On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 08:23 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > The contrarian in me would buy him a course in shorthand instead. > (I remember that the very act of hand-copying blackboard notes -- > while thinking about which were the most important -- most > successfully burned information into my brain, and typing took too > much focus away from other tasks.) It varies from person to person. I absorbed very little in high school prior to salvaging an old i486 laptop with a broken battery (but a working AC adapter) out of a bank dumpster¹ near my school: I couldn't keep up writing, and if I wrote shorthand, my notes never made sense when I went back over them. Meanwhile, I can type 110 WPM, so when something actually key did come up, I could shoot that thought to file and continue actively listening. ¹Yes, a bank dumpster. I brought it to the bank's attention, they just let me walk back out the door with it saying I could keep it. It had DOS, Windows 3.1 and an ancient copy of Microsoft Works installed, and what I discovered to be an ID theif's treasure trove after running the undelete command. About a year later they got bought out by Wells Fargo, go fig². ²I sued Wells Fargo and won after they let a family member not authorized on my court-blocked account withdraw all my money without permission, after they lost a bunch of records (such as court orders blocking accounts) throwing them in a dumpster when they bought out the original First Interstate Bank. -- Paul Johnson baloo@ursine.ca
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