Using typewriters at school

Jazzy1

Jazzy1

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I took typing in High School. When we finally learned the keyboard, our teacher covered our hands with a piece of paper, and we had to type, "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy black dog" as many times as we could in 3 minutes. Then she'd check to see how many mistakes we made.
 

''the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy black dog"

There was no Black dog.... It was simply The quick brown Fox jumped over the lazy dog''


I was in the what they called the Commerical class which meant my majority of lessons were Typing, & Business economics... as well as maths and English...

I had about 12 period a week...

this looked almost exactly like our typing pool...
high-school-typing-class-7.jpg
 
As far as I am aware, the sentence should be,
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
and not
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"

The difference is that in the first sentence there is the letter 's' whereas in the incorrect sentence there is no letter 's' at all.


Regarding learning to touch type. I didn't learn to type till I went to university in my mid 20s, and found that I couldn't even read my own handwriting. So I bought myself a small travel typewriter and learned on that, till a friend of mine let me borrow her IBM golfball electric typewriter. She then told me about the sentence above and showed me where the home keys were, so that I could practice. This I did religiously till I could literally write my sentences by looking at the paper rather than at the keyboard.

Because of this I was able to type quite quickly after a while, and although I now make more mistakes than I used to thanks to old age, I still look at the screen rather than the keyboard when typing.
 

Typewriters in our classes had no letters on the keys. There was a chart on the wall.

Do you know that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow down fast typists?

Early typewriters were balky and if you typed too fast, you'd jam the type levers ( remember how annoying that was?)

The QWERTY keyboard scattered the most common letters all over the board, causing typists to slow down.

At some time, another keyboard was developed with the most common letters right in the middle. It was a flop, however, as no one wanted to re-learn how to type.

The coming of the electric typewriter and computers eliminated the need to slow typists down.
 
My junior year in high school I needed one more class to fill my schedule. I took two half-year classes: Typing and Home & Family Living. In typing, I peaked at a blistering 30 WPM and have never been able to touch type. :ROFLMAO:

Home & Family Living, OTOH, is the type of course that should be required of every high school student . . . household finances, general health, nutrition, marriage, child rearing, employment. I think this world would be a better place now if every young person had been exposed to this wisdom.

(BTW, I predict that within 20 years "keyboards" will be a thing of the past.) ;)
 
I took typing in high school with an old style typewriter. I did not do well in that class but it did prove to do me well with jobs that required typing. I bought myself a typewriter to practice at home. However, electric typewriters and then computers were easier.
 
BJintheUK said:
As far as I am aware, the sentence should be,
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
and not
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"
...
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Ha! I looked it up, and was surprised that the phrase, which is a pangram-- one that uses each letter of the alphabet at least once. This one has 35 letters, and no one seems to have come up with a better one...... since 1885!

Okay, everyone run to their AI applications to see if there could be a better one...😄
 
astralcat said:
I recall the phrase as "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy black dog." We typed this over and over. Another one was "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party." I had a very high typing speed.
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I remember the fox jumping over a log, not a dog.. and men the aid of their country.
It probably varies from school to school.
 
Lavinia said:
I missed out on typing classes as I was in the upper stream. I do remember listening to the typing class though, it was done to music.
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Typing and commerical class WAS in the upper stream in my school. It was cookery, mechanics, and woodwork... which were in the lower streams...

Typing certainly was never done to music in my school... I wish !
 
hollydolly said:
yes you're correct..that's what I get for correcting someone lol.... it's jumps and not jumped... using every letter of the alphabet

I think we can all be forgiven, given that it's been many decades since were at school
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What is it for?
We have 't fokschaap or 't kofschip: the breeding sheep or the old sail ship.
The 't Kofschip rule is a mnemonic for Dutch verb spelling to determine whether the past tense and past participle end in '-t' or '-d'. You remove the '-en' from the entire verb to get the stem and look at the last letter: is it in 't Kofschip (t, f, k, s, ch, p)? Then you get a '-t' (e.g., werken -> werkt, werkt), otherwise a '-d' (e.g.,zaag -> zaagde, gezaagd).

I had to look up this one:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a famous English pangram, a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet, used for testing typewriters, keyboards, fonts, and for typing practice because it efficiently displays all characters. This short, memorable sentence first appeared in the late 1800s and remains popular for showcasing typefaces, showing all letters in one go.
 

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