Mrs. Ford, My Typing Teacher

When I think of down-to-Earth, competent and pleasant teachers who have had a great effect on students in spite of not being dramatic performers or extroverted personalities, I think of Mrs. Ford, my 12th grade typing teacher.

I was one of the last wave of high-school students to learn typing using the old electric typewriters. We spent our days drilling with timed exercises, in which our speed scores were calculated using deductions for our errors, and we learned to type things like memos and envelopes by counting returns and line spaces.

I took typing as an elective because I had vague ideas of wanting to be a journalist or a writer, but I soon found out I loved typing for its own sake. I loved the mechanical purity of typing, and I loved it as an exercise in mental concentration and meditative mind-hand coordination. While the regimentation of typing class and its emphasis on avoiding errors stressed out some hapless students, I found that typing relaxed me. My fingers danced across the keys and produced sheets of clean, typewritten exercises. I had always been plagued by bad handwriting, in spite of my ability to write decent prose, so typing for me was a kind of revelation. The QWERTY keyboard liberated me from the embarrassment of illegible handwriting, which was always slanting the wrong way and which conveyed an unintended lack of confidence in my ideas.

In my mastery of the wizardry of typing, Mrs. Ford was my Merlin, or if you prefer, my Dumbledore. Mrs. Ford was an old-school secretary, a professional-looking woman who wore glasses and always had her hair neatly pinned up. (She was not a fantasy-type secretary, however, in case the reader's mind has wandered in that predictable direction.) She ran the typing drills and exercises in the class with a precision and consistency that did not allow for goofing off or interacting much with the instructor. This was a skills-based class, after all, not a critical-thinking class in which we were to discuss the problems in the Middle East or the symbolism of Moby-Dick. We were just there to type.

Mrs. Ford was a no-nonsense woman, but she was not a drill sergeant or an old battleax. She was pleasant and straightforward, and she modeled for the students a kind of professional sensibility, showing us how to behave in ways that were appropriate to the workplace (depending on where you work) in spite of what we might be feeling or thinking. I never knew if Mrs. Ford was having problems at home or if she secretly despised certain students. She was just there to teach typing, and there wasn't a lot of creativity involved in teaching the most efficient methods for typing.

Mrs. Ford liked me, maybe because I was one of the few males in the class, but probably more so because I typed efficiently and quickly, and I learned from my mistakes. She smiled at me when I finished the exercises twenty minutes early and put my head on the desk to rest. In her own way, without saying so, Mrs. Ford believed that hard work was its own reward.

Some of us have had those "star" teachers who have made a huge impression, changing us in some fundamental way, but we also have had many other teachers along the way, good teachers who aren't praised often enough for being good and consistent, even when teaching a basically undynamic subject such as typing. And most of us hardly ever thank those teachers who have made an impact; by the time we think of doing so, usually years have passed. I never tried to contact Mrs. Ford again, never sent her a card or a thank-you note, and I don't know if she kept teaching or if she perhaps passed away. I hope Mrs. Ford knows she was a good teacher. Whenever I'm writing and I take a moment to think about the beauty of typing (which I'm still rather good at), the mechanics of this tool of the writer's trade, I think of Mrs. Ford and think, here's one thing I was taught that's still working, still keeping me ahead of the class.