Too bad.
4
In my high school typing was scheduled at the same time as an advanced math class, which seemed even at the age of 16 to be a gender based decision on the part of those who made the schedule. Of course I took the math class but then I taught myself typing (no class, just a book) over the summer. I never hit 90 wpm but I was and am a reliable 75.
Kids may type well today but they absolutely need to spend more time writing by hand. It doesn't need to be the kind of penmanship that was drilled into us, but without extensive practice handwriting students miss out on acquiring some important fine motor skills AND a hand brain link (muscle memory) that helps in learning other things.
4
Alas, I passed up typing class so I’ve spend the past 45 year hunting and pecking, as I am doing right now. However, instead of typing I took shop, another practical art that has served me well. Spending an hour sanding an old rocking chair Instills in one much of the same discipline that typing a 10 page paper does. Now if you will excuse me, I have a dishwasher to fix.
6
Typing class was the most valuable class I took in high school. Without question.
6
@Scott
I agree, Scott. I took typing in high school in 1961 or 1962. We had Royal and Underwood typewriters, manual, of course. Sometimes we typed to the tick-tick-tick of a metronome, and I loved that. A great experience that has touched every phase of my work, home and social life since then. Thank you, Mrs. C.
1
I took typing at Miami Senior High School in 1956. We had a blank keyboard and a replica of a real keyboard with all the letters on it in front, above the blackboard. We typed text from a steno book propped on a stand near our right hand. The teacher turned on a timer and when it rang, we stopped and counted the errors on our typed page. Skill level was measured as words per minute, less the errors. That was it, as a lesson plan.
Having studied classical piano for twenty years, with its endless scales, arpeggios, Hanon and Czerny, i thought it would be a breeze. The fun was in racing Jerry, my lifelong friend and senior prom date.
He always won, and grew up to be an eye surgeon.This past year, he went on to the Great Typing Class in the sky.
Thanks for the memories.
14
My memories of typing go back to high school. But it was an all-male military academy. My father was okay with me learning the “female” skill because he was a bartender and wanted his son to earn his living sitting down.
Our teacher was Capt. Bednard, who had been retired from the military for decades. Yet, because his service started in World War I, we took him seriously.
He took typing seriously, too. Every class began with warming up the fingers before we even touched the keys. Flexing each set of thumbs, index fingers, and so on to the pinkies. Then again. And again. After a few minutes, the Capt. thought we were ready to type.
Every error was 10 points off a 100-point assignment. Errors caught were announced with groans and barely mouthed curses. (The Capt. did not abide foul language.) Early classes were lessons in frustration. We often marched out in anger.
But over time we got better. Not necessarily good but better. I discovered that I was merely proficient when I got to college. The girl I was dating, who became my wife, worked in the college librarian’s office as a typist. (Yes, children, that was a real job title.) Her typing was the sound of rain on a roof. A downpour.
These formative experiences in skill-building were formal for those just entering the Information Age. Like learning set theory in math class and struggling with Latin vocabulary, we had no idea we were learning the basics of being educated.
I still do the finger exercises.
9
When computers firsts became available for my second grade classroom, I was determined that my students were going to learn how to type. I wonder how many of them remember the cardboard keyboards I laboriously created and the colored sticky dots that went on their fingernails to help them practice hitting the correct keys with each finger. I hate to admit that my grandsons are probably quicker at typing with their thumbs than those lovely second graders who worked so hard to be proper keyboarders.
4
I have always said that typing was the most useful thing that I ever learned in school other than learning to read. I first learned during middle school on a manual typewriter and having the skill of accurate typing helped me tremendously through high school, college and graduate school, and with almost every single job I have ever had.
6
My mum also sent me off to secretarial college after a lackluster repeated year in school. I particularly hated the typing class where hours were spent doggedly fingering the keyboard of an ancient manual typewriter, which was covered with a wooden hood so the letters and numbers could not be glimpsed. This was Sydney in the late 1960’s. My typing and shorthand skills (and English Mother tongue) allowed me to work in many countries and I have been profoundly grateful to my mum for standing her ground during that year of, what felt like, torture. A lovely column - as always - Mr. Bruni.
3
Worst mistake of my life was quitting typing in high school. I still feel like a 4 year old around a keyboard 20years later. My friend, however, who learned to type, worked the highest paying temp jobs and eventually opened up a court reporting business and makes close to 400,000 dollars a year.
Her transition to computers was seamless because the secretaries were trained first in the office. Even after pursuing a degree and opening my own company, I was always held back by my deficiency in typing and computer literacy.
I replaced typing with Foods and only learned that you can’t leave oil heating on the stove for very long
4
Lynne, your letter reminded me of a moment in junior high school, 1966, that I distinctly remember. We had just learned about the binary number system in math class. I hated math. I clearly remember walking to my next class thinking, “Who cares? When will I EVER use THAT?” Little did I know that the binary number system would lead to the revolutionary period we now live in: the Information Age. So ironic that I type this comment on my iPhone. But I did happily take touch typing—which has contributed greatly to my career as an editor (as did the marvelous invention of word processing).
1
Back in 1966 I took a high typing class in my last year. Eventually I was able to easily type over 60wpm with errors. Without a doubt this has been one of the most valuable skills I ever learned. Even in college I was able to make extra money tying other kids term papers. Good article and allowed me remember a fond time in my past.
3
My mother also encouraged me to take typing in high school, in the late 1950s. Knowing how to type got me through college, typing essays on a portable (luggable) typewriter. When personal computing came along, I was way ahead of the majority of my male colleagues who could not type. To this day, my fingers are on the home row and I type as I was taught some 60 years ago. I so agree with what you write, Frank. It is a skill to be nourished and cherished.
3
Two of the most useful classes I took in college we’re typing and swimming. I use the skills I learned in those classes till today and have only gotten better at both over the years. I find that I use my IPad more than my desktop these days, but truly miss having a real keyboard when I try to type anything. I have to search for letters that my fingers automatically know by heart when using a keyboard.
2
When I was in 6th grade, a few of us were deemed "gifted" and our "stimulation" was to learn to speed read and type. I was thoroughly bored by the experience, and have been thankful ever since. Both skills have been the backbone of my college experience as well as my 35 years of teaching. Speed reading educational journals is the "only" way to make it through them with your sanity intact.
2
Typing and Business Math. The two courses that added true value to my life. Taken in sophomore year of high school. My checking account was (is) always balanced and never overdrawn. To this day I type around 90wpm. Thanks Frank for your lovely appreciation of a valuable skill!
4
I started my teaching career teaching typing. A skill for your lifetime. Now, nearly 60 years later, I am reminded by past students I taught, how knowing how to type was the best course they ever studied. Many have said that it was the foot that got them through the door to a career in many varied fields. A salute to ASDFJKL;
10
Over 30 years ago I too took a year of H.S. typing. My father, gently suggested it and I'm so glad I listened. :-)
2
Hi Frank:
I am an acquaintance of your father.
When I was in high school I took a regents typing class.
I was (I think) the only boy in the class. I found the skill learned in this class to be invaluable to this day. I insisted that my children take "Keyboarding"
5
Not only did I take a semester of typing in high school on the 70s (most girls did) but I took shorthand — at the suggestion of my dad, who taught the only journalism course at Georgetown College. He said it would help if I became a reporter, and he was so right. I used it for 17 years as a journalist and still use it today. Along with the typing, of course.
8
@Fran Ellers I took typing in summer school when I was in high school and I am glad I did. However, when I was studying journalism in college in the 60s the dean of the college suggested to women like me that we not take shorthand because then we would get stuck in secretarial jobs. (That was fine with me since the shorthand class was at 8 a.m.) I never had a secretarial job, but I was in journalism and public relations for 30 years. Shorthand would have been helpful; typing was essential.
1
Whenever I reminisce with other people about high school I always remark that Typing is the best course I had there. That comment is very close to being true; I did have an interesting Modern European History course and Biology and Chemistry also held my interest, but the rest were very boring. (A plea: if you're a boring person, please don't become a schoolteacher). But typing was different, 20 or so of us, boys and girls, went into this room with a (mechanical) typewriter on every desk and for 43 minutes each morning, actually did something. It was similar to the experience of playing basketball, only we didn't sweat a lot. The class exuded life: the teacher barking out instructions over the clacking of 20 Underwoods, Royals, Smith Coronas, what have you, bells going off every time a student reached the end of a line; sometimes ribbons needed to be replaced, a messy job requiring ingenuity (loved by kids). And the greatest thing of all came much later when we typists went out into the world with a usable skill.
11
I also an excellent typist, but in my academic career I never let on. I was not going to be pushed into the thankless, job of taking the minutes in our interminable committee meetings (unless it served my purposes), and I certainly was not going to let the fellows feel justified in stealing all of our precious administrative support because i “didn’t need it.” It was my little enjoyable secret.
And speaking of skills learned that have been incredibly useful: A stint as a waitress was the best training I had for my career in Organizational Psychology.
7
Frank, you have made a keen observation. Of course any skill requiring hand-eye coordination whether it be typing, playing the piano, or golf requires achieving muscle memory by prolonged practice, in short, discipline. Until you know how to type, composing a theme may elude you; until you make the mechanics of playing the piano second nature, you cannot play the music, which after all is the goal. So it is with intellectual pursuits. Moliere, e.g., is so much more enjoyable if you have had the discipline to learn French and read it in the language in which it was written.
By making all accessible, and by making keyboards less mechanical and thus allowing one to ‘keyboard’ (you cannot call it typing) faster than one could type without putting in the time and discipline to learn the skill, ‘Technology’ provides the illusion that we have mastered the skills without putting in the work. Almost all endeavors require discipline to practice at a high level. Forego the discipline, and you are condemned to a hunt-and-peck life.
5
Thank you so much for this essay. Memories. For me, the two most valuable courses I ever had were typing and public speaking. I'm speaking from old age and old experience.
5
I learned to type in the military fifty-six years ago. Three hours of typing instruction followed by three hours of Morris code for six months.
I can type, like Frank, about the same speed as a person can talk. It has been a valuable skill for me throughout my life. As an undergraduate English major who could type, I made money typing masters papers for other people while in graduate school and do a lot of writing now.
It was a monotonous discipline, but it has served me well even now at seventy-five years old.
6
I had a father who every summer had me learn a different skill. "You can't just sit around all summer and do nothing", is one of my favorite quotes. Typing was my summer skill in the summer of '67. It was typing the numbers that slowed me down. How I hated the numbers... but I earned extra money in college typing term papers for many who were of the "peck peck" type. Thanks Mr. Bruni, glad to know there were parents out there who said "learn and do not "let me do it for you".
4
When I was a junior in high school my mother insisted I drop Chorus for a semester to take typing. I have always been grateful to her for that. I worked as a reporter and it came in very handy.
4
I can say the same, though not as elegantly, for my 10th grade typing class with Mrs. Biztritzky. One of the most valuable education/training experiences ever, in terms of payback over more than a half century.
8
Your memories are familiar to me. My mother wanted me to take typing class so I would have "something to fall back on" in case I didn't succeed at anything else. (Thanks for the vote of confidence, Mom!)
She said I could always get a job in the typing pool, or, maybe be a secretary if I added stenography class.
I never became a secretary, but excellent typing skills have proved valuable in many segments of my life, including writing. Seriously, thanks Mom.
7
Your column brought back a happy memory! The summer I was sixteen I decided I needed to know how to type. I don't know why I reached that conclusion, but I did. I can still see myself sitting at the end of a narrow wooden dock at a lake in New Hampshire, a small table in front of me. On it were a manual typewriter and a book of instructions on how to type. How many times I typed "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" I don't know, but it was enough so that I can still touch-type reasonably well many decades later. Even imperfect, as it with me, it's such a useful skill!
4
Mr Bruni, your excellent article brought back memories of my 7th grade typing teacher, Mrs Maxim, at Russell Sage Junior High School in Forest Hills, Queens. She was a martinet and made us perform useful but rather painful hand exercises I still remember to this day. Thanks to her, I was able to type about 80 wpm on an electric typewriter and even faster on a computer keyboard. I also hadn’t thought of the “home row” since 1973. Thank you!
10
I can relate. I learned to type in a summer school course in high school fifty-plus years ago, and it has stood me in very good stead since then, writing technical papers and proposals (including typing my 150-page PhD dissertation). (I also took shop in high school which has been a boon for all kinds of projects around the house). The one problem was that our family went on vacation the week the typing course covered the number row -- and I'm still kind of weak on that!
4
I just love this column, and especially all the lovely responses. Mr. Bruni, you have thousands of people thinking about their summer jobs (like mine, long ago), and everything, large and small, that we learned. Thank you for taking me back to the summer of 1978—if only for a little while, I was young again.
10
I remember typing class with fondness, too. And the phrase to type for my class was: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. Wow - timeless.
14
I remember that typing practice sentence as: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their PARTY. And that seems to be what is going on in Washington today.
1
Hah! I often say that despite my education and other developed skills that typing and 10 key (accounting!), are my two most important skills--all the more so with the transition from typewriters to wordprocessing (and spreadsheets).
These essential (oft overlooked) skills ensure that our interface with technology is not an impediment--and our work gets done quickl and accurately.
