“To shoot a gun proficiently 
is much less of a skill 
than typing.” 
~ Bernhard Goetz

It was one of the most boring classes I took in high school. Typing class — second period in the first semester of my freshman year. Our teacher was the varsity football coach, Mr. McDonald. Even at that young age, I understood that he was not an expert in typing. He ran his classes the way he ran his football practices after school — strict discipline and repetition. He had a playbook he used to drill us on the basic skills needed to master the keyboard. Day after day, it was the same routine:

ASDF — “Do not look at the keys, gentlemen!” — JKL;

ASDF   — “Gentlemen, eyes straight ahead!” — JKL;

ASDF — “Stop looking down at the keyboard, gentlemen!” — JKL;

Repetition… repetition… repetition…

In time, we moved on to lower-case letters. asdf jkl; asdf jkl; asdf jkl; Only occasionally would he call out an individual student for peeking at the keyboard. This methodology was used throughout the entire semester. I wouldn’t say the class got more interesting, but it did get a bit easier. And, without even realizing it, I was being prepared for a future I had never imagined — a career in teaching, a culture of technological innovation, and a passion for writing. All of these things required a solid competency in typing. I gained that competency in my freshman year typing class with Mr. McDonald.

In my upper years of high school, I was able to focus on what I was writing, rather than worrying about how to type what I was writing. As a student at Santa Clara University, I was able to type all my own papers. In fact, on a few occasions, I made a few extra bucks by typing papers for keyboard-challenged classmates. As I reflect back on the past fifty years or so, I can honestly say that the typing class in my freshman year of high school prepared me for college and for life more so than any other high school course I took. 

Over the past twenty-five years, I have found it to be interesting, and perhaps neglectful, that my sons were required to type certain projects and assignments in their elementary and middle school classes without ever having been taught how to type. In fact, elementary education beyond third grade, at least where my boys attended school, did not even require proper penmanship for handwritten work. On several occasions, my boys hand-wrote assignments for school which I deemed to be unacceptable. I’d tell the boys that their teacher would not accept such illegible handwriting, only to have them reply that the teacher would not have a problem with it. As it turned out, they were right. Teachers accepted their handwritten work as it was. 

Yes, the world is different now. Are schools still teaching good penmanship and demanding that student work reflect what the student learned in penmanship class? Are schools finally teaching typing to students prior to assigning that the work they do be typed? I honestly don’t know. I can only hope that students today are better prepared to submit neat, legible work to their teachers than students in the past quarter century.

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(And yes, there’s a typo in my letter to Mr. McDonald in the image above! Not intentional.)