Mavis Beacon~New To Computers

When I look back on my experiences with computer's one in particular time will always stick in my mind. I have never exactly been "good" at computers; I would even say that at times I am computer challenged. When I was in the 6th grade I moved to North Carolina from Massachusetts and in one of my classes it was mandatory that we learned how to type correctly. There was a program called "Mavis Beacon" that we would use everyday to do various typing exercises. The exercises consisted of writing paragraphs over and typing a lot of stuff out to make us stronger at typing. The program not only taught you the correct way to type but also where to put your hands on the keyboard. The typing program had a woman named, you guessed it, Mavis Beacon that would guide you along. I can still remember Mavis to this day; her little animated body was complete with a tight bun pulled back and a burgundy jacket suit. The more I saw Mavis in the corner of the computer screen the more I began to hate her. I was never a good at typing and never knew where to put my fingers; instead I would just pluck around on the keyboard. To make matters even more difficult we had to put a dreadful black mask over the keyboard to make sure we were using the correct finger placement. Every time you would mess up Mavis would speak to you. On the other hand, I would say Mavis yelled at you whenever you made a mistake with typing a sentence. We would have timed assignments that were pages long and my computer always seemed to be the loudest, Mavis was always yelling at me. A lot of the kids already knew how to type well so the more they typed the better they got. I felt like I was only getting worse. I can still remember hearing Mavis calling me out over the computer with obnoxious remarks, "no, no, no" and "try again Jacqueline." My poor typing skills were not something that no one knew about, Mavis made that pretty hard to cover up. As if being the new girl in a new state and new school was not bad enough, the last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to me. I began to hate that woman and can remember flicking her head and talking back to her. I would turn off my speakers on my computer so my classmates would not hear Mavis' corrections over and over. Turning off the speakers was not aloud so my plan did not work as good as I thought it would. I finally got so frustrated that I would begin to take the black mask off the computer just to get through the assignments and for once I saw the nice side of Mavis. Instead of "try again Jacqueline," I heard "great job!" I may have been fooling Mavis but at the end of the year I didn't fool my teacher when I failed the final exam because I still had no idea where to put my fingers and correctly type. Anytime I think about typing or talk about typing I can visualize Mavis Beacon in the corner of my computer screen waving her finger at me. To this day I still do not type correctly and I still hate black keyboard masks but not as much as Mavis Beacon! That will always stay in my mind as one of the first experiences with learning how to use a computer correctly. I have come a long way since Mavis but I don't miss her at all.