It is important to note, though, that our brain works differently when typing our thoughts v. handwriting (as any one who hand journals knows in addition to the science). Same is true when reading print from screen v. paper (which is why those typos which were not apparent on the screen show up magically on the printed form).
And now we have speech to type which may render all this moot........sniff!
3
When I took typing in high school I learned to type very well - and it certainly helped me later in my career as a computer programmer. When my husband took typing in high school he failed to learn to type. He spent his time typing me entertaining and funny notes. We’re married for 49 years now.
4
As a music major/ed minor college grad in the mid 1970's, jobs were scarce, so I did a year at the Special Program for College Women (yes, women) at Katherine Gibbs School in the PanAm Building in NYC. Mrs. Dora Sherwood, our "homeroom" teacher, and the other teachers taught us unemployed/unemployable college grad women how to take sten, type, balance a checkbook (so that we could do that for our - typically male - boss), dress for office work, interview, and answer a business telephone. 40+ years later, I can still taken down/transcribe stenography, am a terrific typist, and use all those skills as a Reform Cantor.
5
Thanks for a delightful read, and thanks as well for a small reminder of my own rather less delightful days in a long-ago high school typing class.
4
Typing was probably the most useful course I took in the 60's at my fancy Connecticut boarding school. Then came learning languages, the rote-learning of grammar and vocabulary. My mother was the one who helped hone writing skills, insisting that I say what I mean in the shortest clearest sentences.
4
Like you, Frank, my Mom suggested I take a typing course as an elective in high school. It was the most useful, practical course I took in high school! With the advent of the computer, my newly learned skill had me zipping around the keyboard at 54 words per minute as my friends did their “ hunt and peck” while I looked on with a bit of earned smugness. Thanks for this refreshing piece.
6
My mother, a flawless typist, told me in high school that if I learned to type, “some man will expect you to.”
I didn’t. It was the 70’s and my want of secretarial skills didn’t affect high school, college or law school, where even exams were in longhand.
In the 80’s and early 90’s lawyers had secretaries. Again, no typing needed from me.
When the first Dell arrived at the office my husband, an artist who had taken high school typing, encouraged me to master it. In a few months I typed like my mother, without the need for white-out, thank goodness.
It’s a terrific skill but nobody needs a class any longer. Now if only mastery of spelling and grammar were imparted by typing on a computer!
2
Best (most useful) class I ever took in high school even if it did ruin my GPA. I got an A in typing but my band director was so mad that I was taking a semester off from band to take typing, which met at the same time, that he gave me a B.
Fortunately, Harvard didn’t seem to mind.
4
One high school summer, I took typing, which built on eight grammar school years of classical piano lessons, so I thought this would be a breeze. It was and it wasn't. What I do remember is that on the daily one mile walk home, my feet were tapping out whatever thoughts came to mind. with lots of little hops and jumps. I guess typing classes are right up there with learning cursive.
4
It's nice to know I have so much good company in this endeavor. My mother taught me to type when I was 12 (and it took me about another 4 years of sporadic practice and a junior high school course to get really fast). I learned Gregg shorthand in high school, and I still use both skills today.
3
My mother always regarded herself as a feminist, although she would never go to a movie or show she wanted to see without my father. She went to secretarial school after graduating from Washington Irving High School, but had always wanted to go to college. I was years into the process of getting my Ph.D. in psychology when my mother said that I should make sure I knew how to type, "just in case." She never expanded what she meant-- that my marriage might fail and I would have to support myself, or I would not be able to find a job with a Ph.D.? I did type my proposal [on a typewriter] and my dissertation [on a dedicated word processor].
2
Thank you Frank-
This brought back memories of the most useful college course I took- I was the only guy in the class and did learn how to type
although it was clear I'd never make it as a secretary....
But until the advent of the computer age in the 80's, I was in a minority of males who could type...
3
A fine piece; thank you! I remember sitting alone in my Brooklyn studio apartment in 1980, unemployed, teaching myself to type from an instruction book because most of the jobs advertised in the “help wanted” pages of the Times seemed to require typing skills.
My 30 year old nephew made a comment recently that bothered me. He said he thought you could learn to do almost anything by researching it online. Looking at a nearby door, he said he thought he could make a door by looking it up online and working at it for a couple of weeks. I myself, having some background in furniture making, know how making something like a door requires skill acquired over a long period of time, through meticulous, painstaking, and often frustrating and boring practice. I fear that an understanding and appreciation of craftsmanship is lost on many of the internet generation.
17
Life is a series of rote exercises to put achieved skills in your toolbox. First we learn to walk--an incredibly complex but inate task--then to tie our shoelaces, then to type (as Mr. Bruni has lovingly described), then to master the elements of our life's work.
In my case in the practice of medicine, it was mostly learning how to ask questions efficiently and with empathy and humanity making the responses most useful to solving human concerns and difficulties.
Clearly though, typing was one of the stepping stones.
6
A walk down Memory Lane was this. I attended All Saints High School in Brooklyn in 1959 and throughout my four years there learned typing on a manual typewriter as well as Pitman stenography and transcription. Our tests were for speed and accuracy. I went on some years later to college and then law school and used both my sten and typing skills for note taking and writing. As an attorney those skills kept me in good stead as I spoke with attorneys and clients. Today, some 58 years later, I still use both skills during board meetings and to take minutes. Learning such skills is like learning another language; it stimulates our brains and opens new pathways.
6
Never was able to master typing in the class and failed it. As a nervous tester, the timed testing did me in no matter how much I practiced. I froze. Computers made it possible for me to type easily but I am still nervous around computers as the result of that class. Lucky kids with the programs that teach keyboard skills in elementary school.
2
When I was in grad school back in the early 1970s, everyone was still tied to the typewriter — manual or electric. I had a class with four other students and a professor who liked to have us over to his house where, over sherry, we would have to share our required papers and critique them brutally but fairly.
One night it was my turn in the gauntlet. I distributed my gem for everyone to read. Near dead silence ensued, with only an occasional sip of sherry. Minutes passed. Finally, the professor politely cleared his throat and murmured “any thoughts?”
Papers were shuffled. My fellow students shifted uneasily in their overstuffed chairs. A weak voice emerged seemingly as if from a ghostly spirit: “Well, this was one of the best typed papers I have ever seen.”
9
Before my high school freshman year my father suggested I take a typing class. That was the smartest advice anyone has ever given me. It is painful to hear my husband hunt and peck at the computer. I did stop learning when we got to numbers and symbols so I remain something of a feeb there. I volunteer in a community kitchen where meals are prepared to exacting measurements according to the contract with the Department of Agriculture. Thus a lot of arithmetic goes on. I have noticed that these people under thirty, cannot do simple math in their heads. The supervisor is 30 or so and carries a calculator with her. So everyone out there, raise your hands if you remember the slide ruler.
7
I'd be surprised if you hadn't accumulated the 10,000 hours of practice that Gladwell discusses in "Outliers".
2
I took typing in Jr. High School. It was an optional class (if I remember - one of the few - now 60 years later). I did so mostly because I had been impressed with my father's typing skill - something he often did at home in evenings for his job (typing up sales orders or something like that). I can remember nothing about the class itself (e.g., if I was only male?, teacher's name?, or anything) ... but it has been a very helpful skill all my life. Nothing I'd put on a resume, but gave me - esp. when I was young - a certain confidence that I could have at least one skill.
2
When I was a sophomore or junior in high school, a family friend / lawyer gave me the best advice I never took, which was to learn how to type and learn how to take shorthand. I followed half the advice: every school-day morning of my senior year, I went to typing class, and learned just like you. Excellent instruction. The next year I went to college and then on to graduate school and then on to a career of seemingly taking notes and writing. From the first moment I could write away on typewriters and soon after that on computers -- but I forever wished I had learned shorthand too.
3
The town I grew up in in Illinois had a business college that offered a summer program which consisted of typing, basic accounting and vocabulary. My father enrolled me during the summer between my 6th and 7th grades. It was four hours of repetition every day for eight weeks as I competed against mostly high school aged students. But I learned a skill that probably saved my life. When I went to Vietnam and was about to be sent off to the front line, an officer announced that a typist was needed and asked if anyone in the crowd could type 35 words a minute. I volunteered, took a test and typed 120 words a minute. I was immediately assigned to the Casualty Division of the First Cav Airborne where I was put in charge of typing letters to the next of kind of the killed and missing in action. It was a gruesome, heartbreaking job for 12 hours a day but not as gruesome and heartbreaking as it was for those men who faced a firing line every day.
24
So true. My first drudgery was learning long addition. Miss Mayer an old-fashioned and elderly third grade teacher said: "No recess for you, Mary, until you do all your long addition." I learned to sit still and concentrate and just do it! If you can find the old children's book "Understood Betsy", read it. Old time schooling, concentration, real information, taught to MASTERY!
What a concept. Self confidence is truly boosted by mastery of a skill. No wiggle room, no sliding by: real mastery. Math, typing, carpentry, whatever.
5
Thanks for this, Frank. It brought me right back to the summer of 1965 when my brother and I were "encouraged" by our mother to take typing at the local high school, since we couldn't work and would benefit from the skill. Like your mother, she was correct. We have benefitted in so many ways ever since. I'm forwarding your article to him now.
3
In high school I took typing because that's where the girls were, even though I developed some skill.
Looking back on my long career now, learning to type, given how much I had to do in an ordinary day, became the most useful subject I can recall.
Now my comments here and my twitter exercises make my typing class time well spent. I don't recall making any headway there with the girls though.
7
My grandparents gave me a manual typewriter for Christmas when I was 5. I spent all of elementary school writing short stories in the afternoons, so by fifth grade in the late 80's I was like demonically fast. I like your story
5
I laughed like a loon when I read this article! A typing class was compulsory in my middle (!) public school in Brooklyn, NY in the 1950s. I still remember the keyboard on the blackboard and my typewriter keys blacked out.
8
My mother's highest ambition for me was that I become a secretary. Nevertheless, I persisted with my natural ability and ended up as an Art Director. She insisted that I take shorthand and typing in high school, and, grumbling, I did so. So, I sat in a classroom of thirty girls stationed at 80-lb. Royal manuals and typed endless quirky sentences that I still remember to this day. Although I resented it at the time, I am eternally grateful that I had these classes. Shorthand was great for note-taking, and typing is something I continue to do every day at the Mac as I continue to create in semi-retirement. Thanks, Mr Bruni, for a very good article.
7
Great article, Frank. Sixty years ago at summer school, between Sophmore and Junior year in high school, was where I learned to type. I remember being terrified when I saw that the typewriter keys had no letters on them. How will I ever learn? But I did and the skill was instrumental in getting interesting summer jobs at the Telephone Company, while I was in college. I have maintained the skill while using my computer. Since I have no cell phone I do marvel while watching people using two thumbs to compose texts. But on my computer keyboard, I rule! Thanks for the bit of nostalgia, Frank!
3
You’re so right, Frank Bruni: What seems like mind numbing repetition is actually the most elegant educational tool. Constant repetition in learning a task, such as typing, allows the brain in your head to learn to relax while the brains in your fingers practice muscle memory.
My high school analogy to your typing adventure was the summer I spent in Mr. Bennett’s remedial English class. I didn’t really need a remedial English class, but surely needed a remedial Algebra class. Since I was going to spend the summer in a classroom, My mother thought a second course would help me, and enrolled me in Mr. Bennett’s class. It turned out to be a grammar and punctuation class at the intensity of Marine Corps Basic Training. Our primary job was to find, cut out from magazines, and mount onto typing paper with rubber cement twenty examples of each rule we were learning. It was an arduous task, but it was also a game- reading random articles in various old magazines looking for examples that expressed a rule of grammar or a particular use of punctuation. This in-depth, meta approach to grammar and punctuation taught me to read for structure while also reading for content. Even though that summer school class was fifty-eight years ago, the analytical discipline I learned has carried me to today, where I do academic research on technical aspects of the history of Photography. I see things others miss because six decades ago I learned how to read between the lines.
31
@Matt Cook Lucky you...what a fine way to learn grammar. In my school days, it was all about sentence diagramming. Of course, we all hated it. And, of course, it's been extraordinarily valuable over the years.
1
I took the typing course offered by my high school. As a young adult I found relatively lucrative work as a "word processor" and that helped me work my way through graduate school. When I began writing computer code, the skill found a real home - I could write an algorithm as quickly as I could imagine it.
Today I teach software development. Some of my students type well, others not so much. It makes difference.
5
Speedily composing this comment on my Mac, without looking at the keyboard, I remember my high school typing instructor Miss Haehn's disciplined and weirdly serious tutelage. Most of all, however, I recall my glee at beating out my equally determined classmate, Gail, to emerge by the end of the semester as the speediest typist in the class, with the fewest mistakes. There was no prize, and no reward, but ample satisfaction at developing a skill that has served me exceptionally well over the many years.
One can minimize and scoff at the value of effortless touch typing, but having spent decades successfully leading complex corporate finance and investment banking businesses after achieving two graduate degrees, I still consider my blindfolded proficiency on a QWERTY keyboard, learned at the University of Chicago High School, to be something that made me much more efficient and self-reliant than I otherwise might have been.
Sightless touch typing has been far more useful than my facility at handcrafting linear optimization and simplex tableau models learned as part of my later MBA program at the same aforementioned institution. Yes, Enrico Fermi may have developed the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under the Stagg Field bleachers at the U of C, home numerous Nobel Prize winners, but I learned how to type on that campus. Gail couldn't touch that, and I haven't blown anything up.
