Stenography 101
My court reporting professor is actually very amazing. All of my classes are live, over Zoom, so I’ve not actually met her - or any of my classmates, even though three of them live in town and three of us have a text group - but the impact of her amazing support and personality has been very obvious on us, as a class. We have a group chat on WhatsApp where 20+ of us commiserate over every new concept in the theory we’re learning.
That said, she experienced a terrible loss last week and canceled one class but promised to be back the next day. (We meet three times a week.) Her returning so soon after is, of course, an absurd thought but I understand that people just want to maintain some sort of normalcy while grieving.
But as we all saw this notification over Canvas, and felt the impact of her news almost at once, my class hustled, collected donations, and sent this woman a giant flower arrangement with all of the add-ons we could find and afford. There was money left over from later donations for a second gift basket with care items, like gift cards for food delivery, so she wouldn’t have to worry about remembering to eat.
I offered to draw the card for that and already had this image in my mind. Took a photo of my machine and outlined it, then dove in to drawing these flowers from a reference bouquet. Which, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever done before and wasn’t sure I could actually do.
(And y’all now that realistic stuff isn’t really my thing. But every now and then I have the patience for detail.)
I should say that I was greatly inspired by our professor fully committing to joining our class the day after her loss. Tears and all. She’d received her flowers and thanked us all, then wiped her eyes and moved forward with dictations for our final quiz of the semester.
This is just a drawing that I didn’t want to add words to, but I hope it brings some additional comfort and I hope she sees that it’s meant to relay our gratitude to her dedication to our success.
Court reporting schools and programs have something hovering around a 95% fail rate. I am only in my first semester of theory but we will have the same professor for all three theory semesters. Then off to speed building (the hounds), up to 225 wpm, where most people tend to give up.
I love the machine and learning a very detailed, even if a bit stroke intensive, theory that makes sense to my puzzle-loving brain, but at some point in the future, I know we will all just be hanging on for dear life.
Til then, I will be sprinkling this new love of mine into my little collection of sporadic thoughts here.
