Thai Ping

"When I was a kid," I drone on and on to my students, "we didn't have computers to learn how to type. We learned on typewriters. And not those fancy electric typewriters, either. The great big clunky things with the manual carriage return." That's about the time that I stare out on the blank faces and realize that what I have just been saying may as well have been in Aramaic, considering the reaction. Or lack thereof.
Nowadays, we leave only one space after a period or a colon. It's "the modern way." When Gary Carnival taught me, it was two. Now, in a world that concerns itself with storage of bits and bytes, leaving two spaces after any punctuation mark is a luxury we can no longer afford. Today I can feel free to write lengthy sentences with multisyllabic words that go on and on without concern for where they might end. There is no bell going off to let me know that the margin is approaching. I simply continue to pound away on the keyboard and let the machine figure it out. The old Royal that I wrote many of my earliest stories and opinions let me know just four spaces before I ran out of room. Then smack that lever to the left and start on a brand new line. And don't even get me started about making mistakes. Learning to use a typing eraser, not correcting tape or white-out, was one of the sublime pieces of the art of typing.
The kids in my computer class eight years ago used to learn to type by moving Nintendo's mascot Mario through various paces by hitting the correct keys. What this has to do with plumbing, I will never know. These days I send them to an Internet site from the BBC that features a variety of cartoon animals urging those young fingers on, row after row, to master letters, numbers and symbols. In my mind, I can still hear Mister Carnival in the back of the room, tapping out the rhythm on his meaty palm with a yardstick and calling out each key as we tapped the keys in rigid unison. The keys we typed had no letters on them. We had to know what they were based on the position of our hands on the home row.
I would not have guessed that, thirty-five years later, I am still using this valuable skill. Every so often a former student of mine will drop by the computer lab with wistful memories of Mario bouncing from letter to letter, and my hovering presence as I admonished them to use all ten fingers. Now they know how to change the font size, shape and color. Setting tabs are done with a mouse click. They don't need to concern themselves with PICA or Elite in a world of Macs and PCs. Or the sound of that yardstick on Mr. Carnivals palm. And every time I leave just one space after a period, I flinch just a little.