For those not familiar

A good article in the Independent today on the growth in the market for coaching in Rosetta Stone Store touch typing skills and the willingness to parents to pay for it. It brought back a memory from schooldays when our Headmaster more or less forced his academic sixth to sit RSA stage III typing. At the time this was a shock, we were after all the academic elite , the 5% of the population that would go to University. Not only that we would be paid to do it with a full grant, the right to claim social security during the vacation and no fees. Typing was the sort of thing they taught to girls at the Secondary Modern. For those not familiar, back in those days we all sat an exam at the age of 11 which divided us into two groups, those who went to Grammar School for an academic education and those who went to Secondary Modern for more basic education and skills based training. There was an opportunity at age of 13 for some to be promoted, but they always suffered having fallen two years behind. I should say that I don't approve of either the 11 plus (as the exam was called) or the social attitudes evidenced above but it represents the realities of the time.. We didn't take the Headmaster seriously at first. He had tried to ban beards earlier that year and as the rebellious offspring of the sixties we had all stopped shaving with immediate effect. Our school union had been disbanded, so we elected the same three people Rosetta Stone Language to the same offices of all schools societies and achieved the same result. However on this one he stuck to his guns, and he also secured the first school computer. More accurately a 300 baud acoustic coupler linking to a computer at a local technical college which (and this was revolutionary) allowed you to type directly using Basic rather than using punch cards. We used that computer to fake our physics practical results. After all you knew what the answer was meant to be so a standard error and some numbers soon produced tables that could be copied out after the event. I think then it dawned us that keyboard skills would have value in the future. I remember seeing my math's teacher typing with two fingers slowly while I could move both my hands at the slight left to right angle that allows you to cover all the keys. To this day I get frustrated on skype chats by people who just don't have that skill.We were also sent on computing skills course, progressive for 1971/2 and I had my first experience of punch cards. That included being taught how to use a punch card machine and being told that acquiring the skill would provide a job for life! Punch cards are an interesting example of a technology handover. They Rosetta Stone Portuguese originate in machine generated music and the control mechanisms for weaving and other machines during the industrial revolution (see picture).