11
Frank, my teenage experience is the mirror image of yours. During the summer I turned fifteen, I saw an ad for a typing class and asked my mother if I could take it. She said I would never have to type because I would always have a Secretary. In college I befriended a Secretary in the admin office who typed my my hand-written work. Ditto for the first decade of my career. However, when personal computers became ubiquitous ( and secretaries became scarce) I found myself spending my evenings learning to type!
6
I was born and raised on Long Island in the 70’s and my high school emphasized typing, secretarial and business classes. There were contests for students at my high school competing with other schools in the region for speed and accuracy in typing. Well, guess who came in first place for speed and accuracy? Yours truly! I was chosen by a Wall Street firm to become an employee in 1978 upon graduation as a secretary. Using that job as a stepping stone I am successful now, sans college, thanks to my business prowess and my willingness to accept rote assignments throughout my career.
10
As an educator, I routinely told my students to take typing in high school. As many here have noted it is the one skill I learned in high school that I use every day. Like Frank Bruni’s mother, I also insisted that both my daughters take typing.
We have lost many skills that used to be considered necessary, including cursive writing, which is reflected in the sad state of personal signatures. In an age where information is available at a touch on a computer screen, and babies play with their parent’s mobile phones, perhaps the discipline of having to learn a skill that requires concentration, and yes, perhaps boredom, a skill that forces us to focus in an increasingly chaotic world, might be an advantage beyond the obvious one of having fingers fly over the keyboard or having a legible signature.
4
I appear to be in excellent company here. My typing and shorthand classes in a secretarial school for Young Ladies back in the Fifties were self-imposed. I had graduated high school and set out on a journalism career with the local newspaper to realise i lacked some basic skills.. I was shy and intimidated by my classmates when I should have been attracted to them like a bee to nectar but I lasted long enough to master touch typing proficiency with the alphabet keys To this day I have to slow my pace for numeric keys and uppercase commands. When eventually I became an editor we administered tests editing strangled prose to prospective interns. That, plus a typing test. I was staggered by the number of applicants with otherwise sterling CV's who disqualified themselves with the response that their teachers discouraged typing skills because they might get stuck in lower paying jobs.
3
Frank, thank you for this essay. I agree that in learning to type one must embrace the dull repetition required. It is a satisfying thing to type quickly and precisely.
2
I failed typing in high school because I took it during the year that I learn how to cut classes. In the 1970 to 1971 school year, typing seemed like a good class to skip because I was not planning to be a secretary. But I did attend enough classes to learn the QWERTY keyboard. In college, I typed enough papers to attain proficiency.
If you had told me in high school that the typewriter would become obsolete in my lifetime, but typing would be an essential skill, I never would have believed it!
7
So true, Frank! As a high school dropout who later went on to get a BA and MA, the only advice I have for my nieces and nephews for course selection is: take as many typing classes as you can! Thirty-five years on, it’s a skill I still use everyday.
2
I grew up in a small town in Michigan which sounds like it was pretty progressive because EVERYONE took typing. You had to do so. It was part of the core curriculum.
Later in college I was a bit astounded how many people could not type. This was at the dawn of the computer age, which is to say I studied that too, but computer time was expensive and punch cards had to be accurate. It wouldn't do to burn through your meager cash allotment for running programs because your typing was poor.
I'm feeling old this morning. Which I almost never do.
2
About sixty years ago I decided to take a typing class when I was a junior in high school. Touch typing continues to be one of the most useful skills I've ever learned. Many people may not realize that for at least twenty-five years there has been wonderful software available to help children learn keyboarding skills. In the early nineties when I was an elementary school administrator, we introduced all second graders to touch typing. I was amazed at how quickly seven year old children could become very proficient typists.
5
The IBM Selectric is one of the great inventions of mankind; it deserves a wing in the Smithsonian. Alas I had to go through college in an earlier era with a massive Royal manual that was, in its own way, Mercedes-like in its touch and feel.
7
I never learned to type because my mom was afraid that if my sister and I learned, that's how we were destined to make a living. Even more than today, back in the 50's and 60's a woman was much more likely to be the secretary than the boss.
I had my own reasons for being reluctant. I have always been a writer and was used to the coordination of taking the thoughts from my head, to my hand, to my pen, to my paper - and I was afraid that wouldn't translate well to the interjection of an unfamiliar keyboard.
Eventually pressure - and the siren song of easy editing won me over. No longer did I have to literally "cut and paste", or make messy "cross out's".
I never did take Frank's advice and learn to type - even online. And now it's too late. My arthritic and bent fingers can't assume the "home row" position, and they will never "fly" again over anything - not even a keyboard.
But I agree that we need to learn to function while bored - a necessary skill for any adult.
9
@Nancy Parker--i understand what you say about composing by hand. While I primarily write on a computer I often go back to pen and paper when I am struggling to articulate something.
1
My mother supported our family as a secretary with 120 words a minute (she was a great pianist too.). She put my dad through school this way. He later returned the favor: but she was not, on the whole, enthusiastic that I learn to type.
1
I am still a "touch typist" although now on a laptop keyboard. I can watch the screen as I compose rather than watching my fingers. Although there were the intrinsic benefits of rote learning cited by Mr Bruni, there was the real stress of taking typing tests expected during job interviews in the 1960s: on average, 65 words per minute with no more than 3 errors. Checking the typing requirement on job announcements was part of the job hunt.
4
I was one of two boys in a high-school typing class back in the late 70's. I probably took it to avoid shop class -- I was horrible at carpentry. I was equally horrible at typing compared to most of my classmates, many of whom became administrators. Regardless, the payoff from that class was enormous. I typed many term papers in college, only a fraction of which were my own. I was happy to help out my friends. That flowing finger feeling was a treat in itself, only occasionally interrupted by white-out artistry -- I was also a bad painter. As a computer scientist, I have enjoyed a long relationship with keyboards, and I cannot imagine how unpleasant those decades would have been if spent hunting and pecking.
5
@Keith Downing Keith, this is very similar to my experience. High school, mid-60's, only one or two other guys in the class. Took it to avoid a shop class. Took the final test on an unmarked keyboard - came in around 40 words per minute. Not bad, but not all that good. Like you, I typed term papers for others in college (but for a fee - I needed the money). I've been working in the publishing business for over 35 years. Typing class, for me, was the most useful class in 4 years of high school.
4
In the early 1960s, I took a summer-school typing class at Sycamore Junior High School in Anaheim. It was one of the smartest moves I ever made. That skill served me extremely well throughout a 39-year career at The Press-Enterprise newspaper in Riverside, CA.
2
I learned to type in the mid '60s, back when there was no "1" or "0" on the keyboard - one would use a lower case L or an uppercase O. To this day, my fingers still occasionally wander back into that territory.
The keys were covered and we had to look at an overhead chart to determine which finger correlated with a lettered key.
That typing class helped make my career. Also took shorthand classes, a skill that I still use.
6
@Chris. V
My mom knew shorthand and I still remember her notebooks filled with the elegant curls and curves of the "language" I never learned to decipher. It was lovely and allowed her to take notes at breakneck speed - something I would have appreciated in all those college lectures.
Still - the notes had to be transcribed...
2
My mom, too, forced me to learn to type back in the late 1970s. I later carted my portable manual typewriter to college and typed all my papers on it until I graduated in 1984. I still have them, stored in a plastic box, an anachronism of an earlier time. But if we had PCs back then, the floppy disk they would have been copied to would have long ago wound up damaged or in the garbage, along with the computer those papers would have been typed on.
I was cleaning out my closet for a move recently and re-read those papers. One of them, from 1982, was about how the emergent cable television industry was going to erode and disperse viewership and, eventually, kill the big television networks by giving viewers so much more choice. I also raved about their subscription model, which allowed them to offer programming without commercials or other advertising to annoy and distract the viewer.
So if my mom never forced me to learn to type, the evidence of my clear brilliance as a media futurist might have been lost to the dustbin of history. As our humble president would say, I was a very stable genius (and also good with White Out, as those yellowed papers show).
10
I had a similar experience one summer in my teen years. Best time investment I ever did.
2
Thanks to my typing skills I became the valedictorian of my high school class back in 1973. Many of my academic friends then did not think much of the class we had, but I did, realizing that typing was a life-long skill. I beat out two others — the salutatorians — and some others because I worked my tail off, staying after school often with the typing teacher, typing away. Thanks for this wonderful reminder, Frank. Typing and cursive rock.
6
You are spot on. The best class I ever took was typing in Junior High School. It was a skill that enabled me to transition nicely to computer typing. The IBM Selectric was a wonderful tool for a college student in the early 1980's. So far, I'm not at all impressed with the basic skill levels of the iGen. No patience, few skills, and an inherent lack of conversation to boot.
2
At Christmas when I was thirteen, my parents gave me a portable typewriter in a nifty case. That thing must have weighed 30 pounds, and I loved it. It came with an instruction book full of charts and exercises. My mom, who was an excellent typist and drill sergeant, demanded that I "do it right." No hunting. No pecking. No cheating. The whole keyboard ballet fascinated me. Once I ventured out from "home row," I became obsessed. I practiced on an imaginary keyboard wherever I happened to be, typing out sentences I wrote in my head and poems I had memorized. It was fun, and I got faster, but it did generate some strange looks from fellow travelers every time I took the bus to the movies and typed on my knees all the way downtown. When I was growing up, my dad told me I couldn't leave home until I knew how to swim, drive, and type. Wise man, my dad. Thanks for sparking the memories, Frank.
5
It's not called typing anymore, Frank. It's called keyboarding, and it is still a skill that needs to be learned. My mother the secretary sent me to typing school the summer before freshman year of high school, and my 100 wpm still impresses those who watch.
Today there are the kids who manage 25 wpm, texting on a smartphone. At least modern devices have taught them brevity, a useful skill in many writing assignments.
5
Thank you, Frank Bruni, for a true and insightful life story! So much more than an Opinion piece.
4
I have similar experiences with typing classes and this certainly dates me. While there are now many ways to commit thoughts to archival data, I found that there is still nothing more efficient than touch typing. It may be more important that when you don't have to focus on the mechanics of data entry, you can focus more on content.
2
When I was twelve, my father bought me an old office standard manual Remington typewriter, along with a book on touh-typing. Learn he said, and for some reason, I paid attention, and did. My university colleages ask how I write so fluidly, and prolificly, without neglecting scholarly rigor and discipline as an historian.
Now, they have the answer.
4
Typing was the single most valuable thing I *ever* learned in school, bar none. Sometimes at cocktail parties, whatever, when people would ask me what I did, I'd say I was a typist. And it was true ... I was typing Fortran, C, assembler code, Java, C#, Python, etc. Sometimes it also comes in handy in NY Times comments ;-)
13
Me too. I took typing as a summer school course between 9th and 10th grades (around 1959), and it became a key still underlying my studies and work ever since. One reason was that I had terrible handwriting. Also, my dad could type, and from a young age I liked playing with his typewriter. I went from his Underhill to the portable I took to college, a Hermes 3000 that I still hold onto in case of apocalyptic grid failure. I then spent years writing on teletypes, IBM Selectrics, and many PCs since my first TRS-80 in 1981. Here's to qwerty.
10
My Dad always said every kid should know how to type and swim.
For my kids I've added cook a meal and sew on a button.
136
@Marie
and cleaning up? my husband cooks ... but i dread the cleaning /washing up that someone else has to do, after ...
1
My mother taught me to type on an old Underwood typewriter. Over and over I would type “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” I became very proficient at it before going to college where I typed many a paper. Thanks for the memories.
7
When I was in high school drama, a professional actor came in to talk to us about working in the industry. He advised us, "If you want to be an actor, learn to type," because it would guarantee the temp jobs we would need to get by.
He was right. That was thirty years ago, and I am still glad I took his advice.
9
Your article brings back good memories. When I had a typing class in junior high, I was also learning to play the piano. There was much cross-over. Both the piano and typing teachers used a metronome to keep the tempo. And 'home row' and middle C were landing places. Today my fingers can fly across the piano keyboard faster than on a QWERTY keyboard. Maybe one day I'll be able to compose an email on the piano!
16
I came at it a different way, but typing for a living and learning to write and edit at speed has served me well all my life. Like Frank Bruni, I learned to transcribe almost in real time. I also learned a range of editing tricks, since meeting deadlines with highly technical material was my job. I believe it also increased my reading comprehension and ability to concentrate. I'd add a basic life drawing class for another kind of valuable reality check.
9
Both my parents typed as part of their vocations. My dad was a television news producer who nimbly used the “hunt and peck” method and my mom was a graduate of the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School who typed for a living. I was fascinated by typing from childhood and was glad to take the class in high school.
Today I find typing relaxing. Earlier in my career I was a legal secretary and I actually enjoyed getting a really meaty document or dictaphone tape that would have to be transcribed.
When I began my career, most documents and correspondence were still created on a typewriter. In addition to Bruni’s appreciation of the computer backspace key, I’ll add a shoutout to the alignment and the table functions. I DO NOT miss having to calculate tab stops!
