I had a typing class in 8th grade, but hated it and didn’t do well.
When I was about 20, I had an old typewriter and got pissed off that my typing skills sucked.
So I simply painted over the keys and forced myself to start to type without looking at the keyboard.
It worked.
Within a few days I was typing pretty well, and by the end of a month I was zooming along.
Luckily, I still remembered the keyboard positions from that class when I was a kid, so I have fairly good form and use all fingers instead of just two.
I should have learned in seventh grade, but I was too busy helping out the coach who was assigned to be the keyboarding teacher. I spent most of my time installing a program so that he wouldn’t actually have to teach anything. It was fun installing programs on 386s that had broken floppy drives.
I did learn from 10th grade, and I did get to the point where I can type around 60, like Melon. But only if I’m typing something original to me. I never could transcribe or copy from print worth anything.
Hmm . . . my dad (an accountant who had a laptop that was about 6" thick and had a b & w screen) had me on Mavis Beacon at around 6. At least I think it was Mavis Beacon. There was a part where you were in a car, and if you hit a wrong key a bug hit the “windshield” covering up the words to type.
I don’t recall learning typing in school, but we did spend time on Oregon Trail (which I was *awesome *at) and Number Munchers. I would also stay in at recess sometimes to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.
There was a typing class in High School though. By that point I had learned enough myself that I didn’t need it.
My first actual typing class started in the 7th grade. It was a semester of just typing. Then I had another one in the 8th grade, and then another in the 9th (although only half the semester was on typing. The other half was on basic job skills/interviewing etc).
I have to share an anecdote here. In grade 11, I was looking for an easy “bird” course to supplement my other decent courses. This would have been 1978.
I signed up for typing. My mum would not let me take typing. Oh, she agreed that a no-brainer course was OK, but typing? Why the hell would you need to take typing?
Of course, in 1978 I didn’t know either, but:
a) It seemed like an easy course.
b) There would be chicks!
So, I got talked into taking Art! Ya. That’s done a lot for me, Mum! Obviously I was way smarter than the average bear. Typing would have been a tremendous course to take: in hindsight!
I’m 22. I never had a typing class in school, but we had computers from when I was very little so I just gradually got faster and faster on my own. I don’t do the “correct” way: I type with 3 fingers (no pinky) and hit the space bar with my thumbs. My mom tried to teach me the right way, but gave up because I was already fast enough and could type without looking.
I type around 100 WPM this way. Ironically, my computer programmer father is the worst typist in the family.
There were typing classes offered at my high school but they were generally considered worthless.
I probably got to age 20 or so having no idea whatsoever how to type. I mean, I used computers constantly, but I was still hunting and pecking. At that point, I realized I needed to learn (college required a lot of typed pages). So I bought one of the earlier Mavis Beacon programs and set out to learn.
I got through the basic lessons (basic finger placement) and then got really bored. Dropped the program, stupid me.
That said - I remembered the basic fingerings and placements. At probably age 22 or so I decided - fuck, I’m gonna type properly even if it kills me. I made a conscious decision - I will NOT look at the keyboard.
It took about two years. With the basics of hand placement and “which finger hits which key” I ground out decent typing skill. I got really good at finding the backspace key to erase my many mistakes.
This certainly wasn’t the optimal way to learn but I managed it. I still cheat a bit if I have to type numbers. I can numpad them like a motherfuck (a summer working at Best Buy, having to input credit card numbers manually) but if I’m typing I still usually cheat and look down, hunt and peck them. I am still getting better but numbers and punctuation I can still improve on.
That said, I can type text at a very acceptable 60-70 wpm. All correct fingering. And I’m a master at quickly finding backspace because I learned the hard way with all of the mistakes.
I took classes in the 7th grade. You had to type 40 wpm to pass the class.
I started playing MUD’s in the 90’s. At one point, my typing speed was somewhere around 600 cpm.
After MUD’s, I took an office skills test at a temp agency. You needed 70 wpm to pass. I barely got it because they required numbers too (MUD’s didn’t. :D)
ahhhh…typing class…what memories… high school in the 1970’s…
there were 2 levels of classes…one “professional” level, for girls only, of course, who were destined to become secretaries.
And one lower-level typing class, for the college-bound kids who wanted to save the hassles of hand-writing research papers and then paying Kinko’s for typing a copy of it to turn in to the professor.
In both levels, there was a lot of concern about measuring your speed in words-per-minute.This is still useful, even in the modern world.
But at the higher level class, there was an even more fanatic concern about something that is far less relevant today: accuracy. Even one badly typed letter on a page lowered your grade severely… Every mistake was permanently visible…At the least, it involved stopping your work, backspacing, using the white-out, etc,etc. And often, the entire page had to be re-typed because of one mistake.
I’m part of that weird generation who lived through both typewriters and computers being standard equipment. We all typed our reports on typewriters at one point, then word processors were it for all the fancy pantses our there, and by the time I got to college, everything was done online. There wasn’t even a manual process for enrolling in classes; you *had *to do it on a computer. Now it may not have helped things that I went to college in Silicon Valley, but still, by the time I was in college everyone had a computer and internet access. When I was a tot, the family on Small Wonder seemed so cool, not just because they had a pet robot, but because they had computers. In their house! Computers were for school computer labs and scientists then.
Anyway, when I got to high school we still had a typing class, although that was rapidly growing dated. I never took it, because I was already pretty good at typing by then (albeit via the improper way) from writing so many papers on my Apple Performa computer.
I think I’m pretty much the same as MOL, possibly a little younger (being that I didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley, so we were behind with computers).
I typed out school stuff on a manual typewriter for a bit, then on mom’s fancy electronic word processor, probably until high school.
My brother, two years older than me, took typing class in high school. I did not have to take typing class, and I took word processing class. But it wasn’t on a word processing machine it was for learning Word Perfect.
You’re actually just a wee bit older than I am, and are exactly five days younger than my sister. Also, I didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley; I just went to college there. I’m from LA, which is fairly tech savvy as well, but it isn’t King of the Internet.
Not a problem if you had a smith corona electric with a modern high tech cartridge ribbon! You just ejected the ink ribbon snapped in the correction ribbon and zapped out the mistake. It worked reasonably well. I used to sit on the couch with the TW on my lap which became quite hot because after a while the TW put out a lot of heat. Fond memories.
I attended a broke-ass private school, but we still had “computer classes,” most of which involved typing. When I was younger, those were on… I have no idea, something ancient. With the monitor and the keyboard and the CPU and whatnot all integrated as a single unit, and the green screen. We were taught the home row keys and were expected to work toward touch-typing. (E.g., there were taped-together cardboard blinds that we would have to lower over the keyboards so we at least theoretically couldn’t be looking at what we were doing.) By probably fourth or fifth grade, they’d upgraded the lab to Macintosh LC-IIIs, and we moved to using actual typing programs like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (previous methods involved typing things on sheets of paper taped in front of us, while the teacher held a stopwatch).
Everyone was expected to be able to touch-type at least 30 WPM by the time they graduated 8th grade.