Friday, July 29, 2005
A Skill Learned in High School That I Actually Use!
I was teaching a technology class in the middle school this past spring. Since I was dealing primarily with 6th and 7th graders, the "technology" dealt primarily with computers, more specifically learning to type. I taught two days starting on a Monday. Some time over the weekend there had been a power irregularity and the server that hosted the typing tutor programs was not on a UPS system and had gone down. The actual instructer for the class was at a technology seminar and I was able to get ahold of him via cell phone and have him talk me through the restart proceedures. Pretty simple stuff really as I'd been talked through much more difficult proceedures many times before. After about 30 minutes I was able to get the system up and running, but I gave the typing tutor program a quick run through before any students gt to class.
When I was a senior in high school I took a typing class the first semester of the year. It was taught by the football coach who then passed it off to a student teacher a few weeks later. I had never typed in my life before that class, never really had the need to. I picked it up pretty quickly, though and was soon up to about 25 words a minute. I was pretty happy with that and decided not to take typing the second sememster of that year.
I don't regret that decision, but the one skill I picked up in high school that I've used nearly every day since (definitely every day in the past five or six years) is typing. In college I typed all of my own papers. Being cursed with poor handwriting I even typed letters home. It turned out to be a good skill to have.
When I got my first job, one of the things I had to do was type in weather crawls. Hunting and pecking on short things like that would have been OK if typing the weather crawl was the only thing going on at any given time. It wasn't, of course, and having a little skill with a keyboard save me many times. After moving into production, I often ran character generator for newscasts, typing in all of the information you would see on the screen during the show. There were organizational tricks you used to do this, ways to get as much of the work done in advance of the show as possible, but about a half hour before the show you'd get scripts and would just have to start typing. Speed was definitely of importance.
Every job I had since then has had some sort of automated playback system. Automated in the sense that you didn't have to physically load every single tape that would go to air, but data still had to be enetered into a computer screen. I actually got really good with numbers when typing, both the 10 key pad and the numbers on the top row of a keyboard. My high school typing tacher told me the numbers would be the first thing you would lose if you didn't type since most people didn't use them very much. I used them a lot and I'm still pretty good with them.
Then the internet came about. I use email to keep in touch with most people now. Add blogging to that and I find myself typing all of the time.
So as I tried out the typing tutor program this spring, I was suprised to find out that I was topping out at 65wpm or so, able to keep up 50 wpm for extended periods. I know that's not really impressive, but for a guy who was pretty happy with 25 wpm as a 17 year old, it's pretty amazing.
But the most amazing thing is the kids today. By the time those sixth graders I had in class that spring day are high school seniors, they'll be able to type twice as fast as me. They're growing up in a world where keyboarding is as essential as speaking. And before long they'll be typing that fast with their thumbs on their cell phones... while driving....
BOJ
When I was a senior in high school I took a typing class the first semester of the year. It was taught by the football coach who then passed it off to a student teacher a few weeks later. I had never typed in my life before that class, never really had the need to. I picked it up pretty quickly, though and was soon up to about 25 words a minute. I was pretty happy with that and decided not to take typing the second sememster of that year.
I don't regret that decision, but the one skill I picked up in high school that I've used nearly every day since (definitely every day in the past five or six years) is typing. In college I typed all of my own papers. Being cursed with poor handwriting I even typed letters home. It turned out to be a good skill to have.
When I got my first job, one of the things I had to do was type in weather crawls. Hunting and pecking on short things like that would have been OK if typing the weather crawl was the only thing going on at any given time. It wasn't, of course, and having a little skill with a keyboard save me many times. After moving into production, I often ran character generator for newscasts, typing in all of the information you would see on the screen during the show. There were organizational tricks you used to do this, ways to get as much of the work done in advance of the show as possible, but about a half hour before the show you'd get scripts and would just have to start typing. Speed was definitely of importance.
Every job I had since then has had some sort of automated playback system. Automated in the sense that you didn't have to physically load every single tape that would go to air, but data still had to be enetered into a computer screen. I actually got really good with numbers when typing, both the 10 key pad and the numbers on the top row of a keyboard. My high school typing tacher told me the numbers would be the first thing you would lose if you didn't type since most people didn't use them very much. I used them a lot and I'm still pretty good with them.
Then the internet came about. I use email to keep in touch with most people now. Add blogging to that and I find myself typing all of the time.
So as I tried out the typing tutor program this spring, I was suprised to find out that I was topping out at 65wpm or so, able to keep up 50 wpm for extended periods. I know that's not really impressive, but for a guy who was pretty happy with 25 wpm as a 17 year old, it's pretty amazing.
But the most amazing thing is the kids today. By the time those sixth graders I had in class that spring day are high school seniors, they'll be able to type twice as fast as me. They're growing up in a world where keyboarding is as essential as speaking. And before long they'll be typing that fast with their thumbs on their cell phones... while driving....
BOJ
# posted by Blind Orange Julius @ 10:35 AM 
