…they had all kinds of classes like “Home Ec” (cooking and sewing), metal shop and wood shop.
Do they still offer these types of courses? If not? Why not? If so, how have they changed in twenty years?
I remember some of the best skills I learned were from those courses during that time. I didn’t take the metal shop class but I took home ec and wood shop. They were a couple of the few courses I actually got good grades in (along with my art class.) Personally I find these skills to be important for people like me who learn more visually and spacially than by listening to a teacher through out facts – I was a book type just not into the books they made me read in school. I was reading adult novels when I was in 8th grade.
I find that if they don’t have these courses anymore we are missing out kids learning some basic life skills. Especially since so many parents get home, call the pizza guy and zone out in front of the TV. Rather than fixing some minor stuff around the house, many parents just call the repair man.
Anyhow, I didn’t think this was so much a GQ topic because it’s pretty subjective with regards to the outcropping of a discussion.
Also, did any of you take those types of courses? Do you think they taught you some basic life skills that maybe you would have never received from your parents?
I’m in 8th grade right now and we have Home Ec, but now they call it Life Management or something. No wood shop or metal shop, but they do have Technology Education.
When I took Home Ec in 6th grade, I think the most I accomplished was sewing together a stuffed alligator. They’re making boxer shorts this year, from what I’ve heard.
Tech Ed doesn’t do much either. We just build stuff with legos and play on the computers.
Well, I’m a high school senior now, and when I was in junior high (we called it middle school, but it was the same idea) home economics and technology (that’d be your “wood shop”) were required for all students. You took two years of each, in 7th and 8th grade.
In Home Ec we learned how to make several kinds of baked goods using the EXACT SAME refrigerator dough recipe, and they all tasted like wool. We also learned how to hand-sew (we made felt baseball-type things, prompting the only quote I remember from those years: “God damn it! Now I’ve lost my SECOND ball!” from the boy who sat behind me).
In Tech we made a bow-saw and rockets the first year and balsa-wood race cars and a mirrored curio shelf the second year.
I have a pretty crafty family (for instance, I knew how to sew better than the Home Ec teacher did), so I didn’t learn anything I wouldn’t have gotten from home. It was neat to play around with the big tools in wood shop and use school-supplied wood instead of having to buy my own at the store and use my dad’s little tools, though.
My high school doesn’t have Home Ec (my middle school did, but that was in a different state), but it does have woodshop and a great class for theatre technicians. There’s a whole performing arts program too, and I ended up becoming a theatre technician because I couldn’t act worth a damn.
IIRC, in my school (which is in Canada), in the 7th and 8th grades at least, you “alternate” options (theres like 5 options throughout the year all in one block), and home ec and applied tech are required. Applied Tech contains a bunch of crap where you work with lame (to screw around with, that is) stuff like circuits, gears, recording machines, etc. In one of the separate labs there they have a little room filled with basic carpentry tools used to make CO2 cars and the like, not exactly advanced stuff. There’s CALM (Career And Life Management), which is necessary at the 11th grade (the grade that I am currently in), basically teaches you crap about emotions, life, careers, etc. which I think is just a load of pure liquid bs. The home ec stuff might have been useful if we had it for more than 2 months, in which we basically learned that ovens can be hot, and sewing machines can hurt. I believe I took in again and failed it in grade 9, in which me failing it had nothing to do with the course itself. It’s also offered in high school, but I don’t take it.
Zoggie, is that per semester or what? If so, I bet that sucks :(. How long are your school days?
When I was in middle school, my dad was shocked to learn that even the boys had to take home ec. In his day, only the girls did. We did cooking in 7th grade and sewing in 8th grade, I made a pillow. During 7th grade, I was in a cooking group with 4 girls and I was the only one who knew how to peel a potato (Mom showed me how ).
And Tech Ed, which replaced wood shop, had all kinds of cool stuff like lasers and robots; I don’t remember it too well.
