CBC Strike Three

I went into this test with a more chill attitude. I did great on all my practice takes. I did about 10, and I got them all on my first try with 96% or better accuracy. I wasn't super rushed leaving the apartment, or getting set up. I was the first one there last time, but about three people beat me in this time.

I didn't practice any of my words this time; I didn't have time. There was practice material playing the whole time, so I tried it out, but I didn't do very well on any of it. The words for the test were super easy this time. I think last time it was something like Harley, and some other weird stuff, but this time it was just William, piano, Canada, and Hawaii. Hawaii is super easy for me to write. Canada's fine, so I decided it would only trip me up to write a brief for it. William trips me up sometimes (I'm supposed to put an asterisk in the YAM part), and so does piano, so I made an easy brief for both of those.

I didn't really feel comfortable with my writing at any point. I was super nervous during the 1-minute warm up. I tried to just be relaxed and calm. My mouth gets really tense when I get to tricky parts to write, and it was tensing up right away, so I tried to just relax it. That seemed to help a little. I just got like a deer in the headlights again. My hands wouldn't do what I wanted them to, and the more I tried to force it, the stiffer they got. I managed to keep going, but it wasn't good writing.

I couldn't stop thinking about things, and being upset that I had blown it already and it wasn't working. My fourth minute was great for some reason. I calmed down and wrote everything perfectly. It just kept going on forever, and I psyched myself out, and made some mistakes in the last minute. I didn't pass. Maybe next time. I forgot to use my brief for William, and then remembered, and screwed myself up by deleting "will" and writing my brief. I wrote "C*AN" for Canada instead of "CAN/D*A," so that cost me two points, since "C*AN" comes out as ^can.

It wasn't a hard test. The words were easy, the speed was slow. Easiest test you'll ever fail, for sure. It sucks that I have to wait until November to take it again. Doing it twice a year makes the pressure way worse. I don't know why they only let us have one take. Even if they would do 15 minutes of audio and pick a random 5-minute sample to grade, it would be better.

I got to do the CBC first this time, instead of having to listen to the CRR first. I liked that better, but then it was really boring sitting and waiting for the CRR to finish. I don't like that I have to send a SASE with my flash drive. I think I pay enough for the test that they could send it back to me for free.

Failing the CBC sucks. It's such a huge disappointment, especially when you know there's no reason you shouldn't have passed it. I might try watching the screen next time. I thought it would throw me off, and I would get freaked out when I saw mistakes, but it's really weird not watching it. Maybe if I had the usual distraction of reading as I write, my mind wouldn't be so free to freak out. I'll try it out when I start practicing in October and see how it goes.

I'd kind of like to sit for the state court reporter exam, just so I have some kind of certification. It's two 7-minute QA takes at 200 wpm. You transcribe whichever one you want, and they grade a random 5-minute part of it. It's so totally different from captioning/CART, though, and I don't have any practice material. I hate RTC. The material is so dense. Even at 180 wpm it takes me like 6 times to get 96% on a take. I want some nice, normal stuff to practice. It's also hard to rationalize sitting for, because it's in October, and the CBC is in November. I know I can pass the CBC, so it's hard to take the CR exam when I'm just about to, theoretically, pass the CBC.

CBC Strike One

I had an interesting time sitting for the CBC skills exam in November. The test site is about half an hour away, and I got there about an hour before the exam was scheduled to start. The RTC site was going up and down for some people, and we weren't sure how we were going to test. I got some practice in, but I was annoyed that I could hear other people's practice recordings through their headphones. About 10 minutes before we were scheduled to test, the chief examiner asked everyone to leave the room so she could make sure the CD was working.

I think a couple of people stayed, because after a few minutes, one of them let us know we could come back in. I didn't like having to get up right before the test like that. I need some time to get settled into a spot before I'm ready to write. The CRR was played first. I can't remember if they had a pause between the minute of practice and the actual exam or not. The chief examiner gave the CBC testers a choice of having one or not. No one had a preference, and we got the opposite of what the CRR testers had. I remember thinking I would've preferred what they got.

