I attended high school during the days of the space race. The Apollo 11 moon landing occurred in the summer before my junior year. Across the United States, school curricula were being revised to encourage more science in academic programs. Our small-town high school wasn’t exactly cutting-edge. It had a few holdovers from previous educational theories. One of those holdovers was Latin. Two years of Latin were offered. Our school didn’t provide any other “foreign” languages. English and Latin were the languages. I don’t know if I took Latin because I couldn’t think of other electives that appealed to me, or if I took Latin because it was something that my relatives had done. High schools don’t offer Latin these days.

Another course I took in high school that is no longer offered is typing. Our school had a dedicated classroom for teaching typing. Most of the desks were equipped with manual typewriters. There were a couple of electric typewriters in the room, but we weren’t allowed to use them until we could type at least 50 words per minute with a high level of accuracy. Typing class, as I remember it, involved about 15 minutes of instruction at the beginning of the first class. From there on, we sat at our desks and copied text from a book on the typewriter. It was boring. By the end of the year, I was passing typing tests at over 60 words per minute, which was faster than the teacher could type. I think he was hired for his coaching skills more than for his academic performance. There wasn’t a lot of instruction involved in typing class.

I wasn’t the best or most motivated student in high school. The challenges of small-town social life distracted me. The skills that most interested me weren’t learned in high school. I learned to fly an airplane. I took ground school as night classes and studied more for those classes than for any classes I took in public school. I passed my written flight test on my first attempt and was ready to take the flying portion of the test before I was old enough to qualify for a license.

Looking back as an old man, three of my high school classes stand out as places where I learned lifelong skills: Typing, Algebra, and Latin. I use all of those three subjects nearly every day.

These days, children learn typing long before they reach high school. They are exposed to computer keyboards early in their lives and develop an intuitive understanding of the keys' positions. They don’t know why the standard English language keyboard is arranged in the “QWERTY” format. They probably learned to find the letters on the keyboard by operating touchscreen devices such as phones or tablet computers. They develop the skill of entering text simply by living with devices in their lives. While I am still fairly quick with a standard keyboard, I doubt that I would be as accurate with a manual typewriter as I am with my computer. And I am awkward and slow “typing” messages on my smartphone compared to any of the youth that I know. I have had trigger thumbs on both hands, and I can’t do the two-thumb technique that I see younger people employing. I have to look at the keyboard, and I use a single index finger to touch the letters. My thumbs are too slow and awkward to enter text that way. Besides, I haven’t learned the various shortcuts and techniques of text typing. I still use complete sentences, avoid abbreviations, and add punctuation. I’m pretty slow when it comes to sending text messages.

I’m no math wizard, but I do understand introductory algebra and geometry. When I worked for a small-town newspaper at the beginning of the transition from wax layout to computer layout, we had to resize all our pictures by figuring out exact proportions in column inches. Images needed to fit into one, two, or three columns, depending on the importance of the picture. I used algebra to figure out the correct width and height of pictures. These days, the computer handles all the math for the layout, and text can be made to flow around objects, eliminating the need for pictures to be printed in exact column widths. The designer working on the layout of a book can resize a picture to make page breaks occur at the end of paragraphs of text.

I use Latin on an almost daily basis, but primarily for my own curiosity or to add trivia to a conversation. I made biscuits for our family dinner on Labor Day this week. I hadn’t been doing much Dutch oven cooking, and since I was cooking the potatoes in a Dutch oven, I decided to ignite enough charcoal to bake biscuits in a second one. I didn’t get it quite right and burned the bottoms of the biscuits, but they were generally appreciated by the family anyway. Thinking of the experience, I got to wondering about the word “biscuit.” It comes from the Latin “biscotum,” which means “baked twice.” The way I make biscuits, however, doesn’t involve baking twice. Once is enough. Flour, baking powder, sugar, salt, butter, and milk. They can be rolled out and cut with a drinking glass or dropped onto a cookie sheet. When I am lazy, I purchase pre-formed biscuits in a peel-and-pop container.

While I think of a specific baked food item when I use the term "biscuit," the word is used to refer to a variety of different foods in other cultures. My English and Australian friends use the word to refer to a “cookie.” And some people call crackers savory biscuits. The company that bakes a lot of crackers and also makes Oreo cookies, Nabisco, is a shortened version of “National Biscuit Company.” I have no idea how they came up with the name “Oreo.” It doesn’t seem to be Latin. I do know that Oreos are imitations of Hydrox cookies. Two brothers, both bakers, had differing visions for their business plans and became fierce competitors. The first developed Hydrox, the other imitated with Oreo. Somehow, Oreo won the popular cookie war even though Hydrox was the preferred cookie earlier. Hydrox is an amalgamation of “hydrogen” and “oxygen,” the elements that form water. It was chosen to indicate the purity of ingredients.

When I share these facts with my grandchildren, they find them to be boring.