Woo-hoo! I’ve completed the Project Steno Basic Training! I feel less like a private off to my next training duty and more like a 4-year-old who made it through pre-school and is trying to figure out kindergarten. Sitting at the writer is a joyful challenge; making my fingers perform correctly is fun, not work. At the same time, I look at what I’m doing and realize that every day, I work with professionals who mastered everything I’m doing now a long, long, long time ago. I feel like a tiny toddler in a room full of adults.
I’ve finished my first two weeks of Theory I at Clark State College, which involved getting to know my classmates, reading about national and state associations, demonstrating that I knew how to assemble and disassemble my writer, and learning some basic CATalyst skills. (I smiled a lot during the assignment to watch a video about dictionary management. I wrote the script for that one, and one of my Stenograph colleagues narrated it. I wonder if, at some point down the road, I’ll be asked to watch a video that I recorded!)
The timing for my dual training worked out nearly perfectly. I finished my Project Steno class on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, and I will be starting Lessons 1-6 of writing in my Theory I class on Tuesday. In other words, not quite soon enough. I want to start writing NOW. And, of course, I will. Yesterday, I went through the concepts of Lesson 1, and as soon as I get back from the weekly grocery shopping this morning, I’ll be working on Lesson 2.
I’ve already picked up some things in the theory I’m learning (Roberts, Walsh, Gonzales) that are different from what I’ve picked up from working with other reporters. For example, to differentiate between words and proper nouns that sound identical (e.g., Bill/bill, Pat/pat, Sue/sue), they want me to write /K-L before the proper noun. I thought I would do that with the asterisk in a single stroke. However, from what I’ve seen in Lesson 2, they’re going to be teaching the use of the asterisk for different purposes, so, okay… I’ll do it this way. I’ve already defined /K-L as <Cap Next> in my student dictionary so that it will translate correctly.
I’m off now to grocery shop, and then I get to start playing with Lesson 2 and practicing. And yes, I look forward to it!