K: Knapsacks and Keyboarding (WR)

Knapsacks and Keyboarding

I have always been a kind of rebel. Not in the rowdy, disrespectful, wild kind. But one that doesn’t always follow the norm. I always tried new things, not to be intentionally different; I just wanted to try new things. I usually ended up doing things well before they become popular or the norm.

The norm when I went to Junior High School was that you either carried all of your school books tied up in a book strap when you went to school .

Or you carried them in a briefcase:

I had done both in elementary school, where I took a bus. However in Junior High School, I walked to school everyday and carrying my books using a strap didn’t work, because they always slipped out. And carrying them using a briefcase (which for me never lasted long) was just too awkward. I needed an alternative.

I decided that I would carry all of my books in a knapsack, on my back. At that time no one was carrying stuff to school on their backs.

Little did I know that in about 40 years, no one would even think of carrying anything to school except on their backs; only they call them backpacks now.

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My parents owned a Smith-Corona manual typewriter. I don’t believe there were electric typewriters at the time.  My father used it to type business letters for his import business, “Walter de Paris”. My mother at one point had decided that she wanted to learn how to type, to possibly help her in any work she might eventually look for. She never got very far with that. No one at school ever typed any of their work, everything was handwritten, though in 7th grade we did have to take a one semester class in keyboarding.

Again being the rebel I decided that I could teach myself how to touch type. My mother had a workbook for learning how to type which I used to teach myself. It had the same typing lessons that you see now on computer typing programs. I would use a clock with a second hand to do the timed paragraphs I had to type. My goal was always to beat my own times.  Needless to say I became pretty adept at typing, which became very useful for me as I grew older.

There are lots of things that I continued to do differently as time passed. I learned how to be a projectionist for Stony Brook University, when I was told I couldn’t do it. When computers came around, I taught myself all about them, which helped me become a Computer Support Teacher later on while others weren’t using them at all.

My being a rebel has made me different in some respects, but for the most part aided me in all my endeavors and helped others too. 

I usually have to wait until others catch up to me. For most of my teaching years my code of dress involved wearing t-shirts over my dress shirts. I’m still waiting for that one to take hold.