Tried to at the start of grad school but it was already over-subscribed (this was when word processors were still experimental university-sponsored software, but US education had already started requiring essays to be typed), so I'm stuck with the mix of sight and touch-typing I'd already evolved. It has advantages including it not being much of an interruption to my typing flow to insert 4-number alternate character codes, and my being able to type quite well one-handed (with a sprained wrist, eating an apple ... ), and I tested at a respectable speed for Manpower.
Yes, at age 15. My mum arranged it at the local college for some schoolmates and me after we'd taken our exams in the summer and had no more school for a month before the school holidays would officially begin. We learnt shorthand as well, but I lost that skill through not practising it. This was just before personal computers came in, so I learnt to touchtype on an old IBM Golfball typewriter. It's been a useful skill ever since.
Yes, in high school. I didn't finish it, though, as it was the year I spent more time skipping class than going to classes. The machines were IBM Selectrics, and some had marked keys, some had blank ones, depending upon age. The eldest had blank keys. The school district apparently tried to save money and just bought regular Selectrics after that. I didn't learn to touch-type until many years later, when I was working in IT and posting frequently to USENET.
Absolutely not. At the time, typing was very much gendered, so I insisted on taking Technical Drawing (also gendered, but in reverse) instead. I was also already a competent hunt-and-peck typist, since my handwriting was never very legible, and I'd therefore been given a small portable typewriter while still in elementary school.
Pretty much the opposite of me, then. There would have been some sort of massive row if I'd handed in a typed essay in secondary school, and it would have never occurred to me, since exams were so much about being able to hand-write as much as possible in a short amount of time, as well as organising one's thoughts without pre-drafting. I had a huge advantage in having learned cursive in my first elementary school before we moved, while my classmates hadn't had any kind of handwriting instruction, or perhaps in a few cases obeyed the teachers and stopped using what they'd learned, and so were forced to use italic (with the special pen nibs), which the school was silly enough to teach us instead. It's way slower to write, since it's basically printing. I didn't think of learning typing until grad school, when I was told by people in the dorm that I would be required to type papers and should sign up for a class. But I'd always regarded typewriters as kind of fun; I'd spent hours during play visits to a friend's house creating plays on a toy typewriter they had. (The friend is now a physician.)
I would have loved to do woodworking, art, or even technical drawing in school, but wasn't allowed to (I was whipped out of art to learn the oboe and it was kept from me that the times deliberately conflicted.) But the only thing I got to rebel against as gender-typed was domestic science (home ec) because it was a girls' school. Although I put up a fight over dance.
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I would have loved to do woodworking, art, or even technical drawing in school, but wasn't allowed to (I was whipped out of art to learn the oboe and it was kept from me that the times deliberately conflicted.) But the only thing I got to rebel against as gender-typed was domestic science (home ec) because it was a girls' school. Although I put up a fight over dance.