Ah, you too can relive high school typing classes.
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@ai6yr I don’t think those were available at my small school; I regretted it later. I did gradually teach myself in college. It would have been handy to know how sooner, though.
Typing wasn't taught in my highly academic girls' school because we were expected to be professional and therefore not able to type. (Dressmaking/needlework was taught because that's an acceptable hobby.)
So I taught myself to type in my 20s.
But I am so, so, grateful to have been taught latin
@regordane @cavyherd @gannet WHAT?!?! "not be able to type" is professional? Yikes.
(though... this corresponds with the "not knowing how to do domestic skill stuff" my mother had to deal with, because that is "servants work"...)
Yes. Totally. Back in the 1970s, when I was at school, it might have been ok for boys to learn to type. Perhaps. Although I never heard of anyone doing so.
In my academic girls' school, learning to type was definitely off the agenda. Because that suggested going on to secretarial/administrative work, rather than the professional careers we were expected to achieve, in which someone else would type for us.
@regordane @ai6yr @cavyherd @gannet It's interesting how that's changed, in only a few decades. Today, executives have secretaries and assistants, but typing is a minimal part of what they do, and high-speed, ultra-accurate typing (as taught 50 years ago in secretarial schools) isn't a particularly valuable skill. But executives now need to be able to type reasonably well themselves.
Are there current skills that now mark you as an "assistant" the way typing once did?
@mattblaze @regordane @ai6yr @gannet
High-speed, accurate typing became much more the concern of coders in the '80s & '90s, I'll wager. Possibly even into the Naughts. Nowadays, one just has to be able to type "prompts" 😬🤦
I've seen some hunt-&-peckers who get on remarkably well, so it does seem to have become a niche skill.
@cavyherd @regordane @ai6yr @gannet Even there, I don't know of very many programmers who could write code at the typing speed of a skilled 1960 secretary/typist. Basic touch typing was (and is) certainly a useful skill for a programmer, but the speed and accuracy that secretaries were trained for was *insane* by comparison.
@ai6yr Hey, in my typing class, it was big old MANUAL typewriters, manual like the one I had at home. I still consider the course (in Jr. High) to have been the single most useful school course I ever took. At the time I thought it would help me with term papers and such. I couldn't have imagined that I'd be spending my entire career at a keyboard touch-typing, as at this very moment.
@lauren @ai6yr one hundred percent. And the manual typewriter (and I also took piano classes for many years) made you strong enough to keep your posture and habits good enough to avoid repetitive motion problems. Tho my typing accuracy on glass screens with autocorrect has gotten atrocious. My typing teacher and my editor mom would be ashamed of many of my unedited postings.
@lauren @ai6yr I miss being able to type without looking at the typed output - I still do but then have to spend thirty seconds per sentence going back to fix it up, with normal luck. And I used to type trust documents (which can't have erased / white out on them). Each page was perfect then I'd take a breath and start the next one.
@ai6yr Unfortunately I was just a bit early to be able to use the computers for final printouts to turn in. While I had access to the "TN" print chain on the IBM 360/91 at UCLA, and it produced very nice upper/lowercase printouts on 8 1/2 x 11 paper when finished, you needed to pull off feed holes on the sides, which always left edges unsuitable for turning in. Missed it by that much! At the UCLA ARPANET lab (ARPANET/Internet site #1), we had one of the full-size phototypesetters that could be driven by TROFF, but it just was expensive and time-consuming to use.
@lauren Ha! Funny... I guess, definitely a handy skill for the computer age.