47
This article is spot on. I was asked to give a talk once, on the most important skill I had learned that paid off in my career. I spoke of learning to type and noted many of Mr. Bruni's points...typing was persistence, practice, and eventually success. Such a simple recipe, really...!
10
My parents sent me to live with my 26 year old physician sister in Atlanta from Africa when I was just turning 12. I was a precocious science and math student and as a result was skipped into 9th grade. On hearing that, my father wrote to my sister that I was to be required to read a book a week and take the school's typing course for a full year. He felt that was the rounding out my school life required. At the time, I thought he was insane. I joined ROTC and played soccer and American football to make up for being in the sissy typing class. Alas, my father was right...I learnt not only to type but to write more cogently, work hard, master seemingly mundane tasks and I met some smart, hard working (and good looking) young women in that class. Thanks, Dad.
41
Frank, I wish you had told us on what kind of typewriter you learned your craft. Was it an IBM Selectric? Its heyday may have been a decade before your class, but in the early- to mid-70's, they were the coolest things ever. I will never forget the crisp feel of those keys. And changing the ball head for a different font--or italics!--was more fun than drinking cheap beer at the local drive-in movies on a Saturday night.
Thank you for your piece, and especially the emphasis mid-essay on the flagging attention span of young people today (and we know it's not just young people). As a college teacher who gives very little homework (maybe I'm contributing to the problem?), all I expect from my students is that they pay attention and contribute to discussions in a way that shows they are actually paying attention. If twenty percent of them can achieve this, I feel as though I've been a huge success.
Thanks for your piece, a welcome diversion from what usually preoccupies us these days. Your prose is always such an absolute joy!
11
I am sure that schools could come up with a very compelling rubric for typing performance today...planning, autonomy, dexterity, language construction. Quite frankly, my struggles through high school typing did teach me the above, but in 1982 it was just an IBM Selectric and an abundance of correction ribbon. Reflecting back to the days before the word processor and electronic corrections, there was a sense of fear that you would make a mistake, need to retype the entire page, or somehow manage to align the correction tape or whiteout with the original version. (Whatever do kids today do with all the time and energy saved sans the fear and effort of the correction?) Ironically, it did teach me autonomy. I needed to accept my fallibility and correct my errors. They were there for everyone to see...in pica type...black and white. I couldn't call someone to fix it, delegate to an associate, or bury it for later. I needed to assume responsibility and remedy the situation. Cursing ensued as the footnotes simply didn't align and paragraphs were reworded to fit within the margins without retyping entire pages. Real life is like an electric typewriter. We can't just simply delete or reboot. Forgiveness and second chances are humanity's correction tape. They too are not invisible, nor perfect, but they show the effort. Maybe today kid's do indeed have time to learn more, but first they need to learn to be the best person they can in order to use it.
9
My parents sent me to a business college one summer to learn typing. I failed miserably; I couldn't master the skill. I was devastated! It was the beginning of my acceptance of my Essential Tremor that I inherited from my father. My parents divorced when I was four years old and I rarely saw him. So I didn't really associate my typing problem with his pronounced tremor.
2
When I was young journalist back in the olden days I was a whiz on the IBM Selectric, thanks to that typing class I took in high school.
Like Frank, I could transcribe interviews verbatim with the phone tucked under one ear (no speaker phone in a newsroom!!) If my sources claimed they were misquoted, I could read the conversation back to them word for word.
And like so many others who comment, this skill got me summer jobs in college and extra income from typing my dorm mates term papers (on my high school graduation present, an Olympia portable.)
Thanks, Frank, for bringing back such great memories!!
6
I took typing in high school for a whole semester. It served me well with my manual typewriter I shared with my twin sister at the University of Michigan as an English major. And in jobs since in corporate communications and freelance writer. I'm very swift and able to get thoughts down quickly, maybe not flawlessly, but it's really part of my thinking process. Kudos, Frank.
6
In my suburban Chicago school system, typing class was mandatory for all 7th graders. I laughed reading Bruni's piece about home row--takes me way back. It was enervating to sit in that class but it was a skill I've always been glad I had. Beginning when I was a teenager applying for jobs, my mother told me to not tell potential employers that I could type--she thought it would condemn me to the secretarial pool. All through my professional career, I've had to write for publication and I never had a secretary to do this for me; many thanks to my middle school!
In a separate, but related, observation, my children were never formally taught how write (by hand)--they were just left to figure it out on their own. As a child, I was taught first block letters and then finally in 6th grade we were allowed to learn cursive. I can still close my eyes and see how the teacher formed cursive letters that are then melded into words. Yes, my children are great on keyboards but their writing is illegible. A lost art that I do mourn.
10
The most useful class I took in high school was freshman typing. But, this article is about life in general. Work hard and learn to concentrate on a skill, no matter what that might be, math, carpentry, basketball, or writing.
11
Great column, which brings back memories. At my aunts’ insistence, I took typing in high school. To my surprise, I was not only good at it—I had always been a klutz when it came to manual dexterity—but I also enjoyed it. I had part-time typing jobs all through college, and a summer job of typing a bibliography of Chaucer led to a 49-year career in publishing.
16
Most valuable high school class I took was typing back in the 70s. I was the only boy in a “nonacademic”track class, but it was a valuable skill for college. And I only took it as I assumed the presecretarial girls would be the prettiest at the school
8
What a great column. Thanks for sharing. I took typing my senior year in high school, and did okay. I did just okay through college, typing papers on an electric typewriter. It wasn't until my late twenties when I as the only secretary for a bunch of parole officers that my IBM Selectric and I learned to speedily churn out perfect transcriptions of tapes. Decades later, in my 60's, my job was the best match for my skill set I ever had. I transcribed police reports (working on a computer now). I fixed the grammar, the spelling, organized the composition, proofread, and returned a finished transcription the very same morning. They loved me. And I didn't have to deal with the public, money, or even coworkers. The sweetest compliment I got was from the cop who wrote "You always make it sound like I know what I'm doing."
23
Mrs. Kyle was my 10th grade typing instructor. 40 years later I still fondly remember taking her typing tests on a manual typewriter, with a blank keyboard.
The tangible and intangible skills that came from her class were incredibly valuable in the years that followed.
6
I must admit--after reading Bruni's piece--that perhaps one of the most important classes I ever took was a class I never completed.
It was my seventh to eighth grade summer and my parents insisted I take two classes that summer that were both useful and pragmatic. So I picked typing and drafting, things that I thought would be of use: typing because I watched by older brother do his Hemingway thing with the family portable when it was time to type his high school papers and drafting because I fancied myself an architect one day. I discovered, after a time, typing was easier than architecture.
After learning in the first week of class that it all began with the "home row" on my assigned 1917 Underwood No. 5 and its power and efficiency in controlling the rest of the keyboard, I disappeared from the class. I had learned all I needed to know and spent the time reading in 31 Flavors waiting for my drafting class to begin.
Both I've used throughout my life, whereas the others that followed in eighth grade, not so much, especially French--Ja ney say paw.
2
Many, many years ago, I also took a summer school typing course with two sisters who were family friends. They mastered the instruction. I embarrassingly did not, maxing out at some miserably low number of correct words per minute. My punishment for finger ineptitude was underwriting some of the college expenses, probably beer in recollection, for a classmate who, thankfully, typed my course papers over the span of three years. Now in a continuing, decades-long penance, I search and peck for the correct letters on my I-pad, like I’m doing now. Sigh.
4
New York City schools had two tracks in the late 1960s: academic and commercial. My working class parents forced me to choose the latter, even though I was in the Special Progress program (also gone from the landscape?) and skipped eighth grade. I was forced to take typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping while my peers studied calculus and chemistry. It was humiliating and left me at a slight disadvantage when I started college against my parents’ wishes—they incorrectly believed that as a woman, I would always have a place in the secretarial pool and shouldn’t aspire to more then that.
Retired now from an executive career and teaching part-time on the university level, I can’t say with truthfulness that I’m grateful for the high school commercial track or for my late parents’ faulty belief system, but at least I can type quickly without looking at the keyboard. It’s a small but significant takeaway.
I’m happy to know, Mr. Bruni, that your own takeaway is
loftier than mine.
13
My parents insisted that I take a typing class in high school. Out of all the classes I've taken this one has been the most useful. I didn't want to take it. I complained about taking it. It was boring. And yet, over 40 years later, I'm a good typist. This skill, more than any other skill I learned, has served me well. I use it nearly every day.
There's a lot to be said for learning by rote, for having standards, and for saying that there is only one way to do something. Typing is one of those things. But rote memory is what enables us ignore the particulars and go on to the abstract side of things whether we know it or not.
8
Hi hen3ry,
I think that a lot of the skills which ultimately serve us well in life are met with yawns or outright resistance in our early years. That sure was the case for me: typing, cooking, changing a litter box, learning a foreign language, writing personalized thank you cards, all things whose worth became clear only with time.
Thanks, as always, for writing.
6
In 1972, when I was in high school, the only typing classes offered were for students (overwhelmingly girls) who wanted to become secretaries. The keyboards were blank. My parents forced me to take the class since I would be going to college (only a third of my class went to college after graduation). I eventually got to 50 words a minute, and barely eked out a "C" in the course. It hurt my GPA, but it was immensely useful in college.
By the time my younger brothers got to high school, they offered a pass/fail typing course. They really can't type to this day.
Thanks, Frank, for a reminder that it's worth it to learn the right way to do things.
11
My freshman elective choices in high school were typing or band. My mother pushed band for me to make money for college. I was obviously tone deaf, but neither of us noticed that problem. So it became hapless band and no typing. In med school I applied for a summer scholarship abroad and it was awarded contingent upon finding someone to type my submission on a deadline. I barely made it. 30 years later electronic medical records became mandatory, my practice became onerous for the first time, and I chose to retire. Little mistakes can produce unintended consequences that follow one through a lifetime!
10
I too took a summer high school typing class in the early 1960s. Several weeks, half-days. I got pretty good at it. That has been an advantage to me ever since.
However, with degeneration beginning in my fingers, and the lousy Apple keyboard that came with my computer, I am more error-prone. So proofreading (also apparently a lost art, just throw it out there), moving the cursor, and the Delete key to retype is used. The software designed to complete words is not helpful. (The man who invented Auto-Correct has died. May he restaurant in peace.)
I am looking to buy an IBM-style wireless keyboard to improve things. They made the best keyboards in history.
7
"... the lousy Apple keyboard ..."
What model, and what makes it "lousy"?
"... an IBM-style wireless keyboard ..."
There are numerous alternative keyboards. Try a search for "ergonomic keyboard" and "big key keyboard" at a well-known online retailer.
2
Thank you, Mrs. Crain. Our first day in typing class (probably 1959) she told us there might be days when we would want to throw our typewriters (manual) out the window. But that if we were patient -- and always remembered that it was accuracy first and then speed -- that we would succeed. I started out typing much more slowly than my classmates -- but I wasn't making mistakes. Yay! And my speed increased.
Like many of the commenters, typing served me well (still does), working my way through school as a secretary and then through my teaching career. Great skill to have! Thank you for stirring these memories!
6
When my older by 5 years brother entered his senior year of high school, my parents gave him a portable Royal typewriter, carrying case included. And he took that splendid instrument off to college with him. And because I was curious, the instruction manual of the "touch" system was my textbook to learning. As a longtime piano student--so was my brother--I found it easier and easier to look at the source material and not my fingers nor the keys. Speed was irrlevant. I was in the 8th grade. But as a senior in high school, my schedule suddenly offered a free period and I signed up to audit a typing class for "study hall credit." And that's when I improved my rate and accuracy. I truly cannot remember the teacher, her name and what she looked like and she basically ignored me as my attendance was perfect. Timed drills made me competitive and she seemed to like that. That semester's work proved one of the best moves ever. And at university, not only could I write essays for fraternity brothers, fees expected, I could also type them--additional fees. Those skills learned eons ago still serve me well even though I am a tech dinosaur, the keyboard I am using to type this doesn't require my ogling it.
4
I deeply envy all who learned to touch-type on a keyboard of a "writing machine", typewriter, and then computer. All the mistakes I make in my two- to four-finger typing, I attribute to "cerebral-digital inadequacy, coupled to a lack of attention to the text on the screen".
7
My CFO dad who got his degree via the GI Bill after WWII insisted that his kids take typing in high school, circa 1975. He had worked his way up as an accountant, and typing was a key skill when he had his own CPA business.
I got a "D" in high school typing because the teacher thought I was looking at the keys even though I was as fast and error-free as anyone in the class. I dropped it, and it saved my GPA.
I learned how to touch type in the late 70's and early 80's writing computer programs getting an engineering degree. Even better, two skills,.
Moral: Have your kids learn how to code. They will practice multiple skills, including patience.
JMO.
6
I was the only guy to take typing in a farm-region high school in western Michigan. I second Mr. Bruni: it brought value in two senses, one the pragmatic one of transcribing as fast as I could compose, and the other a lasting respect for tasks that you simply learn how to do correctly. [And in the latter category, I'd add the value of memorizing phrases and dialogs in another language--it takes time, but it works.]
6
Add to the best skills learned in school: shorthand and outlining. Invaluable shortcuts for taking notes in college and now at meetings. I wish all students could learn all these practical skills.
