When I graduated back in the 80’s, I was groomed to dive right into Engineering. I was certainly not a straight-A student, but I took all the college prep type classes and was in the top 25% of my class. So……for any current high school students wondering…..twenty years later, what was the best (most applicable class) that I ever took? You’ll be surprised.

It started in 9th grade when I scheduled a study hall into my day (negative, it wasn’t study hall). After a few minutes of study hall, the toughest meanest teacher in the school (that was his reputation) walked into the study hall. I don’t remember his name, so I’ll call him Mr. Tough. Mr. Tough asked “Is there anybody in here who would like to switch from study hall to keyboarding?” I was sitting with my friend Dave and for some reason unknown to us, we raised our hands and said we’d be interested. Mr. Tough asked “Did you guys take Basic Keyboarding?” We said we took the basic 8 week class in 8th grade. He said that there was actually another 1 year class, but to come on in and he’d get us set up anyways. We were the only volunteers.

Dave and I walked into the class and the first thing we noticed…..there wasn’t another guy in the class. There were about 20 girls all of them sophomores and up. Ok, since this is a clean blog, I’ll just say that thoughts of my yet-to-begin dating status crossed my mind (but that wasn’t why this was the best class). We sat down at the electric typewriter that we were assigned (typewriters back then….not computers). Mr. Tough had everyone turn to the page of some book and begin typing. The room was a buzz with the chatter of 20 girls typing 30 words a minute along with Dave and me barely finding the letters on the keyboard (maybe 5 words a minute). Mr. Tough told us not to worry about it as he would grade us on a separate scale.

As the semester went on, I learned to type faster and faster. Mr. Tough would have us put a piece of paper over the top of our hands so that we couldn’t hunt and peck for the hard symbols like “$” or “&” or “!”. By the end, both of us were topping out at 30 words a minute with perfect accuracy and never looking at the keyboard.

Of all the classes that I completed in high school including calculus, computer programming, English, and history, this one keyboarding class (instead of study hall) started me on my way to typing 60 or 70 words (including #’s and symbols) per minute. Twenty years later, this has paid off handsomely when responding to emails, drafting project charters, and creating presentations. My calculus has long been forgotten. As you can tell by my articles, my English is far from perfect. By typing quickly, I can concentrate on the response or draft and the words just appear on the screen (just like when I write this blog).

If I can make any recommendation to the younger generation, learn to type the “right” way (fingers on the home row I think they call it – basically fingers on ASDF JKL;). You may be able to hunt and peck quickly, but to get to the fastest speeds, you’ll need the solid foundation.

I actually moved after that first semester of my freshman year…..so none of those dating ideas ever materialized….once again verifying that typing was the key benefit.

A side note for all those engineers that are wondering why calculus isn’t tops on my list, I eventually switched to computer science and then again into product development. I do think that math and computer science have taught me how to quickly learn and problem solve, but the linkage is a bit more vague.