Mary,
To meet your goals, you should have been in my wife's typing/business class.
It was in the small northern town of Burns Lake, BC where half the
population was Native Indian and the white half of the town was employed.
Poverty was rampant, and even though few ever graduated, many of the Native
youth attended high school during the winter simply because it was warmer
than at home. Fern, a well trained primary teacher, was assigned to teach
typing/business in the high school because she had once worked in an office
before going to university to get her teaching degree. No previous
typing/business teacher had ever stayed for more than one year and the job
was open when she left university to begin her career. The class was
filled with big husky 16 and 17 year old Native boys who could legally still
attend school (warmer than at home) but who had no interest at all in the
classes of any subject. They were simply assigned seats in classes where
they might cause the least diversion, and since the school had no "shop",
typing/business was the administration's favourite spot for them rather than
academic classes. To pass time during the long winter days, the young men
applied their natural boyish love of mechanics to the typewriters. The
daily game they played was to see how many pieces of the typewriters could
be removed by hand. Every night Fern had to put them back together as best
she could, learning a lot about fine machinery in the process, complaining
bitterly about the pieces ripped off instead of unscrewed. Through her
persistence, she established a rapport with the youth, ending up staying as
teacher for several years and seeing one of the clever young men take an
interest in learning and go on to become the local Chief at a very young
age.
As a naive yout of your earlier era, "boring" was the very last word I would
ever have applied to the conical style.
cp in bc
> Our typing teacher resembled the front end of some of the cars that were
> in vogue-- huge conical frontality-- and it was boring,
--
**Please remember to trim posts, as requested in the Terms of Service**
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>
|