To Harry Baker From Goody Gootch, With Love

Long, long ago – half a century, more or less – and far, far away from where I am this minute, Harry Baker taught me to do what I'm doing this minute – touch typing. I've been thinking of him every day lately, and wishing I'd paid more attention, because I'm trying to do for the South African teachers I'm working with what Mr. Baker did for me. I'm trying to teach them to use computers, which means I'm trying to teach them touch typing. And let me tell you: Not so easy.

I've got tools Mr. Baker never dreamed of. I've got personal computers and typing tutor software and video projectors. But what I don't have is Mr. Baker, who knew how to get the job done.

I took two semesters of touch typing in summer school. It was the thing for college-bound students to do -- take typing in the summers so they could squeeze in an extra academic subject during the regular school. I was particularly interested in typing because I was going to be a writer. And I got even more interested after the first class started – mostly because Cindy Morris was in it, and I had a wild crush on her, even though she was two whole years older than I was – not so important as I contemplate my 65th birthday next week, but a pretty big deal when I was 15 and couldn't even drive yet.

We were in class all morning, with one 15-minute break (we would all pile into as many cars as we had and race out to the A&W for root beer, then race back to the high school). I wish I could remember what Harry Baker did in that class as well as I remember the back of Cindy Morris' neck (her hair was short, light brown). I wish I could do it for Sophy and Segofatso and Dilwe and the other students who struggle to compress their hands into that peculiar bunch-fingered knot that lets you get all eight of your digits onto the home keys what Harry Baker did for me. But I'm struggling.

I think of myself as a pretty good typist. When I sit down at the keyboard to show my students how it's done I can dazzle them. I close my eyes tight and reach out for the computer keyboard and find the right keys by touch (thank you, Bill Gates or somebody, for those little bumps on the F and the J) and then start talking and typing what I'm saying. And they're amazed. They should be. It's a neat parlor trick. And I should be pretty good. After all, I made a living at it for nearly 45 years, writing millions of words for newspapers and magazines and books and Web sites and company newsletters and marketing brochures. I put my fingers down on the home row of hundreds of keyboards from Royals and Underwoods to IBM Selectrics to Apple Macintoshes and IBM PCs, and most recently on a tiny little HP Compaq netbook computer with a keyboard so small it feels like I'm typing inside an ashtray.

I've still got a lot of those millions of words. I've got boxes of clips from the publications I wrote for, and I can Google up more virtual boxes of Web pages any time I want. But there is one thing I wrote that I'm afraid is gone forever. It may live on, in fact, only in Mr. Baker's memory. During one of those summers in the typing room at Salem High, I took my eyes off Cindy Morris long enough to write an assignment. The class was typing a newspaper, a tricky assignment, because you had to justify the columns, which is easy to do on a PC, but meant you had to count each line and figure out how may extra spaces to insert between words on the typewriter. I volunteered to write the advice column for the newspaper, and I turned out “Goody Gootch's Advice to the Lovelorn.” It was probably exactly what a 15-year-old boy who was trying to be funny would have turned out, but Mr. Baker liked it. In fact, for the half-century since, whenever I've seen him, he's called me Goody Gootch.

So thanks, Mr. Baker. And just how do I get these people to keep practicing JMJ JNJ JUJ JHJ until they can actually do it without looking at their fingers?

Love,

-- Goody Gootch

Catching Up -- We've Been Busy

David says this blog has been shamefully neglected and that’s true, but we have been so busy since January that we have had no energy after work to write a blog. We come home and collapse.

Previous volunteers had told us that we would likely have lots of free time: they told of afternoons kneading and baking bread and taking leisurely walks around the neighborhood. That is not us -- or most of the other volunteers in our class. We are the first group of education volunteers who can actually work in the classroom teaching classes (as opposed to advising and assisting teachers) and several of us are extremely busy.

I am teaching four full days each week and still trying to learn Setswana with a tutor. I have two very active 7th-grade classes in one school and different groups of 4th-, 5th- and 6th-grade classes in the other school. My 7th-graders are eager for me to start an after-school book club—as soon as I can get some books for them. 

I’m finding handling 40 or more students in one classroom to be very challenging. The students have varying degrees of ability or skills. Some are at or above grade level and some are not really able to read. We have no remedial services so I have to try and work with all the different skill levels. It is very demanding and exhausting. I work with my 7th-graders all day Monday and Tuesday and I am their only teacher of English, although most of the teaching of other classes is done in English. On Wednesday I switch schools and work with the other grades at a school where I team up with teachers by taking half their class and working on reading and comprehension skills. 

I like these young people. They are full of energy and many are very bright and full of ambition. Recently when I asked them to describe their dreams of their futures they said they wanted to be pilots, doctors, singers (Beyonce is a favorite role model), chartered accountants and police persons. 

David is very busy fixing computers that are overrun with viruses and teaching adults basic computer skills. There are so many computers here that have been attacked by viruses — usually transmitted by thumb drives. He is getting tired of fixing viruses and is looking for an apprentice who might take over some of the work. 

We are both also on Peace Corps committees. Sally is on the IRC (Information Resource Committee) and David on the VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee). David also is editor of the newsletter that the South African Peace Corps volunteers receive each month. These committees require our presence in the Peace Corps office in Pretoria about once a month. 

We are enjoying our work here most days but we are very tired at the end of the day. A week-long fall break is coming up soon and I am looking forward to sleeping long and late. 

The new school year started this week, and we are officially no longer adrift. In fact, we're suddenly scrambling to catch up.

The month-long summer vacation that ran from December 11 to January 11 was too much of a vacation: now we've got a month's worth of story to try to catch up with. It's all good: we had a guest for the Christmas holidays, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer from Louisville, a woman who once taught at Jefferson Community College, where Sally used to teach, and who lived in Irish Hill, near where we lived when we first moved to Louisville 40-plus years ago. Once again we fixed a holiday dinner -- this time with two small turkeys, but we're still trying to convert South Africa to pumpkin pies.

Doing Christmas in the middle of summer has a disconnected feel to it. It was hot, and it didn't really begin to feel like Christmas until Father Mark took us to a Christmas Eve festival of carols at his church. The choir sang beautifully, and the music made the season right.

We took a vacation ourselves right after New Years, and flew from Pretoria to Capetown to spend a week at the Nine Flowers Guest House, a wonderful B&B very centrally located in the Gardens district. We walked all over Capetown, and rode the tour buses up to Table Mountain. We ate wonderful meals in lovely restaurants, went to the movies, and visited some wonderful museums, and took a too-brief tour of the wine country. It was just about perfect (and if it sounds like I'm doing a commercial for the Nine Flowers, I am. It was fabulous.)

We came back on Jan. 8, and schools reopened for teachers on Jan. 11, so we were back in the thick of it immediately. Sally began the work she's going to be doing, teaching English to seventh-graders in two schools, and David put in a week trying to get past doing computer tech support -- for him it was a week of installing anti-virus software and trying to clean viruses off computer lab servers and teachers' laptops. Sooner or later he'll teach basic computer classes to teachers and run computer clubs for students, and in spare moments help with some technology courses.

There, now we're all caught up, the slate is clean, and we can try to move on with our lives, right? So get ready for it -- pretty soon I'll tell you about the warthog sausage salad.