Once the actual test started, my nerves got the best of me, and I felt like I was writing complete slop. I couldn't feel where the keys were, and I couldn't focus on the recording. I think I even dropped a setence or two because I was so zoned out. It was really disappointing, especially since the recording seemed really easy. It felt like something I should've been able to write, which made failing that much harder to take.

I got an 85% on it, which I guess isn't abysmal. I really lucked out, though; since there were problems with giving the test via RTC, it's being offered again for my site (and others) at half price on January 26th. I'll be taking it again, of course, and since I passed both the CBC and CCP written exams in October, I won't ever have to do those again.

My practice strategy, such as it was, was to carry on with my normal 2-hour practice routine every day, and to include the RTC practice take once a day for the week preceeding the exam. The take was a struggle at first, but by the end of the week I had it down pat. This time, for the two weeks preceeding the exam, I'm going to switch out the news portion of my practice for an hour of speedbuilding takes at 180 wpm. Getting back in the groove of metered verbatim is a huge hurdle, but hopefully two weeks will be enough to clear it.

11.11

     I got my new minute already. I really liked the strategy of starting at a slower speed. I think what worked for me was telling myself I wasn't allowed to move on until I was "comfortable" writing it, as opposed to just shooting for 95% accuracy. The minute was also only at 220 wpm, which is the speed RTC claims the entire piece is, and the speed at which I actually want to practice.
     I decided to try getting a tripod for the LS, and today was the first time I used it. It was actually really nice not having to balance anything on my lap. It felt much more sturdy that way, and I think it's going to work out.
     I have another list of potential word-boundary conflicts: cast, going, grade, heart, ward, stream, wind, bridge, found, wax, bound, rail, nail, comb, fill, hole, room, pile, mill, fare, house, made, and bulb. And there were a few words that only presented problems in one instance: printwheel, standstill, and handshake. I can't believe anyone would have STAND\STIL defined as one word! There were a lot of instances for "-house" and "-room" especially. I also changed "board" to BAORD a while ago, but I never went back and put asterisks in for "-board" or even fixed all instances of BORD, apparently, so I took care of that.
     When I got to "-nk" in the Phoenix drills, I realized I never practiced doing FRNG instead of *NG. I started trying to think of the finger formation as "-nk" instead of thinking of words as, for example, DRAFRNG. That's what you're always supposed to do, but there are a lot of instances where I never quite got there. PB I think of as N, of course, and TK as D, etc., but for a lot of the other stuff, like IFM for "-ism," I'm still thinking "IFM." "-nk" words were dramatically easier to stroke once I started thinking of the position instead of the keys, so hopefully I can apply that to other aspects as well.

8.11

     I finished my whole entire piece on Tuesday.  It only took five weeks, which is good, and much better than the 14 weeks I spent on the one before it.  Unfortunately, it was the last one that RTC labeled as 220 wpm, so now I have to move up to 225.  That wouldn’t be so bad except that the first piece at "225" is actually 250 wpm for the first minute. :(   

     I’ve been working on it for a couple of days, and I’m not ready to give up yet, but it’s definitely difficult.  I actually hit 214 at the end of it today.  I misstroked "windowsills," and what I actually wrote was "vindowsills." TM translated it to "veindo Simms."

6.10

     It’s really nice not to have to spend half of my practice time playing with the Report-It.  In all of the terrible positions I had it in, I couldn’t even write for 4 minutes without feeling horribly fatigued, and now at least from a fatigue standpoint, I’m completely back to normal.  I haven’t gotten used to the position yet, but I’m working on it.