5
In the summer of 74 my father suggested I teach myself how to type as my cursive was hard to read. I had a textbook. I had the turntable set up to play my vinyls next to the typewriter. I could type by the end of 8 weeks 70wpm. It was one of the most useful skills especially in college when I used my smith corona to type term papers and letters to the family.
5
Thanks to my mom’s insistence, I was the only college bound student in my late ‘60s high school typing class. I do hope I thanked her at some point for the pocket money it provided when, after I completed my own papers, I was able to charge others to type theirs.
7
The only class in high school that I got a D in because you could actually get a negative grade rounded up to a 40 and any thing below a 50 rounded up to a 50. What do I do every day, type. Typing lets us communicate and may we use it for the good of humanity and communicate the facts or in the humanities communicate our imaginations.
3
I was a Catholic school girl who took a typing class at the local public school one summer. I hated it because I wasn't very good at it, but it was a skill I turned out to need. I've earned a good living as a writer for 32 years.
5
My first full-time job was a legal secretary. The toughest job I ever had. It gave me a solid foundation and the skills I obtained are still with me today. Additionally, should I lose my comfy corporate job, I know I have skills to be a secretary again.
5
Typing was the most useful class I took my senior year in high school. It got me through college papers right up to the briefs I write as a lawyer today. An essential skill that should be taught in school.
7
I don't remember any details of the class, but my mother encouraged (made?) me take typing as well. It has been a very useful skill ever since, first on manual typewriters and then on computer keyboards. Thanks, Mom!
6
I'm with ya, Frank!! Even earlier than you (1962), I learned on a manual typewriter whose keys were capped so you couldn't see the letters. There was a large keyboard chart on the wall and, as we typed, the teacher played a record with a tune we had to type in time with. The tune kept getting faster and faster.
Despite all the tedium, etc., you describe, like you, I have used this skill more than any other as a student, grad student, professor, computer programmer, manager, trainer, editor, and writer.
Thanks for an endearing article that brings memories back to so many of us!
13
I've had two careers: one as a journalist and the second as a clinical social worker. In my 18 years of schooling, including my master's degree, it was my high school typing class that has served me extremely well daily in both professions: Asdfjkl; I still remember the satisfying sound of 20 some (girls) mostly typing away in that class on manual typewriters, later in newsrooms on electric typewriters and now on keyboards into an electronic medical record. I still love to type (the faster the better). At my best, I think I typed 5-60 words a minute.
4
As an experiment in the mid-1940's in a small northern Minnesota town, typing and home economics was offered for boys at the junior high level. Of course, I volunteered and eagerly enrolled, one semester for each subject. Nothing but good came out of that experience and when I think of how progressive it was for that place and that time. I still marvel at it. The crowning achievement was cooking and serving the football players banquet. I still cook and typing still comes naturally. Thanks for reminding me, Frank.
14
"... typing and home economics was offered for boys ..."
What was offered for girls?
1
Many thx for a most entertaining piece. .
Like Frank Bruni and what appears to be a host of other readers, I, too, am the beneficiary of your garden variety, high or middle school typing course.
Besides helping me make the necessary numbers to graduate, it also afforded me the basic skills needed to succeed as a radio operator--Morse code & so forth--during my stint in the armed forces, and go on to very satisfying employment in what's come to be known these days as "information technology."
Thanks a-mil., Frank, for triggering memories of how I got to where I'm now.
8
Gosh, this was so nice to read today! It is so true and I must say that my wife-who can type and I, who can not, insisted our daughter take a typing course in HS. Along with driver ed, the best course in hs. I don't think driver ed helped her at Georgetown in Foreign Service School but we know typing did.
When I was in college in the early 1960's I could not type, I could only push the keys. Back then we had to have the footnotes on the bottom of the page and I can remember honestly cutting short papers due to problems with spacing and other typing issues. How weird!
Thanks again for a wonderful article, probably written in 1 minute!
8
I refused to learn to type in high school, certain that even possessing the skill would relegate me to the secretarial pool.
Years later I spent a tedious summer with a typing textbook teaching myself to type. Very worthwhile skill.
6
I also took a summer typing class. I have grown rusty and never got very fast, but I know where to place my fingers on the keyboard and do not hunt and peck
7
A standout characteristic I recall of my father was he was always typing on a semi-portable. I didn't know at the time that males, and especially executives, didn't type.
When I graduated from 8th grade, he enrolled me in the high school summer typing class.
The class was typing and how and when to set up different types of letters. Toward the end of the course, he'd returned from a trip, I was doing my practice at the kitchen table, complained, and he overheard it.
He told me why he typed and had me learn to type. People take type-written letters and notes more seriously and actually try to understand what is intended. I guess that effect is gone these days but it was true in the past. Regardless, ever since, I type because of it's faster for me.
But, wait ... the income value of typing isn't over! About 6th grade, my son took keyboarding. He eventually was hitting well above 100 wpm with high accuracy, as he demonstrated with pride on my computer.
It paid off. He completed his degree a couple years after the Great Recession when grads had nearly no jobs paying livable income.
He'd done some medical clerking during college. A good paying job opened up for a critical medical manager position but the candidate had to have high speed, accurate, typing skills with both word processing and with a spreadsheet. He got the job. His speed and accuracy, handling millions of dollars in meds each month, earned him a promotion.
24
I agree—the value of learning a complex skill by rote paid off for me.
I also spent a summer in a secretarial course while in early high school—although in the 1960s and I lugged a manual typewriter around. However, I learned the discipline to create a printed page as well as a rapid typing speed. I was the fastest typist among my friends in college and even wound up a radio-teletype operator in the Army.
7
My mum suggested to me that I take vocational typing in high school in the early 80s. Some of the best advice I ever got.
I was the only boy in the class, and it certainly was tedious ("fff jjj ff jj f j"), but it was an invaluable skill to learn.
When word processors came along during my uni days, many were jealous of my typing speed. I still grimace when I see people typing using only two fingers.
8
My mother insisted I take a typing class in the summer before I started 9th grade, telling me it would be something “to fall back on” should I need that later on. In graduate school, I worked on campus at a state civil service typist. This allowed me to get my degree at a discount, and because I worked there long enough to be vested, has provided me with a pension. That summer typing class was probably the best investment of time I’ve ever made!
9
Great article. In high school I took a year-long typing class (just an hour a day) and while I never attained the speed that Mr. Bruni did, I'm glad I took that course. It was a great foundation for all the typing I did working in IT (even though a lot of that was programming, which is a different discipline than typing for other reasons). It's still something that I use every day.
6
I had a similar experience to Frank’s. On my very first morning at my very first job at a small-town paper, my editor looked at me writing out a story long-hand, then proceeded to roll my chair over to a Royal manual and tell me, This is where you will write from now on. I’ve been typing ever since. Thank you, Frank, for reminding me of my one artisinal talent.
8
Took typing in junior high, and as a graduate student, law student and attorney was famous for my excellent note-taking - which was actually very fast typing.
8
@RCT A=
And yet certain educators discourage or even forbid the use of computers in classrooms, arguing that all students are doing is transcribing.
How little they know.
2
One of the best, most valuable, courses I took in High School. The advent of computers did not make obsolete this skill.
32
@Brainfelt, I fully agree. One of the most valuable courses I took in *junior* high school (so there!).
4
I wouldn't let my daughter learn to type, because I was afraid she'd end up typing boys' papers as I did all through school. So in true independent form, she sneaked it behind my back. She sat me down one day and triumphantly showed off her typing skill.
36
As always, love your columns. And love this line in the 15th paragraph: "If only life had a backspace key." Made my day!
43
I took typing lessons on Saturdays in 7th grade. It meant that while everyone else was taking typing lessons in 9th grade, I worked on the literary magazine and became editor in 10th grade. No sweat in hs and college. Spent my time writing instead of torturing myself to type. Now electronic medical record not a problem. As a pianist also, there is comfort in “manual” labor.
7
My mom made me take a typing class in summer when i was middle-school age so i'd have a useful skill. I was bored to death as well, awful at it, and there was no desire to be a writer or journalist to make it worthwhile. I paid to have my college papers typed, and i'm still awful at it, i still look at the keys when i type. But just for fun, i tried your quick brown fox sentence without looking at the keys. What do you know, my fingers somehow still seem to remember where the keys were.
I enjoyed this piece!
7
Obtained a masters degree in Social Work in my thirties. To this day am glad I went to Katherine Gibbs executive secretarial school and learned steno and typing. Both still come in handy for note taking and record keeping
10
@Dee Erker
I went to a top law school in my 30s. Prior to that I had a liberal arts BA and also attended the Gibbs program you did. I worked as a legal secretary for sever years.
I made sure never to tell anyone during my career as a lawyer that I had 100 wpm steno because I was afraid I would be expected to do note taking. On the other hand, I was frequently complimented on my reports about meetings and conferences because I was secretly using steno.
I also think it’s unfortunate that so many young people do internships for no pay and with no real responsibilities. Those who have slogged through 9-5 Jobs might have more empathy for workers than those who cannot really be fired because they don’t have real jobs.
19
I decided to learn how to type simply because my longhand was too slow and unreadable despite years of being harassed for my penmanship by a bevy of nuns. I took the class in high school and discovered that the ratio of females to males was about 15 to 1. What a great fringe benefit!
14
I found learning to type was an underrated, liberating skill. In college, my classmates who would take enjoyment in suggesting I’d make a good secretary, a macho insult then and probably now. I was an unsympathetic profiteer when they faced deadlines for papers.
25
I had to take typing in my junior year....at a Catholic high school....with a nun glaring at us all. Scary.... I may have sailed through my other courses, but typing? The incessant and loud rat-a-tat-tats surrounding me during those dreaded timed tests, my many mistakes...what a pain in the patooty. I think I squeaked by with a B which is rather good, I guess. But it was a labor of absolutely no love.
In hind sight, I am glad my school required it. Believe it or not, it prepared me for the dexterity needed in my chosen profession, nursing (as well as motherhood), not to mention all those term papers that I had to endure. Also, when the computer age began, it was one of the few things in which I out-performed my husband. He was hunt-and-peck all the way. But his pride would not allow him to ask for help. Hooray for me!
11
If I look down at the ends of my arms
there are two worn and torn hands that
once belonged to the
State Junior High Typing Champion.
I still have the typewriter I was given as a prize
that day:
IBM Electric C - Model.
I wish I could write to the New York Times on that
elderly IBM,
perhaps I would not makes so many typos,
these computer keyboard just require the lightest touch,
from hands and fingers that no longer simply obey -
not a solid and firm stroke,
and so letters go
where they really
ought not to go.
208
My grandson changed the touch response on my laptop so that it accommodated my needs. Can’t tell you how to do it but find some young one and they can do it.
2
@John Brown
Yeah - I hate the current computer keyboards as well. They feel like toys for young children.
2
@Ren
There was a Dell keyboard some twenty
years ago that I used in the library -
it had a nice feedback to it but then the
library changed computers and I could
never find that keyboard.
I too was ‘asked” to take typing by my mother in high school. Her mantra: “you will always be able to support yourself”. Never has it come in more handy than typing in the electronic medical record in my job as a primary care physician.
20
My son is in residency now, but one has to pass certain license exams to reach that plateau.
After passing USMLE I, the student can proceed to the second half of med school - clinical rotations. After completing rotations one is required to pass USMLE II. There are two parts to this test, CE and CS. CS stands for clinical skills.
After completing a timed patient examination the student has to complete a patient note. It requires typing skills to complete the effort in the time allotted. Some students fail the exam for that reason alone. Click on link!
https://www.usmle.org/step-2-cs/#format
11
Thanks for the memories Frank. I remember the clatter of Smith Corona's in my HS class, a crochety old man teacher walking about with a ruler to smack hands placed wrongly. It was the worst of the best time in my life. But I learned and learned well, moved easily to an electric IBM Selectric as a secretary for SONJ in New York at the very young age of 17and a half, typing close to 76 WPM. To this day I love my typewriter and use it almost as much as I do this dang computer, whose keyboard, though similar, is just different enough to slow me down some. Anyway, you tweaked the sweet memories of this 82-year-old lady and for that I humbly thank you for the smiles.
15
Helen Gurley Brown said it was the best skill she ever learned. She reportedly encouraged all women learn to type as a road to success. Who can argue with the original Cosmo girl!
8
I loved this and completely agree. Thanks for the article.
5
When I finished high school in 1972, I looked around my rural hometown and saw that the college educated women who didn't become teachers were in jobs as secretaries and low-level administrators on a dead-end career track. I decided I wouldn't learn how to type in order to avoid being cast into these roles. This decision has not served me well as the PC/computer keyboard became front and center, but at least I was able to pursue a professional career track without being consigned to the secretarial pool.
10
My Life in Keyboards
Early 1950s: Piano lessons for 6 years.
Late 1950s: 10th grade semester course in typing, then semester of learning shorthand to prepare us for typing college papers and taking notes in college courses (I went to a high-powered, competitive high school that was more rigorous than college).
1964-69: Married my graduate student husband; my dowry is my Remington portable typewriter in a very heavy case, which I typed my husband's papers and research articles on, sometimes while rocking the baby in her cradle with my foot.
1965-69: Worked as a secretary-typist at husband's university. Office had new IBM electric typewriters, which I type his papers on at night while he babysits.