Well i went to an independent all-girls school in the south east of England from 1990-97 so i’m not terribly representative, but we had needlework classes and cookery classes. And they were actually called that too. No woodwork, no metalwork, nothing like that. What did i learn from them? Needlework - nothing at all that i didn’t already know excpet possibly how to operate the oldest sewing machine i’ve ever come accross. Cookery - how to make rum truffles and how to be picked on mercilessly by a teacher who randomly decides to hate you. I’m bitter. We learned how to wire a plug in physics class.
I did, however, get to take Latin and Ancient Greek for 7 years.
Fran
PS - note to Merkins - this curriculum is in no way representative of schools in England in general.
I’m a senior now, and when I was in junior high(7th, 8th, and 9th grades)we had to take each semester one of the following classes: Music, Theater, Craft, Fine Arts, Home Ec.(it is called that way), and Industrial Arts(basically how to draw like an architect, engineer). I took all of them. But in Home Ec. the teacher got sick and I only had half the semester(which was the cooking part, we never reached the sewing unit). In high school, the same school offers more programs under the blocks I mentioned above. So, there is also a woodwork class, a photo class, a paternity and maternity class(which I had the bad luck to take), and other art related classes.
Up until 8th grade I attended a small parochial school which did not have the resources to teach home ec or shop. This meant that I didn’t encounter them until high school. In high school, they were only available as electives. If you were, or hoped to be, college-bound, you didn’t have time to take them. If you were in a vocational/technical course, you didn’t have time to take them. And if you were taking business courses, guess what, you didn’t have time to take them. This meant that the courses were not at all popular. The prevailing attitude was that shop was for the greasers/slackers (boys only, of course!); home ec was for the girls who just wanted to take an easy course to get the credit and get the hell out of high school.
I bought into the stereotypes and missed out on my one chance at learning something practical in high school
Flodjunior (and later flod2k) will start wood shop and home ec in third grade. I think this is a wonderful thing.
In my junior high, way back in the time of record albums and the popularity of KISS, there were 3 shop classes (wood, metal, drafting), and 3 home ec classes (sewing, cooking, and I forget the third one). There was no official segregation of sexes, but there were only about 3 girls in the shop classes and 1 guy in the home ec classes (his father made him take it).
My daughter is in the 9th grade. So far, she’s not had any kind of home ec or shop-type classes - none were offered in her middle school. Next year, she’ll be taking the Life Management class, but she’s not sure what it covers, apart from one part that teaches them about money management and writing checks.
Personally, I think everyone needs to know the basics of cooking, sewing, personal economics, auto maintenance, plumbing, carpentry, and electricity. If you can read and follow a recipe, sew on a button or hem (NO STAPLES!!), balance your checkbook, and handle simple repairs around the house, you’re prepared to be an independent individual. That’s not to deny that sometimes the best tool for the job is a checkbook…
Education should go beyond academics, and if kids aren’t learning these skills at home, they should be able to get them at school. Self-reliance is a wonderful thing!
My junior high school (encompassing grades 6,7,8) had technology (required) which was really more like problem solving class, actualy kind of fun, and we read “The Soul of A New Machine” which would have been one of the better books I read in JHS. They didn’t have facilities to teach sewing or cooking (I learned at college, and at home, respectively), but did have computer programming as well as word processing (both required). We also had to select a “Talent” which was stuff like: art, drama, photography, band, choir. Those classes were a lot of fun. I also vaugely recall being forced to sit through some sort of “life skills” type class but it didn’t make a huge impression.
In high school we had to take a “5-period shop” (ie 1 hour a day, 5 days/week) and a “10-period shop” (2 hours/day, 5 days/week) and these classes ranged anything from metal shop, to stage & media, to painting, to “energy shop” (solar, wind, etc.) and lots and lots more. Drafting was also required, (and heinous)… whether you got manual or CAD was entirely random. (I got CAD).
We didn’t have tech classes, this was just before the home PC came out. No one even considered a home computer.
In high school, the guys who did take computer classes were considered geeks. But then again in high school I more involved in socializing than I was in any of my classes. The high school I went to didn’t have anything remotely geared to vocational classes. It was a school that focused on academics and people that wanted to take a mechanics class would go to the community college in the afternoon, I honestly wish I had taken the mechanics classes but I really didn’t know they existed. I was very much into cars so it wouldn’t have been that weird for me to take em. My class mates may have thought it weird though.
