Beech Tree News Network

One day at work, after Greg hunted and pecked out a customer’s name on the computer keyboard, he turned to me and said, “I wish I had taken typing in high school.”

Back in the day, it would have been hard to foresee the importance a computer keyboard would play in our every day lives.  I did take typing in school, and it was not a pleasant experience, mainly because of our typing teacher.  Mr. Downs struck an imposing figure, firstly because he was a man, and secondly because he was a no-nonsense man.  We typed from the time our bottoms touched our chairs and our fingers positioned themselves over the keys until the bell rang for the next class.  Once, he gave every student in the class a “D” for the entire six-week term, because a few kids in the class were whispering to each other while he was in the hall with another teacher—talk about messing with your grade point average.  The bottom line, however, is I learned to type, and I am grateful for the skill.

I was never very good at typing for the same reason I’m not very good at the piano, I don’t trust my fingers.  Typing depends on muscle memory.  You have to trust what you don’t see.  If you do look down, even occasionally, it slows you down, hence my less than average typing and piano skills.

Garey took typing in high school, because he planned on attending college—which he did until Uncle Sam decided he could be of more use in the military service—and he knew he would have to type term papers.  Typing class turned out to be a fortuitist choice on his part, because he landed the position of medical clerk in the Army because of it.

According to Britannica.com, the first attempts at creating typing machines resulted in monstrosities as big as a piano—imagine loading that into your car for a quick trip to Starbucks.  The first typing machines were also slower than handwriting.  It wasn’t until 1867, that American inventor, Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer from Kenosha, Wisconsin, constructed the first practical typewriter.

I have always questioned the layout of the keyboard.  The layout is called the QWERTY. The keyboard was originally fashioned in alphabetical order.  According to theatlantic.com, the explanation that the QWERTY order replaced the alphabetical order because people typed so fast that the mechanical character arms got tangled up is bunk.  It wasn’t an attempt to slow typists down that led to the evolution to the QWERTY keyboard.  It was the telegraph operators of the day who pushed for the change.  “The telegraph operators needed to transcribe messages quickly, and the alphabetical keyboard proved to be inefficient for translating Morse Code,” hence the evolution of the QWERTY keyboard.

Although I appreciate typing skills, I never realized how valuable they are until I started helping my granddaughter with her online classes.  I think I’ve told you before, I’m basically there to keep her on track.  She does the work, and it is unbelievable how much typing they have to do.  Even in math class, after they solve the problems, there is a section called Synthesis, where they have to type explanations of how they arrived at their answers in complete sentences, with correct punctuation.  It’s grueling to watch her hunt and peck.  In the spring of last year, the curriculum at her school included keyboard instruction for the third-grade students.  She learned where the home keys were then Corona virus hijacked the rest of the semester.

If they don’t go back to school in the spring, I think I’ll pay somebody to teach her how to type.  It would save us both about two hours a day.  You know, the kids her age are really good at texting.  If somebody could come up with a keyboard where you used just your thumbs, they’d be set.