Typing Spanish
In high school, our foreign language choices were French or Spanish. That’s it. At the time I thought French was the language of snobs so I chose to take Spanish–a down to earth language of the people. That’s what I told my friends when they asked me why I wanted to learn Spanish.
The language I wanted to study in high school didn’t matter much. When I got my schedule at the beginning of the year in the slot where a language should’ve been my schedule contained the word typing. Typing? How was that going to help me get into college?
The typing teacher scared me, but I was overly timid. She was old and stern and didn’t take any funny business. If you were caught chewing gum in her class, she’d make you ball it up and stick it to your nose. We all sat at huge electric typewriters and did typing exercises. The room was filled with the racket of banging typewriters. Those things are really loud.
Maybe some of you aren’t familiar with electric typewriters. So here’s a demonstration.
What you type goes directly on the the paper. Crazy, huh? I don’t know how people ever lived like that! Now imagine thirty of those going all at once in a smallish classroom. That was typing class.
I wander if that was the only class my typing teacher taught. If so, I don’t know how she managed to hold on to her sanity. I’d have gone crazy if I had to listen to that noise all day. That’s probably why she occasionally made us watch films on hygiene. I guess she thought we needed some tips on how to bathe or maybe she’d just do anything to get a break from all that noisy typing.
I never had the opportunity to take Spanish in high school. Foreign languages just weren’t in the cards for me. My adviser must’ve thought I was destined to be a secretary or something, because the following year I ended up in information processing class. Information processing just meant typing on a computer and learning shorthand. Since I do a lot of typing on a computer now, I guess those classes better prepared me for my future career than Spanish ever would’ve. Now all I have to do is find an opportunity to use shorthand.
