Making mistakes into opportunities

A first-year student asked me the other day whether I'd actually used a typewriter back when I was in college, and I admitted that yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth I did indeed use a typewriter, and in fact I made enough money typing papers for classmates to pay for the 800-mile drive home for winter break, but then the student asked, "But what did you do when you made a mistake?"

Well of course there was Wite-Out if you didn't mind big blobs of glop smearing all over the place, or I could slide some correction tape in and try to make the error disappear, or I could pull the page out and start over to create a pristine page, or I could challenge myself to edit the sentence on the fly so that the error was no longer an error but simply a new pathway for the sentence to follow. And there's a joy my students may never experience--adapting a sentence in response to a hard-to-correct typing error.

And now they've made me feel old again, these energetic young people who can't imagine hauling a bulky electric typewriter down to the lobby of the dorm to type late into the night without disturbing roommates--but hey, at least that was better than the manual typewriters I'd learned on back in junior high, those clickety-clackety masses of metal with keys that required the strength of seven men to press and here I was one wimpy little woman, or not even a woman yet but a wimpy girl pounding painfully on those reluctant keys because typing would surely be a useful skill in whatever career I could conceivably pursue.

I recall sitting in a room full of these manual typewriters--because yes, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, a junior high could justify devoting an entire classroom to typing instruction--trying desperately to hit the right keys called forth by my teacher's dictation. I don't remember his name, but I recall how he would stroll slowly up and down the room calling out, at an ever-faster tempo, "a, s, d, f, j, k, l, sem," and he said it just like that, "sem," because life is too short to waste time on all the syllables of "semicolon." His voice is seared into my memory but I can't picture him doing anything other than dictating text, so maybe that was his entire life, pacing the room and calling out letters and words and, eventually, sentences, but you know what? He taught me to type quickly and accurately, and if I could do 40 words per minute on a manual typewriter, just imagine how my fingers could fly across the keys of an electric typewriter!

Too fast and I'd make more mistakes, which is why I developed the ability to transform error into serendipity. It didn't always work, of course; there's nothing anyone can do with hte or brng or Tmmy. But if I caught an error while it could still be turned into a real word, and if I could adapt the sentence to the presence of that word, I'd do it just to avoid the annoyance of grabbing the Wite-Out or pulling out the whole sheet and starting over.

I was a good typist but mistakes were made, and if occasionally I could turn a mistake into coherent prose, that felt like a triumph. Typing introduced many rewards into my life but also many small miseries, and sometimes--when I was working toward a deadline and the error was far down on the page and the thought of starting over filled me with gloom--what I really needed to keep my fingers moving was a small triumph, a little mistake that could suddenly be transformed into an opportunity.