Continuing the investigation of my early technological literacy practices, here’s some homework from a computing class, I think sometime in middle school. I’m not even totally sure if it was a Mac or pre-Mac Apple computer assignment… any clues?
So like I said, probably middle school with Mr. Hatridge or Ms. Thornton, though judging by the markings “2D” and “2B,” it could well have been with Mr. Kressen or Ms. Lee. And, as one of my current classmates pointed out, my post-D’Nealian-system handwriting is atrocious.
A few other notables:
“How many lines of a long word processor file are visible at one time when you are editing the file?” Holy cow, there’s a blast from the past. Gives me the kind of feeling I get when I hold a USB keychain drive in my palm and think to myself that it has more memory that Mac Classics. Like my head is spinning around and around. Also, it makes me think, good lord, why did they bother teaching us to regurgitate any of this when it was all going to change in five and again in ten and fifteen years? Better to try to teach us to teach ourselves, and never have any fear about trying new methods. I guess we got that done on our own time. I’m a little chagrined to find, too, that my computer education was (in places) not so different from the frightful class I sat in on at one point in the Bronx where they forced kids to type in one of Dr. King’s speeches to teach them typing. (Then again, we also had Logo and BASIC training.)
But you’ll notice that a few of the command keys I was learning back then are still viable today. Nowhere near all, but some. The thing is, I probably didn’t learn these by reporting them on a worksheet. I doubtless forgot all of them, and sometime in high school or college picked them back up when driven by the hunch there must be a better way of getting around the screen. And unlearned them so I could learn how to navigate in Pine, and unlearned them so I could learn to navigate in Windows.
Finally, those of you who know me nowadays will also note I went by something closer to my (first) given name back then ;)
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