I feel like I’ve been typing all damn morning. Worse still, I’ve been trying to improve my terrible habit of looking at the keyboard when I type.
Just to show you how poorlu I can do sometimes, I tuped this sentence withouf correctind and of the erroed I would have made whils tuypinf it.
See all that junk? Yeah. Terrible habit that I need to break right now.
I’m not sure when I started to stray. I took a typing class in the 6th grade, and even then I was looking under the thing that was covering my hands and my keyboard. My mom bought us numerous typing “games” to help us improve our skills. I guess it worked a little because my fingers got the whole “home row” thing down. And I’m actually remembering where all the keys are placed on the board. But the “game” really sucked.
First you had to match the letters typed on the keyboard on the screen as they were typed. It kept you from looking at your hands. Then after you finished what felt like a million drills you got to play the most game-y part of the game.
There was a layer of cheese at the bottom of the screen, and all these mice would be running toward the cheese from the top of the screen, and the only way to destroy the mice was to type the letters on their backs.
The game really sucked, but it put my typing skills way past those of my peers in high school. I took typing in my Junior year to fill in the gap in my schedule. The course had a book with an ID number that was tied to the computer program. Each chapter skill had to be passed with an 80% success rate.
The first day of class we got our syllabus, went over how homework would be handled and graded, and got some idea about what would be on the exams. At the end of class we had about 20 minutes of free time, so most of the guys (I went to an all guys school) used the time to surf the net. I went all Hermione Granger and finished the first chapter in about 5 minutes. The second chapter took about ten minutes.
The next time we had class our professor told us to start on chapter one. He said that he expected us to be finished the chapter by the end of the NEXT class period! So I silently plugged along, and by the time many of my classmates were on chapter two, I was finishing chapter ten. I finished the book about halfway through the semester, so I started reading comic books in class. When the professor caught me he was all ready to give me detention, and he really wanted to layeth the smake down, so he tried to embarrass me by making me do chapter 5 while he watched. After I finished it in about 15 minutes with only a few errors we struck a bargain. As long as I wasn’t disruptive I could do whatever I wanted in class.
I read comic books, I surfed the net, but most frequently I’d take 30 minute bathroom breaks. I’d ask the professor to go to the bathroom, and he knew I was going to the cafeteria, but he would have allowed me to go to the cafeteria had I asked, so he would let me go to the bathroom for huge chunks of time while the other mouth breathers sat and tried to figure out how to get the keyboard to give them a Tab.
After that class ended, my habits became worse. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point I was constantly looking at my hands and the keyboard whenever I typed. I’ve let it go way too long, and now it’s much harder to reign myself in. But, from this day forward I’m going to give it a try.
My typing will improve of I;ll make a mess of the interneit tryind.
