He sounded pretty serious to me. Do you have a better suggestion? The Mavis Beacon software does a perfectly fine job at teaching touch-typing.
Unfortunately when I did so, it didn't have special lessons for the numeric keys; hope that changed.
Goes to show you don't really need to learn the whole process with some type tutor software. Though in terms of efficiency you may want to be aware of what they suggest. For instance, I think I was hitting the Y key with my left hand rather than right hand at some stage, but long ago changed that.
The only gripe i had with it was that it required typing two spaces after a period. I found this just plain weird, so I fixed it in the tutorial files.
I guess using a blank keyboard also helped quite a bit..