When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all

Typing was the only useful thing I learned in high school. Had we never advanced past manual typewriters the world would never have heard of carpal tunnel syndrome. Your wrists and fingers had to be strong enough to bend steel just to push down the keys and make a mark on a piece of paper. One of the many signs of advanced age is whether a person calls copy paper typing paper.

While useful, it was not my favorite class, though I’m not sure what was. Mrs. Sills would walk around the room and lift sagging wrists while we did drills.  asdfghjkl; They were exercises in every sense of the word.  We thought she was ancient, though when you are sixteen everyone over 27 is ancient.

Eventually I could look at the workbook and type the drill without looking at the keys. This all came in handy in journalism school when we were expected to type our stories without first writing them out in longhand (not to be confused with shorthand, which was taught in the next classroom by the equally ancient Mrs. Gaustad.  I didn’t take shorthand.  It was not something boys did).

Typing has held me in good stead ever since.  I seem to be able to think more clearly if I stare off into space while typing.  Somehow–and I’ve never understood this at all—my fingers know when they’ve made a mistake long before my head does.  And they stop and backspace and, sometimes, can even make the correction while I’m still looking down the hall at nothing in particular. Correction is a skill which came much later, with the advent of the computer, or at least with stuff called “correction strips.”  Backspacing was never allowed in Mrs. Sills’ class. It made for a rather messy paper, typing one letter on top of another. If White-Out existed, we didn’t know about it, and since we were often expected to use carbon paper (because apparently Xerox didn’t exist either) it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Typing class also taught things like indenting paragraphs and formatting letters.  Anyone who has ever read an e-mail knows that neither of those matters any longer. In fact the only vestige of typing etiquette which seems to linger on—much to the chagrin of many—is the convention of leaving two spaces at the end of a sentence.  I understand it’s not necessary, and not even considered correct in most circles, but my fingers can’t help themselves. If I think about it, I can use one space, but if I think about what I’m writing, and not what I’m doing, it’s always two spaces.  It just is.

But in point of fact, none of this will matter much longer, if indeed it does now. For most kids in high school and all kids in elementary school, typing is done with the thumbs while staring at the screen of their phone or tablet. Those reporters we used to ridicule who hunted and pecked their way through an assignment with one or two fingers were, it turns out, decades ahead of their time. Typing is going the way of punctuation and spelling. And when typing, or keyboarding or texting or whatever it will come to be called, is no longer an exercise for all the fingers, what order will the letters be in?  Except that it is the way it has always been, there’s no good reason for the letters on the keyboard to be arranged as they are. And, like double-spacing at the end of a sentence, one day it will change too.

When I do the drills on the proper way to hold a tablet while dexterously moving my thumbs about the screen, and hitting at least some of the keys I want to hit,  I’ll think back to Mrs. Sills, carbon paper (for that matter paper at all), and the keyboard.

Oh, QWERTY, I will miss you.