       Today I measured the speed of my piece when I write it for control, at the end of my practice session. I’m almost completely comfortable writing it at that speed, and I don’t think I would want to go much faster.  It turns out that it’s only 180 wpm.  That seems awfully disappointing. I was also able to figure out how many words were in the 4 minutes that I write at the normal speed.  I know it starts out at 230 and finishes at 215.  According to RTC, it’s supposed to be 220, and actually, if you average all 4 minutes, it is 222.

     The other day I had time for some dictionary maintenance, so I finished fixing every thing I wanted to in terms of integrated endings.  I deleted 333 LG words, 122 NG words, and 46 RG words.  I also fixed anything where I had BG as in ribbing, because that conflicts with things like Rick, and anything were I had RBG, for things like crashing, because that conflicts with things like cracker.  Remembering not to write all of those is going to be a different story. 

     I deleted some entries with the long A sound and D, like swayed, which interferes with suede.  Carol says you shouldn’t attach D to any vowel sounds, but I think I’ve accounted for any problems aside from the long A. I also finally added my attaching alphabet, that attaches lowercase letters to the last word.

Square One

     I’ve been feeling very frustrated with my writing lately.  I feel like I've changed so many things from StenEd.  I started with integrating endings, and that opened a whole can of worms and conflicts.  Now when I write, I’m always trying to remember to incorporate endings, or remember which ones I can’t do, and especially now that I read about the ones I can’t incorporate on Phoenix, I’m worrying about that, too.

     When I got the Magnum Steno book, I decided to put all the prefixes and suffixes in my dictionary, and that caused some conflicts, so I tried to change the way I write some things.  I never practiced them, though, so when I tested for Caption Masters, a few things came out wrong, and the instructor suggested that I add asterisks to all of my suffixes.  I didn’t really know what was or what should be a suffix though, and it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to figure out "is this actually a suffix, or just a second stroke" when I was writing, so I decided to add asterisks to all of my second strokes, but I didn’t really commit to it, and I just kind of do it when it comes naturally, but it’s still something that slows me down when I write.  Even though I should just do an asterisk on all of my second strokes, I always have that moment of hesitation where I wonder, "do I need one here or not?"

     Then I bought the Broadcast Captioning Training Manual from NJCaptions, and I decided to add all the prefixes and suffixes that were listed in it to my dictionary, and that caused all kinds of conflicts and problems and things I had to come up with alternate ways of writing in order to fix.  I started using DL- at the start of my suffixes, because there were times when the outline for the suffix by itself was a regular word, and I needed to use that same outline as a prefix and a suffix, so I put the asterisk in the prefix, and then I didn’t have any way to distinguish the suffix, so, DL- worked great.  But I didn’t want to have to remember which ones needed DL and which ones didn’t, so where possible, I just created all of them with DL-.  So that’s another thing I have to think about; remembering the DL, and all the other things like it that I added.

     That’s basically the extent of it, but I feel like it’s really hurting my speed.  It seems like every time I hear a word, I experience massive hesistation where I have to think, "how am I supposed to write that now?" It’s all for the better because my writing will be truly conflict free, unlike it was with just the StenEd, where, for instance, the outline for the word con, and for words starting with con and for words ending with con were all the same.  But I almost feel like I’ve created this mutant theory, and I need to go back to square one and go back through my theory book and start completely over and do it all again, spend six months writing through all the exercises and word lists and train myself to write the way I want to now.

     I don’t have time for that kind of thing though, not unless I stop speedbuilding, and I certainly don’t want to do that.  I think, though, before I start going through my dictionary wholesale and trying to fix everything to at least translate properly when I remember to write it the way I want to, I’m going to work through the VITAC book, since I’m probably going to change even more things as I do that.  It talks about what is and what isn't a suffix, and has ways to fix basically all the conflicts.  I wish I had started with it and only changed things based on it to begin with.

     In other news, I got my minute today.  I don’t feel too much accomplishment about that though, because it was only at 215.  That’s the annoying thing about Realtime Coach.  Even though it says a piece is at a certain speed, it’s really not.  It’s all over the map.  It could start faster than it says it is, and then get slower than it says it is, and then be at the right speed for a minute.  It’s crazy.  I decided to just ignore that and practice the ones that say they’re the speed I want, though.

