A night to relax? Nah.

Here we are. Friday night. My plans were to relax after dinner, but the homework from my other classes was haunting me. I kept thinking that if I get some of it done, I'll have more time to practice court reporting over the weekend.

Well, I managed to get quite a bit of my Sociology and American Government homework done. Yay! Since I was on a roll, I decided to work on some steno dictation. I started with Chapter 25 (Numbers). The mp3 recordings that our instructors provided us are spoken at either 25 words per minute (too slow) or 40 words per minute (too fast). I wanted a challenge so I opted for the 40 wpm mp3. Holy moley ~ I'm dropping words all over the place! Very frustrating. Perhaps, I'll try again tomorrow when I'm fresh.

Good night all.

Review night

Court reporting class is held three nights a week ~ Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays. Monday and Wednesday nights we learn new theories and Thursdays we review the week's lessons.

Did I mention that each night we have a different instructor? Court reporting is taught by working court reporters. Hence, the evening classes. I'm not sure how many court reporters teach at Colorado Technical University. There are three that teach theory and several more that teach the speed-building courses.

I feel a little sorry for our instructors ... our little class of four students currently write at about 35 words per minute, and the gals have to dictate V-E-R-Y S-L-O-W-L-Y. It kind of sounds like a first grader learning to read.

Shhhhhh

We learned more endings for words tonight. We learned how to write the sound SHAL, as in artificial, facial, glacial. And we also learned how to write the sound SHUS, as in delicious, cautious, pretentious. It was a lesson that was easy to understand - a nice break from Monday's lesson about numbers, decimals, fractions and dollar amounts.

The highlight of the class was during read-back. One of the students was having difficulty reading back her notes and said, "The male was both delicious and nutritious." Ummm, I believe the correct word is "meal". The teacher said as she burst out laughing, as did all of us.

I hope I don't make a mistake like that in court ~ Yikes!

Giving the answers away.

As I mentioned before, I’m working toward getting my A.S. degree in Court Reporting. With that, of course, comes many, many other classes that seem to have no relation to court reporting. This quarter I’m taking Sociology and American Government along with my court reporting classes.

Our assignment this week in Sociology is a 30-question quiz and a short essay about whether or not government should fund studies on sexual behavior. At the end of class last Friday, the professor tells us about our homework and directs us to the student portal website where we can download the quiz. We download the quiz and find the key to the quiz at the end. Whoops! Seems the professor downloaded the wrong document. When we point out his error, he says, “Well, it looks like you get one for free this week.” Yay!

I bet he double-checks his work next week.

Numbers!

Tonight's class was all about numbers. According to my instructor, nobody likes numbers. I can see why. I never liked them in my standard typing class either. Although, we changed our settings in the translation program (Eclipse) that we use to make writing numbers easier, and it helped a lot. I was actually getting the hang of it by the end of class.

BTW, did you know that there are cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers? I never knew the way you write a number actually has a name. Cardinal numbers are 1, 2, 3, four, five, six, etc. Ordinal numbers are 1st, 2nd, 3rd, fourth, fifth, sixth and so on.

We learned how to type dates, decimals, fractions, large numbers, dollar amounts and even Roman numerals.

One of the gals in class had an orthodontist appointment and had to miss class. Of all classes to miss ~ this was not the one. I hope she gets a chance to meet with the instructor. The author of our book crammed a lot of information in Chapter 25!

The start of a new chapter

Hi friends,

Since I've managed to make it through Realtime Theory I at Colorado Technical University, I thought I start a blog in an effort to record my progress as I work toward getting an A.S. degree in court reporting.

Well, so far, so good. I have the basics well under my fingers. Memorized keyboard - check. Can type without looking at the keyboard - check. Have a good number of briefs and phrases memorized - check. For those of you who don't know what briefs and phrases are - and you'll hear these terms a lot - they are the "notes" (the letter combinations used to define a word), that represent words or a combination of words. For example, S means "is" and T means "the". Therefore, S-T stands for "is the". Get it?

Anyway, as I begin Realtime Theory II, the language of steno is getting much easier to read and I've built up a little speed - OK, very little. But I look at it this way: If I can't type slow accurately, then I won't be able to type fast accurately.

So, I guess I better get my homework done for tomorrow night's class . . . we'll talk soon.