1967-68: Took a stat course for free because my husband became an Instructor. Worked for stat professor; in 1968, IBM key punch machines put in the stat lab, where I teach students how to type and process data for prof's advanced stat course. We buy an electric Olivetti typewriter to type our papers & articles.
1970-72: Husband graduates; takes job at huge state university as prof. I get assistantship in Dept. of Measurement & Statistics where I & another student man the stat lab. I teach students how to use Wang calculators to calculate their stat problems--50 Wang calculators pounding away for 1.5 hours for each session. I get serious headaches.
1973- : We buy green screen IBM computer; I earn Ph.D.; we coauthor & publish for decades, thanks to a series of Apple computers.
44
@PB
"how to use Wang calculators"
1962: I started Brooklyn Technical HS and learned how to use a Slide Rule!
2
@Texan
Funny you should mention this.
Many decades ago, a prospective engineering student for graduate school told the engineering professor who was interviewing him that he (the student) was very interested in learning about computers. The professor later commented that this was like saying you wanted to major in slide rules.
Yes, in the end this was an ironic statement by the professor given what is going on today, but at the time, it was seen as very funny.
My mother insisted that I take typing AND shorthand in high school. As a result, I was one class short of the academic requirement to graduate with honors. I was devastated at the time....BUT when my parents divorced and I was faced with quitting college I was able to use those skills to not only stay in school but to develop terrific relationships with the professors in my department. I could take shorthand....the department secretary could not. I worked 40 hours a week, but had the blessing of professors who gave me the flexibility to complete papers, prepare for exams and still make enough $$ to stay in school Hats off to my mom.
71
Back in the mid 70's, needing to fulfill a "practical arts" requirement in high school and having no desire to spend time under the hood of a car or at a circular saw table, I too signed up for typing class.
I soon found I was the only male there; a large number of my female classmates routinely took typing in anticipation of some sort of secretarial position down the road. (In Staten Island then not a lot of teenage females had professional ambitions--it was still a place of early marriages and "MRS" degrees.) While I wish I could claim I did this as a plan to meet said females, this never occurred to my fifteen year old nerdy intellectual self and if it had I would have been too frightened to speak to them anyway. So I just kept banging on the old manual keyboards all through sixth period.
It wasn't until later, in college when I was rapidly typing my own papers and making some money rapidly typing those of others, that I realized this was one of the best decisions I ever made. I had no problems operating the first PC's to come out, either, and even helped train some people at early jobs.
I smile at the easy facility my son and his generation show with keyboarding; many of his friends have fathers and grandfathers who, they say, never go near one and who are baffled by tablets and smartphones. I have a certain amount of tech cred among them--all because of a 10th grade typing class.
Sometimes, you do make a smart decision for less than smart reasons.
14
I’m an attorney now but once upon a time I was a legal secretary. When I was in high school I made a whopping $20 an hour as a typing teacher. I was very lucky to come up the way I did. By the way, i can still type 120 wpm and it really gives me an edge.
11
@Mara Dolan 120 wpm! I am seriously impressed!
1
I agree with you Mr. Bruni, which happens occasionally. You told of your adventure, now I will tell of mine.
I grew up the first 4 1/2 years with my grandparents. When I was sent to live with my mother I could embroidery, knit, and crochet.She didn't want to send me to kindergarten so.. There you are. She married my step-dad when I was 5 1/2. She had a baby when I was 6 1/2 and I learned to change diapers and make very simple dinners, and sandwiches. I went to parochial school then. I learned to write.
My parents decided that I was not dexterous enough so they paid for guitar classes when I was 7 years old. It was cheaper than ballet. Guitar classes kept up for a long while until I began competing in art competitions and occasionally winning. But everyone know artists starve so my parents decided I needed to go to secretarial school during the summer break when I was 15 and 16. I now think of that time as something similar to meditation. It helped me tremendously in various facets of my life, I even took dictation!
I also attribute secretarial school and guitar practice, not to mention sketching, to patience. All three have endowed within me the persistence research and quietness.
Now the problem, at this point is the better I get with French and French grammar the worse I seem to be with English and English grammar. I occasionally find myself having to search the French/English side of the dictionary because I can't remember the English word for the French I now use.
8
I loved this! my Mother made me take typing in high school, I took her manual Royal to college, that she had taken to college, still have it.
I am same age as Frank Bruni.
Before auto erase every page had to be perfect, and I composed 20+ Government papers off the top of my head (with footnotes to references of course)--then literally cut and pasted long paper, taped it together, and flawlessly retyped the thing.
It would kill me today.
I hated the electric humming noise of newer typewriters, like they were saying "hurry up".
Went from manual to computer only because my Master's degree prof made me.
In the meantime my Mother had serenely gone to electric then computers.
16
This one brought back fond memories. I was 14, and my mother made sure I was busy during the summer. It was the summer of '53, and we had a summer place in ME where we now live. She said (almost intoned), that I was too young to get a summer job, but she had bought a new Smith Corona Skywriter, and a book by Ruth Ben 'Ary, on touch typing. I was headed off to boarding school in the fall, and this would be a good skill to have. I had some years of piano instruction, so keyboards were familiar to me as was practicing. I was tasked with typing the letters my brother had sent from the Korean war, as all our relatives would be interested, so armed with carbon paper, I learned to type. She was right, of course, it was a good skill to have, even though I would learn the numbers later. And I wasn't particularly fast early on. I missed out on a HS typing course, our prep school didn't offer it because they thought it was beneath them, as was balancing a checkbook, etc. It was the best gift my mother could have possibly given me, and I was ready to take it on--before going out for tennis lessons or sailing lessons. She really did want to make sure I was busy.
17
As a graduate of the NYC public schools this is one of the best skills I learned in the 1980’s! In high school we had a full semester of typing and all had to take it prior to graduation. I am now a physician and given how medicine/healthcare has been overrun with computers I excel at typing while I take a history and try to maintain a connection with my patients all while keeping eye contact. It’s been one of the best skills public school gave me!
41
In the early 70s I took typing in high school because we could only have one study period a day and by senior year you would be looking for some “easy” elective. All I really recall about typing class was being caught smoking behind the school by the typing teacher and having to spend detention typing. I would never have predicted it at the time, but as it turns out I stopped smoking 30 years ago and yet I type every day.
26
I smiled as I read this essay. I took typing, not keyboarding, in high school in order to get out of a tougher class and to be in a class made up almost entirely of high school girls. It turns out that was probably the best class I've ever had in high school; keyboarding is a skill I use everyday.
18
This goes beyond being an ode to muscle memory, but there's a lot to be said for the confidence it can give you. Frank describes it in the fleetness of his transcriptions and elsewhere, I call it brain candy, the ability to do something really well on almost automatic pilot. My mother, who also encouraged me to learn typing, to no avail, was a court reporter and was as fleet on the steno machine in court as she was on the typewriter at home doing transcriptions. Being the all knowing teenager at the time, I found it all too plebeian, mundane, beneath my station, etc. I did however eventually learned and mastered a skill, a trade actually, later in life, and realized only then what it was all about (not the hokey pokey). Thanks to computers, phones, autocorrect, suggestions and other technology, I can now type pretty fast with 4 or 5 fingers but I have to look up then down then up again many times as I write, and still make corrections, especially if I'm being more dyslexic that day than usual. Ultimately, Frank and his mom are right, sometimes you just gotta fold the sheets a certain way no matter how much it bothers you, and accept that you'll understand when you're older.
15
I really resonated with your article today about what a valuable skill knowing how to touch type has been in your life. It certainly has been that for me. I took it as an elective in Middle School and became quite proficient at it. Throughout high school and college I always took jobs in the summers. The jobs ranged from being a secretary to 10 buyers, to being a trainee account executive at an advertising agency, to being a fashion model, to working as an assistant to a college professor who was writing a book. Although the jobs were very varied, each one required skill in typing. Without that skill I would never have been hired. The jobs provided enough income for me to purchase my books for the upcoming semesters but the even more significant fringe benefit was that it enabled me to meet many different types of people from all walks of life. Later I went to Medical School and practiced as a Family Doctor for 35 years. I would venture to say that those summer jobs went a long way to training me to be an effective physician, perhaps nearly as much as anything I learned in Medical School. And all because I was a good typist. While I was practicing full time, I decided I wanted to acquire a second Master’s Degree in a field I was interested in specializing in. I credit my typing skill as the most important determinant in enabling me to do this. Without the ability to type accurately and as rapidly as I could think, I would not have been able to do this.
69
I still remember my typing teacher - Mrs Meaney, no kidding - at Mater Dei High School in Middletown NJ. I can still hear the clack clack clacking of the keys, the little ding and then the quick zip sound of the return. I loved learning to center the type and the smooth feel of the roller as it caught the paper.. My mother warned me as I began my career in the 80’s to keep this skill to myself in the office “or they won’t let you do anything else” but happily the rise of he computer made everyone a “typist”. My children today are amazed at my ability to think, transcribe, type, talk and listen simultaneously. Those hours of practice stayed with me!
23
Typing was taught in 9th grade in my junior high school. The week before school I was in a bicycle accident, breaking both wrists, with a cast on my right arm from finger tips to shoulder.
It was, in retrospect, a very useful skill, and early in my consulting career I quickly bypassed the secretarial pools and did my own typing, as it was quicker and more time efficient than explaining my handwriting.
To this day, however, I still only hit the space bar with my left thumb, as my right one was encased in a cast during that class long ago!
10
Frank, this is an absolutely wonderful essay. Your mother was one smart lady.
Most of us have teachers or mentors — and parents — who deserve our gratitude for urging us to develop basic skills that last a lifetime. I had a math teacher who made every individual in his classes memorize flash cards of the times table through 12 x 12, and still marvel how useful that knowledge has been. Just like typing.
101
Actually, my learning to type might have saved my life. I had learned it in Junior High School. When President Truman instituted the peace time draft,he offered 18 year olds to join any branch of service if they were accepted, serve for one year and go into the reserves for 6 years. I decided to enlist in the Army Air Force and being only in for 1 year I was given the job of a clerk typist - which was downgraded to a clerk in the reserves. When the Korean War occurred, I was asked to report back to the Air Force. Just before going I received a telegram saying the orders were revoked and an explanation would follow. The explanation was that they didn't need any more clerks (smile).
38
What’s abundantly clear from the photo is that Frank has lost a lot of hair since secretarial school.
Secretarial schools (to the extent that they even exist anymore) do a heckuva lot more than teach typing. Apart from stenography, filing and personal organization, you’d be surprised at how tough it is to slip a shot of bourbon into the boss’s coffee without anyone noticing. What Frank took, of course, was a typing class. My own similar experience was undertaken many years before his, in actual years as well as personally chronologically – it happened when I was ten, and it was offered as a summer class at one of the local elementary schools. I was one of two or three boys in a class of maybe thirty, and for me it didn’t last long: they kicked me out after less than a week for cutting-up too much.
Consequently, I’ve gone through life as a two-fingered typist, but a very fast and accurate one -- when I applied for my first regular job on Wall Street in early 1977, in what then was called “Data Processing”, I was measured at just over 100 words per minute with zero errors. This became increasingly important as we moved beyond punched cards that we’d need to fill out longhand on forms that others would punch to keyboards and text processing systems into which we wrote our own COBOL. I don’t think I’ve become noticeably slower with age. And, unlike Frank, I’ve kept most of my hair.
Given the intensity with which the young are consumed by social networking on smartphones, …
2
… I can’t say I’m surprised that more kids today are typing adepts than in my salad days. Indeed, we may soon note an evolutionary leap by observing that fingers are becoming more slender.
I was bored to the bone as well by my brief excursion into rote learning so many years ago; but, unlike Frank as well, it never liberated me. Women often have remarked to me that there are few useful things a man can do with ten fingers that he can’t do better with one or two.
@Richard Luettgen
Punch cards wrecked my typing for a while because they never inked out on top. So you would waste time running a program only to have it crash or worse, loop.
People would run their utility bills through the reader and make copies changing the hole-punched digits, I cannot recall energy bills in early 80s, but tech gotta be used!
1
Totally agree. My Mom was a high school typing teacher during World War 2. She made certain I took typing in high school and I forever grateful she did. It's a skill I use every day.
17
In my urban all boys high school typing class, students in academic sections, me, did not have to enroll. Lacking this skill was not a serious impediment during my college years.
However, when entering graduate school and facing writing demands I enrolled in a typing class at the local community college to. Similar stares that you received from women, greeted me, a 6"6" 20 something man wanting to learn a skill.
This college was low on maintenance funds and many of the typing machines would malfunction. I soon found that the skill I learned much more adroitly than typing was typewriter repair! I being the only male in class was asked to try and fix them. Gender roles were apparent but not widely discussed in the early 70's and the man as mechanic view held sway in this class. Instead of being taught typing I would spend valuable class time "helping."
I fixed what I could, floundered during lessons and dropped the class a few weeks later. I hired a typist for my dissertation.
In my high school non-college bound students took typing class. Students in academic sections had foreign language and mathematics classes as substitutes. In the community college typing class women were the overwhelming majority. Elitism and sexism undergird my fallowed typing learning experience. Classrooms now have STEM, STEAM, and Dual Language Immersion students. Hopefully these and others are being trained in typing or keyboarding.
6
Kudos Mr. Bruni. To that I add short hand, which came very handy for note taking in college.
