June 22, 2005
Yann Teaches Typing
I think I already said that in some previous post or another, but now I know that it's really started. It's been heating up outside, the days are getting lazier, and I'm already becoming quickly unenthused with the lack of work to be done. My boss is sending out the catalogues for the summer classes at our little tutoring place, so I won't be having any money coming in for a little while yet. I'm not particularly looking forward to starting the tutoring again, since summer tutoring for me seems to be composed primarily of teaching JHS kids how to type. Needless to say, this is boring as all hell and serves only to remind me of how much I hated it when I was learning how to type.
I remember being stuck in a room a day or two every week, looking at some asian-looking girl named Kiki telling me to put my hands on the home row, and to type stuff like, "aaa sss aaa sss asa asa sas sas". She'd then chide me on not having my hands arched correctly, and not sitting up straight, and other crap like that. This was actually fairly fun for a little while, while I was doing it mostly for fun. The problem of course with me, a third grader or so, doing it for fun was that I was constantly looking at my hands to hit the buttons. While this did indeed defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, "reason" and "discipline" aren't the first two words to pop into mind when talking about grade schoolers.
So the following year, we moved to a crappier typing program that actually measured words per minute and such, and they put cardboard over our hands. Our goal was something like 60wpm by the end of the year, though nothing was actually being graded. If I recall correctly, there were two girls in the class that ended up hitting the goal first, and I don't remember how many more reached it. I sucked at it something hardcore, and could still barely type by the end of the year.
Now, I did eventually learn how to do that crap, but I don't recall when now. I thought it was during my MUDding phase in 8th grade, but I could still type pretty decently before that. In retrospect, it was most likely during my BBSing phase when I would play Exitilus, LORD, and that one game which was a precursor to Earth 2025.., Barren Realms maybe? I recall that you and your country could save up to buy a Gooey Kablooey at the enemy, anyone remember that particular game? Anyway, many hours were spent doing that, which ended up sharpening my typing skills.
The point of this entire rant is that now I'm forcing these kids to do the same thing I hated so much when I was young. I hated doing the typing with my cardboard over my hands, and I kinda feel bad for making the kids do it as well. I have to say though, the students I had the previous year probably did a lot better than I did in terms of sticking with it. I took every possible opportunity to look under the cardboard to do the typing, even though it defeated the whole purposed of the exercise. After I bully my own students once or twice, they tend to refrain from looking at the cardboard until it looks like I've started to nod off or gone wall-eyed from boredom.
I guess I don't feel so bad about it since I do know that in this case, what I am teaching them is absolutely necessary. Even though I slacked my way through typing in grade school, when I actually started to need to type fast, I put my hands in the same position that Kiki taught me, used the correct fingers to hit all the damn keys, and very quickly went from worthless to 100+wpm between 6th to the end of 8th grade.
This reminds me: I had a family of students composed of a 5th, 7th, and 9th grader I think. I want to say the oldest was a little younger than 9th grade, but really I have no recollection. Basically, they were all quite rambunctious, and every time I worked with them, I had to struggle a bit in the beginning to keep them on task. The nice thing however, is that since they were all brothers and had a bit of a rivalry, once I got them going, they worked their little fingers off trying to get ahead of eachother. Their mother was quite enthusiastic about the whole thing since she was tired of typing their essays, and so offered to do whatever it took at home to help them get this down. Eventually they finished the class, thank yous were exchanged, bills were paid, I went back to school, etc.
Fast forward to a few months later I see the family as I am entering IHOP; the mother goes ballistic on me. She thanks me so much for having taught them how to type, gushed about how they were typing their own essays, even the youngest one, and how she was so, so thankful, and how great a teacher I was and the kids were kinda nodding and thanking me a bit. All in all, I really did appreciate it, and liked that they thought I did a good job, but it was still just a bit embarassing. In a good way though, not a bad one.
Moral of the story : tutoring is a fun thing to do. I enjoy it. It technically does pay well per hour, but one can't exactly just do 20 hours of tutoring a week. Either there aren't enough clients, or you go insane trying to deal with such a workload. I've kinda considered getting an actual job for this summer, since I'd like to save up cash for various things in the future, but I don't know that I really want to give up tutoring. It isn't a whole lot of cash, but that's not really the whole reason I'm in it to begin with. I've considered doing something else, but I don't know that there are a whole lot of typical summer-job type jobs I'd really enjoy doing. Clerking, waiting, selling could bring in more cash, but ultimately what skills I would learn would be inapplicable elsewhere, and the clients would hardly be phased if you weren't there.
What this whole thing was, I'm not entirely sure, but the lateness of the hour grows and my bed sings its siren song to me, coaxing me to sleep. Good night.
