I had the same Coronet model in high school. Mine was gold/yellow, yours appears almond brown but maybe it's the lighting. Mine purchased 1972. It had manual carriage return for about $120. The higher model with the carriage return button cost $150. It got me through high school, college, and grad school. We already had a 1960s model Smith Corona electric at home (the Electra model?) but with two kids at home in middle/secondary school, two machines were needed. I took the Coronet off to college with me.
I learned to type in fifth and sixth grades. California has a program for gifted education, then known as MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors Act) and today known as GATE (Gifted/Talented Education). MGM provided for additional funding to schools that established gifted education programs for kids who tested at or above the level the state defined as gifted. However, simply putting all the smart kids in one class and teaching them at a faster pace did not meet the requirements. The schools had to establish enrichment programs above and beyond the normal curriculum.
San Diego City Schools adopted the "cluster class" model: taking the kids testing gifted from three adjacent schools into one class, which still only amounted to only a dozen or so kids, and adding high-performing students who did not test quite at gifted level, but who had their acts together, academically. The core gifted group(a dozen or so of us) had additional "pull out" sessions with a resource teacher from school district headquarters. Some school districts used models other than cluster classes. I know of one person whose school district placed the gifted kids in "normal" classes, but once or twice a month they met off-site with gifted students from five other schools for a half or full day of enrichment education. This model may have become impractical as more women entered the work force and were unavailable to shuttle kids to distant school sites, but it worked in the 60s and early 70s. It so happened that the school I would have attended anyway was a host school for the MGM program, and students from two adjacent schools who qualified were allowed to transfer to our school....but they were on their own in terms of transportation, and the distance was often beyond walking distance. There may have been some gifted students who could not transfer if they had two working parents or a single working parent (whereas students who lived within the enrollment zone of my school were all close enough to walk or bike).
I remember in fourth grade we had pull outs learning how to research problems and look up information. In sixth we were placed in a faster, more challenging math section, using a student teacher. In fifth and sixth there were two or three weeks of typing instruction, twice a year for two years, so that by the end of sixth grade we had had almost a semester equivalent of typing instruction, but spread out over two years. Classes were taught by an itinerant teacher who moved from school to school every two or three weeks. The intent of the instruction was not pre-vocational, but rather pre-honors student.
We learned on manual Royal machines, with tape over the keys to hide the characters. I probably did 18 words/min in fifth grade, and perhaps 23 wpm in sixth. However, I noted that I could go 30-32 wpm at home on the Smith Corona electric, and that kept me motivated. I didn't foresee transferring my keyboard skills to a computer, but I could see that mechanical typewriters were a thing of the past and that someday I myself might own an electric typewriter.
Today I do 60-80 wpm. My profession is now almost entirely computerized and I am grateful I was given keyboard training, albeit on a Royal mechanical model, so early in life.
www.usbtypewriter.com
