---

Sharon Hamanaka
Lorena St. Elementary, LAUSD

I never learned to type. I had it in my head from a young age that if you learned to type you would end up as an assistant or secretary to some old fool who would never let you advance (because he needed you too much).

Instead, I muddled through high school and college with my mother typing all of my term papers. It beat using a typing service, but it was a scheduling nightmare. She had a job and I always had a deadline.

Then I entered the computer age. I would take a computer course, enjoy everything I learned and then go on doing things the old-fashioned way. I loved what a computer could do, but it took me so long to enter anything into one that it was usually easier for me to do it by hand.

I kept telling myself that I would get more into computers when everything didn't have to be typed in. I was waiting for the machine that would take dictation. What happened instead was the invention of the mouse.

When point-and-click became a widespread computer phenomenon, I was hooked. I now take meeting notes on a laptop and compose papers on-screen.

I have become an avid fan of the Internet, spending time on-line checking airline schedules, finding up-to-date information for my classroom and browsing the World Wide Web. I also love e-mail. I correspond regularly with colleagues and childhood friends - even ones halfway around the world.

The more I use the computer, the more my hunt-and-peck style of typing has improved - along with my attitude toward a keyboard. The extra time it takes me to input anything (like this article) is now balanced by the editing capabilities that allow me to make changes with a click of the mouse and a couple of keystrokes.

It may be awhile before the general public can get a computer that takes dictation, and I doubt that I will ever learn the correct finger placement on a keyboard, but now none of it matters anymore. I'm caught in the 'net.