Background

     I'm 25 years old. I've lived in St. Louis, MO, my entire life. When I have the money, I want to move somewhere warm, probably California.   I graduated high school with a 4.3/4.0 GPA, and in December 2007, I graduated from Lindenwood University with a 4.0 and Bachelor's in Spanish.  I taught Spanish for a semester at my old high school, and then I taught for a semester at another high school.  I was mostly interested in the career for the retirement benefits, and after a year, I decided they weren't worth being miserable for 30 years.  I wanted something a little less interpersonal, so I had to find a new career.
     I found out about court reporting by looking in the big book of jobs and how much they paid at the library.  I was already thinking about medical transcription, since I could type 100 wpm and I didn't think I would get bored doing it, but I really wasn't interested in anything medical. Court reporting seemed easy enough, and in looking into it, I found out about captioning, which seemed even better.  I love watching TV, so it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig to just type whatever I heard on TV.

     I found a school based on which ones were NCRA accredited.  I thought about a couple of online options, but I didn't like the idea of having to lay out $5,000 right at the outset.  The only school in Missouri that was even participating (they weren't accredited at the time, although they are now) just happened to be the local community college, St. Louis Community College.  I was able to enroll in classes about a week after they officially started, which turned out not to be a big deal at all.  I wound up doing the entire program online. I took the first theory class that spring, and the second and last theory class that summer.  Learning it was a breeze.

     I did very well in all of my speed classes, and managed to stay almost a full semester ahead.  Once you got to a certain point, though, if you were in the captioning program, you stopped doing the court reporter speedbuilding classes and started just using Realtime Coach for practice and testing.  My teacher didn't think I really needed to do that, so I just signed up for Realtime Coach and started practicing on my own.  I took both of the "Broadcast Captioning" classes at STLCC, but all they entailed was writing to TV and adding words to your dictionary based on what you wrote, as well as journaling about your reactions to each type of broadcast.

     The next step after that was a captioning internship, which I had the required speed for, but the professor didn't feel comfortable having me represent the college because I hadn't taken medical and legal terminology.  She suggested I talk to some captioning companies and see if I could work out some training with them.  I'm sure that would have turned out great, since I could barely write at 180 at that point.

     Ever since then I've just been using RTC to practice away on my own.  I've been practicing about 2 hours a day the entire time I've been student, which I know isn't much compared to some people, but it's also more than others.  I'm hoping to get in to the Caption Masters course, but you have to be at "court reporter speeds," and while I'm sure I'd easily be testing there now if I had kept taking tests, as it stands I've fallen out of test-taking mode and I'm not used to writing raw material even as slow as 180, although I'm practicing at 230.

     I got my LightSpeed writer about two months ago, and learning to write on that has been a challenge.  It allows me to write much faster, which isn't always a good thing, because I get tripped up trying to go so fast.

     Somewhere back in September when I was still in the broadcast captioning class, I discovered Mark Kislingbury's StenoMaster theory and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I even bought the $260 book. I tried to write everything as "short" as I could, and lost a lot of speed trying to get my fingers into complex positions for briefs.  That wasn't such a great idea, and now I just incorporate a few of the principles, like tucking K, R, S, and G.

     I had the opportunity to observe a CART provider about a month ago, and although at first, when I thought CARTing was just following a deaf person around at school, I didn't like that idea at all, now that I know more about what CARTing is, I think that might be a great way to go, too.  You can do remote CART from home, which I think I would like, but I also like being in the classrooms, so I think doing it in person would be fun, too.  It seems like there's less pressure than with captioning, although I know it's still important to be the best you can and provide quality text.

     I wrote this on my steno machine, and it's interesting how different my writing style is from when I type on a keyboard.