I have mentioned before that I am taking classes at the Junior College.
It is taking a long time, because I am taking one class a semester, but eventually I will have a certificate showing that I am proficient to be an office assistant. Some classes are taking longer than others.
The class I am currently enrolled in is a typing class (or keyboarding, as they changed the terminology since I was in high school). It is meant to improve speed and accuracy. This class is online; we log onto a site, type in the lessons as provided in a book, and our scores are recorded. Each lesson has 15 lines, but that is deceiving. Some of those lines are more like tomes.
The first handful of lines are 15 second timings of short little words or combinations of letters. For example, “ext, ext, exp, exp, pox, pox, oxe, oxe, tox, tox, fix, fix, mix, mix.” Typing that anywhere else gets you lots of program auto corrections, or little red underlines, suggesting you have possibly suffered a medical emergency. You type that as many times as you can before the timing runs out. You are not allowed any mistakes, or the timing will not count. Then you have a handful of lines that have 30 seconds to type, also mistake-free. They are often nonsensical, too. Try “Maxey will examine the exhaust and fix those vexations.” Then comes the longer, more involved lines, which are paragraphs. These are the parts of the lessons I dread.
I can type fairly quickly, but I am in possession of some terrible habits. The first thing I had to extinguish was using the backspace as a tool. When I am typing my own thoughts, I can fly through despite chaos around me…but I have learned that when I am typing someone else’s text, I need silence to refrain from editing, or transcribing what I hear from the other room. (Several times dialogue from Nick Jr. programing has worked its way into my lessons.) I literally use headphones now.
The paragraphs are meant to use all 26 letters, so the editors have to wrangle words to accomplish this. They have tried to make the paragraphs somewhat tied to being a manager or leader, so there are lessons in the text. We get a lot of “seize,” “quality,” and “examples.” The problem is this leads to stilted sentences, such as “If you want to excel in that difficult leadership role of changing the attitude or behavior of others, give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.”
The first longer timing is 3 minutes. The second is 5 minutes. For these timings, we are allowed the same number of mistakes—3 for the 3-minute, etc. If you pause for longer than 3 seconds, the program zeroes out your attempt and you have to start over. My problem is if I go slow enough to deliberately type each letter one by one (o-n-e space b-y space o-n-e space), I start drifting off and lose track of where I am. (“Did I hit space, or do I need to hit that now? Gahhh!”) If I go quickly, typing words (“then,” “and,” “one,” etc.) I start reading the text and thinking about what they are saying and how I would word it differently, or worse, replying. I start composing letters to the editor.
One such timing mentioned a boy who was repeatedly pushed off his trike by a bully. The parents solved the problem by encouraging the boy to eat all his dinner. My reaction was along these lines: Wait, wait! This boy is young enough to ride a trike, so less than 5, right? Why is someone allowing him to be repeatedly bullied off his own tricycle? Where are his parents when he’s outside—clearly in the front yard, not his backyard, if he’s encountering this bully repeatedly? Where are the bully’s parents? And furthermore, why was the child resisting his food to begin with? Did he have sensory issues?
Shockingly, this train of thought derailed my accuracy, and I had to re-type that lesson a bajillion times.
Juliana LeRoy wears many hats, including wife, mother, paraeducator and writer. She can be spotted around Windsor gathering material, or reached at ml****@so***.net.
