I hate to break it to parents who just sent their college-admission-minded progeny to the Tibetan Plateau to churn yak butter, but the smartest summer I ever spent was in secretarial school.

I was 17, and it wasn’t grist for an essay about a transformative communion with people outside my clique. I wasn’t ripping the blinders from my eyes. I was typing — hour upon hour, day after day, with my shoulders back and my spine straight.

My mother had decided she could no longer bear the tortured stutter of my pecking at her electric typewriter and my histrionic begging that she, with her superior dexterity, take what I’d composed in longhand and type it for me.

“You like to write?” she said. “Then learn to write.” She meant type. She was willing to pay for a proper course if I would go. I’d have no grand tales to tell.

But I’d have a skill, she said, and it would be more useful than I expected, not just in college but beyond. I’d be able to catch all those sentences and phrases swirling in my imagination and pin them down before they floated away.

I accepted her offer. The course lasted four weeks, I think. The dozen or so other students were women and all older, and I was too shy to do more than exchange greetings. They regarded me with bafflement before they stopped noticing me at all.

Typing was more than a skill. It was an understanding that mechanics sometimes matter as much as fancier, loftier stuff. It was a discipline in the truest, best sense of the word.

I later realized typing was my motorcycle maintenance, my shop class, the humdrum exercise I performed to a classical, exacting standard.

Today, few children are prodded toward typing classes, and that’s for the very sane reason that few children need to be. They use computers in lieu of typewriters and have grown up on smartphones and tablets and laptops, developing an organic fluency with keyboards.

In a 2011 essay for the MIT Technology Review, Anne Trubek bemoaned how far out of favor typing instruction had fallen. Then, she gave a typing test to her students in a writing class at Oberlin College.

“They all scored incredibly high,” she said.

I’d argue that she should still feel some formal typing nostalgia — not for the typing but for what it represents, which is an act of fierce concentration in counterpoint to the stimulation-promiscuous, staccato nature of many children’s lives now, especially online.

“Learning a rote skill, learning how to be bored — that doesn’t happen much anymore,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor who whipped up a storm of debate with her 2017 book “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.” She questioned whether childhood still includes enough activities that cultivate attention span and nurture focus. A binge of “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix doesn’t count.

“Having to sit for more than half an hour or an hour doing one thing — that’s gone by the wayside, and that concerns me as an educator and as a parent,” she told me.

I was bored during typing class, and then I was liberated by it. To this day, nothing was a mightier boost to my particular career than “home row.”

That’s where your fingers are supposed to rest when you’re typing: your left pinkie on the “A,” your right pinkie on the semicolon, your thumbs together on that long bench of a space bar. You memorize home row first and then the rest of the keys, and you do this by seemingly endless repetition.

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” — you type that sentence a lot, because it’s a pangram, meaning that it contains every letter in the English alphabet.

You type other alphabetically eclectic sentences and paragraphs, your fingers darting away from home row and hurrying back, again and again, with the goal of these movements becoming automatic. And at some point they do. You turn a corner and the dance of your hands across the keys is no longer a constipated jitterbug. It’s an elegant ballet.

I brought a tiny electric typewriter with me to college in 1982, and I reliably finished my term papers faster than my classmates did, thanks largely to the velocity of my typing. Computers came along and only quickened my pace: I didn’t sweat errors, which were easily fixed. If only life had a backspace key.

Journalism was where my typing paid off. I’m sure Oberlin students were nimble typists, but I doubt they were like me. I could take notes almost as fast as the person on the phone could talk. I could transcribe a televised debate in real time. I developed a reputation as a fleet writer when really I was a fleet typist. The talents were intertwined. Confidence in my typing gave me confidence in everything else.

My typing was good because my typing was correct. I often hear there are many routes to solving a problem or mastering a task, and that’s true. But sometimes there really is a right way, and it’s learned through complete submission and unquestioning practice.

The emphasis today is often different, Twenge said: “Do it your own way, everybody’s unique, there are no rules.” It can feed a runaway individualism.

My mother, long gone, was all for adventure and personal expression, but she was also for drudgery and humility, and I bet that she trusted secretarial school to acquaint me with both. I’d have plenty of time later to jet off to faraway lands.

First, I should sit still and train my fingers to fly.

— Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times.