I often draw correlations between stenography and other professions and skills.  They teach motor skills.  We teach motor skills.  They teach a certain way.  We teach -- well, let's see.

     Right now, it is spring training for baseball.  Pitchers are working on pitching; batters on batting, fielders on fielding; runners on running.  Every team does it.

     What kind of practice do they do before a real game?  Very little.  Practice may occur at other times of the day, but before the game, they aren't practicing.  They are warming up.  Easy ground balls, easy throws, easy pitches. 

    There is a time for practice and a time for warm up.  They figure that they are about to play a game with whatever skills they came to the park with.  If they want to have the best chance to win, they will use those skills to their best advantage.  And finally, they figure that the best way to do that is to warm up, limber up, psyche up.   Easy ground balls, easy throws, easy pitches. 

     When I went to school, every teacher believed that the best way to prepare students for a test was to feed them fast dictation before the test.  No easy ground balls; no easy throws; no easy pitches.

     Unlike sports, which gives their players easy warm up, all of my teachers drilled me beyond my abilities on test day.  This was especially true in the last five minutes of drill.  It was felt that the test would sound slow, if the drill immediately preceding it was fast.

     That was true.  It did sound slow.  But I was a quivering mass of unclarity and hesitation by the time of the test.  I could no longer perform at the top of my top abilities.

     So it really didn't help me.  I passed my 200s by ignoring the final dictation before the test.  When everybody else was writing at 220 and 240, I was warming up by slowly writing such stock sentences as "Now is the time for ...." and "The quick brown fox jumped ...."

     Today was test day.  The students received slow material at a controlled rate.  These students are at the end of Theory and are competing for 60 and 80 wpm tests.  Their drill was as low as 40 wpm and as high as 80 wpm. 

    Tomorrow is not test day.  Every drill will push the students for one reason or another.  The slow drills will require writing unusual words or thick words.  The fast drill will be extremely fast.  The regular drill will require that the student know common briefs and phrases or know how to write out the words.  The drill will reach as high as 120 on normal dictation.  Easy dictation will be much higher. 

    Today was game day.  I warmed them up. 

    Tomorrow is for practice.