Someone mentioned a maturnity class? OMG…that surely shows how the world has changed since I graduated from high school in 1986! WOW.
I look back to those real life skills types of courses and was so glad I took them. I love to cook, I can sew better than anyone I know. The woodworking class I took really helped my understand the craft behind making a beautiful piece of furniture and those that work with their hands.
It’s good to hear that they haven’t completely taken out those types of courses though. Academics aren’t for everyone and it’s good to know more than what year Columbus said the ocean blue and Shakespear.
Yea, it was me… A maternity/paternity course (open to both sexes). It has a project that involves a crying baby doll, with a computer(its called the Baby Think it Over, cute name, heh?). The things so far I like about it is that it also teaches some sex ed.(in my school there is no sex ed class, just biology(which covers about a third of a semester to human sexuality…but just the biological part, and taking decisions), human ecology(much more profound, a whole semester about human reproduction), and paternity/maternity. Also, the home ec. course taken in ninth grade is suppose to give classes about sex ed. Really, the only thing I truly hate about the class (other than the general fact that I had to take it because there was nothing else to fit my schedule…grrr), was the baby project. Carrying everywhere, it became a problem with my university class, I almost got kick out of it.
Oh no, not that long. Just from 8am to 3pm, depending on whether or not you have a free. We have an alternate schedule. Three eighty minute classes one day, the other three on another day. Odd and even days. The electives really depend…they are hour long classes. I took mine this year in the first semester (September to end of January). Now I have frees in place of that.
Re: Maternity/paternity baby…how did they know you were taking it around and not just dumping it in your sock drawer? I mean, at school they could probably check up on you but when you’re out of school you could basically do anything with it…
Well, I graduated in 1991 from a rural Louisiana high school; we had Home Ec and Shop (sort of a general “These are tools. Do something with them.” kind of class). I didn’t take either–courtesy of my father’s influence, I was already a much better cook than the Home Ec teacher (who was perfectly capable of burning salad) and a fair do-it-yourselfer. Besides, the shop teacher was missing an eye and a finger or two–he never struck me as an appropriate authority on proper tool usage.
I don’t feel that I missed any useful skills by avoiding those classes–I cook, build things compulsively, and if I need some sewing done, I can do it either by hand or machine (it may not be very pretty, but it holds).
As for sex ed…well, sad to say, I provided most of what my friends and classmates got. Heaven forbid that a school should even mention the s-word in a staunchly conservative Southern-Baptist-dominated town. Fortunately, I had access to quite a good library on the subject, so I could pass the clinical truths (and a few juicy non-clinical truths) on to others. They quickly learned to ask me questions in private, though–my answers tended to embarrass people.
I left school in 1993, or I would have graduated in 1994. In years 7 and 8, we had to take both woodworking and home ec classes, and also sheetmetal, platics, and another class that was just called technology, and covered powder coating, iron working, and a bunch of other things. We also did sewing classes in that time, and physical education, and sex education. That was funny - we weren’t allowed to call it sex ed, we had to call it “Physical Development”, and it was a joke. I paid no attention in class, so I failed Physical Development Heehee.
On the art side, I did calligraphy, graphic drawing, pottery, and others, and I signed up for but didn’t get into leadlighting.
In years 9 and 10, I did electronics and drama instead of sheetmetal and woodworking.
I’m wondering where we found the time for things like english and maths, looking at that list.
Re: Maternity/paternity baby…how did they know you were taking it around and not just dumping it in your sock drawer? I mean, at school they could probably check up on you but when you’re out of school you could basically do anything with it…
No, because the baby, on the back, has a computer box. That box determines when the baby will cry, for how long it will be, also if the baby has been hit, or the person took too much time to answer the baby’s call. So if you left it on your sock drawer…It will cry as long as it wants to, and after a minute of crying non stop without attention, it will mark a mistreatment or negligence. You can, though, take the box out of the baby and carry that instead. To make it stop, you stick a jigsaw(sp?)key through a hole in the computer box, turn the key, and held it in that position for the time the computer wants to.
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