4
@Luis Arauz. +1
And for working at newspapers before I gave up the foolish pursuits of youth.
1
I love this piece, a tribute to the painstaking acquisition of a skill, the myriad ways that skill might change you, and to some extent, a letter of love to the author’s wise mother. Very nice read.
305
Took typing at my blue-collar high school in the 80s and smiled smugly to myself when my far-fancier friends hunted-and-pecked at their keyboards in college.
9
We were permitted one elective in junior high, back when it was only 8th and 8th grades. Our choices were typing or art. A study hall or free period was not an option.
Unfortunately the woman teaching typing had MS and was confined to a wheelchair. By the time we had to cap the keys on our manual Royal typewriters she went on medical leave and the substitute had no training in teaching typing. I transferred to art, in a classroom shared with high school boys doing mechanical drawing. While I learned a lot in art, from calligraphy and plaster of Paris life masks to throwing pots and messing up glazes, I wanted to do mechanical drawing and was told it was not for girls.
I took typing three more times in junior high and high school and never progressed to capping the keys because all my teachers in this subject went on medical leave or died suddenly before the fourth week of the semester.
I am grateful for that calligraphy segment because my first job in high school required the use of an electric IBM Executive (predecessor to Selectric) typewriter which had varying numbers of backspaces required to correct typos depending on the width of the letter requiring replacement. These values were already instinctive and it was not long before I mastered 60 wpm.
Computers were years later and I despise many of the newer very flat keyboards as they slow me down. I'd much rather have an old Palm with a fold-up keyboard when I want to compose than any tablet or smartphone today.
5
What a great article! It has lifted me from a low I have been in all day. I’m a middle baby boomer. I couldn’t count if I had a year, the boring repetitive chores and tasks my WW II USMC dad instructed me to complete before doing what I deemed as fun. One example, dig all the weeds out of the front yard without damaging the lawn it self. I became a surgeon of weeds and a better person to this day. Of course it was off to the beach when I was done.
10
My wise mother told me when I was 14 that if I could type 50 wpm, I'd never be unemployed. Off I went to summer school. She was (too) correct. One of the things I regret, looking back on my work years, is that I never once collected an unemployment check. Just a month or two would have been nice.
51
I got my typing when I needed one more course to graduate from High School. Best investment of time ever. Used it in the Air Force, college, grad school, professorship and more. Still do. Like Latin, one of the all time great things of use...both enhance writing.
109
I had taught myself to type in grade school, using my Mom's text "20th Century Typewriting" and her old Royal manual portable. I took both typing and Gregg shorthand in high school, and thus was able to work summers starting at age 16. I saw a number of careers from the "inside" and had a salable skill--a skill that helped me in my studies (shorthand, including reviewing the notes that day and then afterwards) and typing (term papers for others, to which I corrected grammar and syntax for no extra charge!).
Typing became useful as my cursive became less elegant, even more so as I started using a computer.
At my peak, I could hit 90 wpm. Now I'm paying for 60 years of typing by developing bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome!
10
This article resonates with me, as I also entered college in 1982 (Harvard College) and my mother, who was a crackerjack secretary - and a widow by the time I was 17 - told me that typing was a skill I would benefit from for a lifetime - and she was absolutely right (or write?!).
The main benefit of being a good touch typist is not the discipline, but that if the typing takes no effort, one's mind is free to concentrate - and to think - while typing. Thus having learned the route skill allows intelligence & imagination to engage!
68
@William M. Palmer, Esq.
That is how I could write all my papers in college and grad school, composing on keyboard--cut and taped and retyped as necessary.
But footnotes and references a drag, that got much easier with new tech.
I am trying to type again correctly after reading this great article, it IS faster to do if learned correctly first time around!
1
Concentrated, disciplined study of any worthwhile subject can be tedious and take a long time, but in my life I've found it to be very rewarding. If I hadn't done that, I never would have graduated from my (demanding) university. Alas that so many young people are too distracted to manage that.
9
@Iconoclast1956
Our best typist in high school used to visit bathroom before and get stoned, also our teacher played rythmic music, not sure how much there was in 70s.
I could belt out a 20+ page paper in French {sans accent marks, had to add} on a manual after a year o had to have learned something!
P.S. Her father was a cop.
2
My accelerated track classmates never understood why I would take a typing course as a sophomore in high school back in 1962. By the end of that one semester class, I could actually do 100 words per minute on a manual typewriter. It was my answer to not being able to do a hundred pushups in gym class. While I can't type that fast anymore, the typing skills that I learned then have always meant that I can get through the drudge work quickly.
9
Typing class was part of college prep in our family. Our town offered a variety of summer classes at the HS (typing & speed reading being two). Each of us was sent in turn. I still enjoy the skill - and as a preacher the capacity to type while looking at the screen - and, yes, computers have made it sooo much easier.
A myth of modern education is that learning can always be fun. Sometimes it is simply repetitive and hard work, e.g., learning a new language requires memorizing declensions, grammar, vocabulary. Likewise, learning typing (or dancing, playing an instrument etc.) requires practice, practice, practice.
107
As a retired teacher, I tutor students in my home. Their summer homework was to perfect their keyboarding skills using a program on their computer at home. State testing for kids in California public schools is now completely computerized, so the students who plunk are at a disadvantage. They are so slow as they plunk away with two fingers that they have no time to go back and edit a writing piece or check a math explanation, much less finish the test. The students who type faster often score higher on these tests. Some think we should go back to the good-old bubble-in paper and pencil tests. Parents...?
46
I, too, thought all children today were growing up knowing how to type because of computers in schools. My daughter-in-law, who teaches high school chemistry, says her students can't type. She had to ban tablets in class for note taking because her students can't keep up with the lectures. They're so used to typing with one finger on their smart phones that they use the same technique on their computers. Maybe schools should teach typing again.
77
I learned the concepts of typing as a senior in high school, but didn’t really practice them for another 10 years - when I began using the original PC. Still, I’m grateful for the original training, and I’ve been good with the keyboard for decades. That said, I’m entertained that many of the [male] managers to whom I’ve reported - all approximately my age - are still using 2 index fingers to commit thoughts and emails to the ether.
10
Terrific article, Mr. Bruni. I was a jock alpha whatever who had both a secret talent and affinity for typing. My teacher was impressed and my friends essentially abandoned me. Now the world functions on fingers on keys, even with the noeuvo CEOs. Best class I ever had.
13
I learned to type in my mother's kitchen. She taught me the home row one night, the upper and lower the next two nights. I was done. I was typing 80 wpm before summer. The only problem: she never taugHt me the top, numbers, row. so I type speedily until I hit a number.l too owe a lot to my mother.
74
I learned to type as a computer science student back in the days of keypunch machines. Accuracy was essential, since we submitted our programs on decks of cards, and it would sometimes take a half an hour (or more) before the job ran, and an attendant deigned to put the student printouts in the box from which we collected them.
If you made a spelling error, it would be back to the lineup for the next available keypunch machine, and the cycle would begin again. And then there were all those special characters that programming languages can’t avoid.
My professional work with computers came after the days when programmers coded with pens and pencils on gridded paper, and keypunch operators typed the programs onto cards. It became more common over the years for programmers to type code, and later for them to type letters and reports. In the end, typing was just another one of those things that everybody was supposed to know.
18
Thank you, Mr. Bruni.
I can only echo what many other commenters have said: I was the only guy in my freshman typing class in high school in the late 1950s.
I often say that it was one of the best classes that I ever took. It enabled me to type term papers and theses and letters and stories and, well, the list goes on.
My parents’ gift to me upon my graduation from high school was a manual portable typewriter. I had it through graduate school. Best gift ever!
74
I so remember, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”
I went to a tiny rural school where we had compulsory options like typing, French, and remedial reading for everyone because that's all there was. I promptly forgot the French, loved every bit of the remedial reading because it was reading, and absolutely adored the typing. So much glorious clacking!
We typed on old black Olympia typewriters, the boys AND the girls. At first I didn't care how many words per minute I typed. The girl sitting beside me was a whiz and destined for higher things in the secretary pool. I used to driver her nuts in speed tests by slamming my carriage to the next line at the same time she did whether I was finished with the line or not. Of course my missing words counted against me and I never won, but it was so worth it.
Eventually, though, I got very good at it, never lost the knack, and even after years of not typing, started again with computers to find I still had it. It's wonderful to have such a skill.
But I really can't relate to Bruni's "complete submission and unquestioning practice." Growing up German, I was well acquainted with submission, never questioning rules, but they too can feed a runaway individualism. Mine has lasted a lifetime and doing it my way has resulted, more often than not, in finding a new and better way. My fingers are fast and nimble because I like the work. "Drudgery and humility" were never a part of becoming very good at what I do.
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This brings back memories. I took typing in college to fill a credit & it was one of the best decisions I made. As a physician who now spends all day typing notes into a computer, I feel fortunate I'm not using 2 fingers like many of my colleagues!
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@Melinda: One of the things that aggravate many of us patients at VA hospitals is how much time doctors have to spend entering data or info on their terminals as they talk with us, thus not making eye contact. My primary care physician is a touch typist thus I get boku eye contact, and believe me it makes a big difference from other docs I've sat with who hunt and peck (like I do). I'm glad she doesn't use 2 fingers, as one is uncomfortable enough.
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I think it 1958 when my mother did to me what Frank's mom did to him...summer typing class. My classmates were somewhat older high school students - girls all - so I was quite the curiosity. I still remember some of the finger-twisting exercise sentences. In distant retrospect, I can never thank my mother enough. I breezed through high school assignments and earned earned good money as a college freshman knocking out friends' last-minute essays (which were required to be typed). Later I made good use of my typing skills as a professional. I typed countless lines of computer code, first on punched cards, later on display terminals; I was able to knock out memos and reports much more quickly than my one-finger-typist colleagues which afforded me extra time for actual work!
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i wish there wre some modern eqiuvalent of typing class. one reason you don't learn to type any more is tthat we rarely encounter keyboards these days. i think that it is possible to 'type' effectively and efficiently on a tablet or phone, but thst skill eludes me.
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I did almost the same thing in high school in 1959. I took the secretarial course offered by my high school. I was the only male in the course as well as the only person in the class who was in the top 75% academically. This was long before computers and I did not even have an electric typewriter. The typing skills it gave me have lasted through the years and as I touch type this note at a reasonably fast speed, I realize how much more efficient I have been all these years being able to write paper, reports, essay, letters and now emails at a good speed. Typing also let me enter the computer age seamlessly.
I never thought that it taught me discipline nor did it give me any dexterity, but it has been a wonderfully useful skill.
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Simple but perfect explanation of why it is worth learning to do something well and with great skill. Well done, Mr Bruni.
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Thanks Frank Bruni for such a wonderful column because it brought back so many great memories. Now those were the days when typing was the most important skill anyone could hope to master successfully. I remember typing ASDF over and over again until it became second nature. Let's not forget that typing 50 words per minute in under 5 minutes with no errors was the gateway to almost any job way back when.
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@sharon5101-gateway to "women's jobs" that is.
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I went to Betty Owen Typing School in 1980 — we even had homework to practice ASDF and other key keyboard combos — and on exiting could fly through error-free 100 wpm.
I took typing tests at the temp businesses — Kelly “Girl” et al. — and soon earned $10/hour as an inexperienced 20 year old, $350-400 a week! I loved how my typing skills gave me access to all those offices and a crack at financial independence. And all that rote learning meant my brain was free to focus on other things as my fingers flew along.
I hope there are comparable passports to employment for young people today.
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@sharon5101: oh it was -- I had many summer jobs strictly as a result of my impressive typing skills (way beyond 50wpm -- more like 90wpm in those days!).
But you had to be careful, because being a crackerjack typist could also put a WOMAN (not a man like Frank!) right into a secretarial job instead of as a specialist or manager-trainee. Once people knew "she can type"....you'd get every report and letter dumped on your desk, under the idea that "you can type it so much faster than anyone else!"
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My husband tells the same story that you do.He is much older but in his teens was forced to learn typing even though it was not an on ramp to a career for him.He was amazed that his fingers were so nimble and that later served him well as he did tedious dissections in Biology.Much later after medical school and he was doing surgery these same nimble hands never tired as he tied hundreds of surgical knots.Typing is a discipline that confers more than just an ability to transcribe words-it confer a mind-hand coordination.
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Thanks for reminding me, even as I speed type this, that the rigors of typing class (at Katharine Gibbs School in Boston circa 1971) were worth it. Although I barely passed at 55 wpm with no errors after practicing at home on my rented IBM Selectric, my speed and accuracy have vastly improved over the last 35 years. It's a skill that I still use, every day. It's kind of like learning how to play the piano, something I wished I had done as well. Practice, practice, practice. Discipline, discipline, discipline. No way around it!
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Apparently the human body is nicely wired for repetitive tasks, OK, some a little more than others. The stuff we do repeatedly becomes an act without conscious thought about each muscle motion, like driving with in a hilly city with a stick shift or making a 3 pointer like Steph Curry.
I think about all of the domestic tasks that were denied to both men and women when I was a kid. What my father fumbled with in the kitchen was matched by my mother's clumsiness in the garage, because there was no opportunity to learn the rote skills that we take for granted.
