Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
The Revision of My Own Alphabet
A typing tutor keeps her nightly practice file, and the keystrokes in it have been arriving correct to the syllabus she will not teach until a term from now.
- dated: "the Michaelmas term"
- narrator: "Patricia Ellerby, typing tutor"
*Monday 5th October.* Evening class out at nine, the Imperials covered and the wall charts squared away. I stayed on to keep my hand in, as I do of a Monday, and put three pages in the practice file. The file is a buff folder from my training college days, and nobody sees it but me. Home on the last tram.
*Wednesday 14th October.* I sort the file at the kitchen table on my night off, which I do for tidiness and no other reason, and I found typed among my own pages two drills set out in the bottom row of the keyboard, used cleanly and at speed. I have taught the class as far as the top row and the figures. The drills in my file belong two terms on. They carry my substitutions, my timings, and the little names I give to drills, and they are correct from the first line to the last.
*Thursday 22nd October.* Mr. Stanley Croft keeps the early copies of the Lent syllabus in the office cupboard, and he let me look because I asked and because he still owes me for the Christmas plays. Exercise 9 and Exercise 12 of the Lent sheets are in my file key for key, under my own headings and at my own timings. The class is three weeks into Michaelmas. The file is a full term ahead of me, and keeps its spacing neatly, which is a thing I would have liked to teach it.
*Monday 2nd November.* I meant to break off at ten past three, as I do, and typed on. The kitchen clock stood at twenty past three when I looked up and did not move while I stood over it, which I put down to the wind-up and the cold in the hall. I finished the drill to its last line. It was Exercise 12. I have typed Exercise 12 four nights now and it comes out the same every time, as a drill should, and it is not due until spring.
*Thursday 19th November.* I have decided to teach the class forward to meet the file, in the printed order, so that syllabus and class come together in the spring without a gap for anybody to be blamed into. I have written to the examining board to ask when the Lent syllabus was set, and by whom. What I have not found, and am asking them for, is the day the file went ahead, because a file wants a first wrong night in it, and mine has none.