Mrs. Pohlman taught me how to type. Correctly, anyway. There were fifty students in her class. I was the only boy. I loved it. Got lots of attention. Usually from Mrs. Pohlman. She would drop by every couple of minutes while I was doing a tying exercise and she would rap my knuckles with a ruler and say, "Palms off the desk! Keep your fingers high! Hit those keys! Let me hear them!"
This was the era of the manual typewriter, folks, and to type, you literally had to "hit" the keys. I discovered I was a fast typist, but I made lots of mistakes. One mistake on a page was a letter grade demotion. Two typos was two letter grades.
I made a lot of D's and F's. I was the worst student in the class. But today, typing is the one subject I learned in high school that I use every day, and I'll bet I've typed rings around every single one of those girls in the class who got straight A's . . . so put that in your standardized-testing, SAT, ACT, ISTEP Pipe and Smoke It, Mr. Public Education guru!
Learning how to type correctly changed my life. Period. Following my junior year, I was all set to ask old dad for an upgrade on my typewriter. The way I figured it, if I had an IBM Selectric, I could make a million dollars writing the great American novel.
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