Fortunately, this is changing, which is liberating for all. In our household, Mom brags from outside about sinking 3 inch nails in wood with only 6 hammer blows while Dad shows off his omelet aerobatics. Most of do not want to trapped in stereotypical roles. Its fun to make dinner unless you have to do it every night.
Ironically, the routine of learning new skills can often lead to less routine. But I learned an important lesson in the age of typewriters during my years of student internships. Never tell anyone you know how to type. Splash your fingers with correction fluid. Throw some balled up paper in the wastebasket. Never let on.
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My typing class served me well. I looked into typing classes for my children and was disappointed such instruction isn't offered any more.
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Delightful, thank you Frank.
Everyone had to take typing in Grade 10 in our Canadian high school in the early 60's. Some of those in the 'academic stream' resented it, and a lot did poorly just to show how far beneath them it was, particularly the boys.
I didn't mind it, unlike the piano lessons I was forced to take I found the physical practice and muscle memory learning quite soothing.
As most others have mentioned, being able to type was a good skill to have, although I think the language and math I learned were more important.
I like it when you write about these little vignettes from your life and look forward to them.
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I was in an (SP) special progress class in NYC in the 1950's. 7th, 8th and 9th grades were condensed in two years. (We were on the college track, even then.) There were also some extra periods and thus we had typing. I remember the blank keys, with the layout on a window-shade like contraption at the front of the room. But...like you and all the other comments here...I can touch type. What a handy skill. Thank you Mrs. Armao.
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My senior year in high school, I took “Typing for the College Bound Student.” I loved that class. I had been trying to teach myself to type for years, without success. Like you, Frank, I needed the structure and repetition to finally get it right. One day we were allowed in the room to use the IBM Selectrics (usually reserved for the students [girls] on the secretarial track). I loved typing on that machine and even bought myself a used one off ebay a few years ago, just for fun and memories.
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@Leslie N: I typed my dissertation on a rented Selectric with a math ball. It was fun. There were hardly any typos, too (credit the erasure tape). I say nothing about speed, though -- for a reason.
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@Thomas Zaslavsky I typed my master’s thesis on an IBM Selectric. For my dissertation, I used an Osborne 1. Memories!
@Leslie N: seriously...I adored those IBM Selectrics. They were the apex of all typewriters -- heavy, beautiful, cast metal -- elegant and super-fast -- with a typing "ball" that could be easily swapped out for different typefaces! Typing on those things was like riding on greased rails! they upped your speed and accuracy!
You are so lucky to have one! but where do you get the ribbons, LOL?
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In high school, class with the "typing nun," (sorry, Sister, but I long ago forgot your name) was painful. I somehow ended up right next to the best natural typist. She would finish a page and put here fingers in her lap while I still clanked along. I could feel her superior sneer out of the corner of my eye, just to the left of QWERTY.
But like you, Frank, I eventually mastered the craft and it too turned out to be fortuitous. My first job in broadcasting was as a newsman for a tiny AM station, where you didn't have time to write and rewrite the news; you simply sat down and typed the stories out, one after another, knowing a new deadline was only 15 minutes away. If I hadn't been able to type, I would never have lasted.
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@Clyde, nice, but "fortuitous" is not a synonym for "fortunate". Quite not.
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My mother, who rarely insisted on anything beyond the usual, insisted that I take a personal typing class when I was fifteen years old. It necessitated taking a bus to another town one night weekly because my school didn't offer typing unless you were in the "business" program. She said no matter what happened, I'd always be able to get a job. She was right. I always had summer jobs, and I efficiently typed my way through high school, college, and graduate school. My only problem in transitioning to computers was that initially I typed so fast the keys stuck. But I'm confused about the comment that students now, who don't study touch typing formally, type faster. I see them using two fingers, and it isn't faster.
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Dear Mr. Bruni:
Thank you for reminding me of the nights I spent at our dining room table, learning to type by tapping my fingers on a piece of cardboard with the keyboard keys printed in order. Not only did I learned to type but also I can whip out that story when people compare how poor they were ("No, we could not afford a typewriter or a window to throw it out of"). As things turned out, given that my handwriting is indecipherable, my mother could not have taught me a more useful skill, a hundred essays and articles and two books later (not that anyone read them necessarily, but, by god, they were typed beautifully).
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I took a summer typing course in my early teens in the 1960's before I was old enough to drive. My father drove me to and from our summer lake house to class in town every day for several weeks; I was the only male student although the instructor was male. I think this was the most useful course I ever took: the rise of computing was just beginning and my skills on a keyboard are still phenomenal. At long last computers are starting to understand verbal commands well, and I am impressed by Hey Google, Alexa, Siri, and Cortana which are far superior to the transcription software of the intervening decades; remember Dragon® Naturally Speaking and Mavis Beacon? I never expected to be using a keyboard all my working career, and I am still using it at this moment to touch-type this comment. I can still remember a time when male executives would dictate to a female and never suppress their egos or humiliate themselves to go near a computer keyboard and perform "woman's work"; these were men who would have their emails printed out for them and dictate responses through their "administrative assistant". Teaching kids to type would have been much more useful to them than learning cursive handwriting, but it's all moot today.
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@Jeffrey Atwood, I disagree only about cursive. Cursive and typing are both valuable skills.
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I took typing in high school, and it’s one of the few things I ever learned in school that I actually use. It’s especially useful these days, when students can’t even read handwritten notes, ever since longhand has been systematically ignored in grade school.
I’m a fast typist, but I make so many mistakes that I spend more time correcting them than making progress. I’m surprised my backspace key isn’t worn down to a nub. How on earth did I type term papers, and a graduate thesis, mind you, when errors had to be laboriously corrected with white-out?
I view typing class in the same way I view piano lessons. I’m grateful for both, but neither had the desired effect of creating great speed and proficiency. Sadly, there is neither a backspace key nor white-out available while playing the piano.
But after you do anything for sixty years or so, you can’t help but develop a little proficiency. Still, so as not to flaunt my typing skills, I endeavor to make at least one or two typos in every comment. So far, I haven't been disappoited.
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Well typo-ed, Lord Gemli !
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@gemli
In spite of high school typing classes, I was never very fast or accurate, either. The way I managed to type term papers and theses was by starting doing so 2 weeks before they were due. Otherwise, they never would have been done on time. I don't know what I would have done if the profs had wanted footnotes on each page instead of allowing them to be grouped at the end--the spacing and correcting would have driven me mad.
Oh, also the invention of erasable bond helped a lot.
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@gemli
I typed 90 words per minute with only one error (even an extra space or comma counted, Miss Melby’s standards were very high) for an A in second year typing. Now I’m lucky to get through a sentence without a typo. I’m pretty sure the difference is in form. In typing class we sat ramrod straight, feel flat on the floor, held the hands in a precise position with no sagging wrists, and there were no distractions beyone the clacking of thirty or so typewriters. My first class still had manuals, but by second year we had electrics, albeit still with a carriage. These days I sit on a chaise section of the sofa with my MacBook on my lap and wrists resting on the computer--what would Miss Melby say?!
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Frank, while discipline is always good to acquire and certainly developing new skill-sets are worthy pursuits, the highlighted sentence:
" “Having to sit for more than half an hour or an hour doing one thing — that’s gone by the wayside, and that concerns me as an educator and as a parent,” she told me."
is concerning.
In light of the many studies which show long periods of sitting are detrimental to heart health:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/health/sitting-increases-risk-of-death-st...
though apparently not as bad as long periods of standing:
https://www.today.com/health/standing-long-time-doubles-heart-disease-ri...
we're in favor of education atmospheres that instill good life-long health habits while acquiring knowledge, just as much as we're in favor of that knowledge being acquired and implemented.
As it turns out, the teachers and parents constantly telling kids to 'sit still' or 'quit squirming' may not be teaching the right health habits, and that Recess doesn't get quite the appreciation it should.
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@R. Law, I agree with the last paragraph, for sure.
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Great column! I had typing in high school, but never was I as humbled as I was in the summer of 68 when, fancy liberal arts education and academic accolades aside, was forced to accept the fact I couldn't get a decent job in my field without touch typing.
So off to the Hickock School in Boston for speed writing and typing.
Speed writing was a joke, but touch typing was the way I earned a living as a commercial writer where speed was of the essence.
Thank God for "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
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@ChristineMcM
I did Gregg shorthand which I found fascinating and very clever. It’s still the best way to dictate I think--especially, as in those days, if the steno was a bit brighter and more literate than the “boss”. You simply corrected all his awful grammar as you took the letter down.
It came in very handy when I got tired of being smarter than the boss and went back to college. I could take notes like crazy and transcribing them reinforced the material very nicely. Eventually, I developed a system where I did part words and part shorthand which I didn’t have to transcribe.
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@ChristineMcM You couldn't get a decent job in the 50s, 60s, w/out typing, since "women's jobs" only involved typing, or menial service.
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Learning to type in high school helped me earn money during college by typing friends' papers. this was precomputer so almost no one knew how to but all our papers needed to be typewritten. Took me through my first job after graduating high school through my dissertation and career. Even now my younger colleagues are surprised at my speed and ability to touch type.
26
I did the same thing in high school 50 years ago; was the only guy in the class and got a lot of flak for it. Later made money typing papers for my friends who were too macho to learn to type. Charged accordingly.
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I took a year of typing in high school in the early 50's and was one of very few males in this "commercial" class. The girls talked about their hair, their nails and their boyfriends. It was another world for me.
While I was in graduate school I earned steady money as a temp typist, with small stints at banks, real estate offices and one at a union then being investigated for corruption.
Later, in my profession, typing was helpful in writing reports. I wrote stories that were published and when computers put in an appearance helped my wife edit her book. I never regretted learning to type; it saved me when I was on the verge of being broke and widened my experience of the world.
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My 19 year old rising college sophomore took typing in second grade. She’s pretty good — much better than I. I took typing in high school but didn’t do well because I didn’t want to be locked into being a secretary. I am a physician now & guess what? I spend a lot of time typing! And by the way: said daughter built a tiny house in our backyard and did it with minimal help from her engineer dad. She’s can binge watch Netflix with the best of them but I have no worries about her future.
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Dear Mr. Bruni,
Your experience mirrors my own from the 1950's. My parents, both PhD's, insisted that the most useful two courses I could take would be (a) typing, and (b) auto shop. The first, for university and graduate school, the second, so that I would be familiar with the vehicles upon which we depended - much the same as anyone in the 1850's would be wise to know about the care of horses. Both were examples of great advice. I, too, was the only male in typing class, and the only "academic" in auto shop. I made acquaintances of fellow students in those classes whom, otherwise, I would never have met. As it turned out, a few have become lifelong acquaintances, whose life experiences have given perspective to my own.
358
My biggest regret in this area is that I didn't take shorthand in addition to typing. My journalism adviser said it was unnecessary since I'd always have a rewrite man at the other end of the phone. (And there were no tape recorders in those days.)
2
"But sometimes there really is a right way, and it’s learned through complete submission and unquestioning practice."
That brings to mind, "There's a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way." Submission was expected to the Army way.
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Thank you for this reminder that our formative experiences need not be glamorous, exotic or especially prestigious. What counts is setting one's mind to a goal and then seeing it through. That simple formula is invaluable in life.
For me, it was getting my driver's license in high school. I pored over the DMV books, got my permit, spent evenings and weekends practicing driving with my brave parents, was upgraded to a junior license, invested a summer taking Driver's Ed (and getting up early for class), and, most triumphantly, passed the road test on my first try, enabling me to accomplish my then-fondest wish: a senior license.
All these years later, when I feel overwhelmed by a given task at hand, I think 'well, I did learn parallel parking...'.
23
Thanks for sharing this memory, Mr. Bruni. Like you, I took a typing class (in the late 1970s), except that mine (also by my mother’s urging) was an elective in high school! Imagine my surprise when, in a class full of teenaged girls (and a handful of boys), I received a “Typing Medal” at the end of the semester—-for best speed and accuracy! This class indeed taught me a valuable discipline that I was able to carry forward through life, and also apply to my academic studies. As a teacher, I don’t envy the hundreds of elementary students I’ve taught over the past 20+ years, who have become increasingly engaged with social media, video games, YouTube channels, and instant gratification. Their growing lack of focus doesn’t bode well for their future education.
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I worked out of economic necessity before I went to college. That's the experience that you're describing: doing tasks set by somebody else, and doing them the way your boss wants the tasks done, whether or not it makes sense (the QWERTY keyboard stopped making sense when tangleable keys were replaced by the ball).
Many people spend their entire working lives at such demeaning work. You were lucky you didn't have to; many of the women in your class probably did have to.
But you, like me, were doing it for an external reward. So don't disrespect young people who, instead, volunteer to help their communities or poor people abroad.
7
@Howard
You write: “So don't disrespect young people who, instead, volunteer to help their communities or poor people abroad.”
These elite young people you reference going abroad should stop taking their first world privilege around the globe then rubbing it in the face of the downtrodden of the third world.
First, more studies are showing many of these programs are more for the participants - mostly white, rich Ivy League types - with little to no impact, even a detriment, to the communities their ‘helping’.
Second, the waste of resources, particularly jet travel, for these programs make them environmnetally damaging.
Third, there are more than enough communities and people at need here in America, usually right in our own backyard, that we should be looking to helping.
5