(Early-mid 1990s)
Shop wasn’t offered at my middle school, although there was enough time for them to give us a mandatory 9-week unit on self-esteem. :rolleyes:
I didn’t take it in high school, even though it was offered. Most electives like shop class were not offered as honors courses. Therefore, the aim was to take as few electives as possible, because they would drag down your GPA even if you got an A in them. My last semester I had only four hours worth of classes and two hours where I was an aide for my swim coach and for my guidance counselor.
I had shop in the 9th grade. My favorite tool was the wood lathe. Made a lamp and my final project & main grade was a small gun rack. We also poured some concrete flowerpots & benches from molds,
I took wood shop and metal/electric shop in 6th and 7th grade. Not a good experience – the only semi-worthwhile thing I made was a continuity tester with a clear plastic case. The metal shop teacher had a phrase that was famous with all his students: he would fire up some piece of machinery and exclaim, “It’s the power from Hoover Dam!”
I had shop which was a combination of drafting and woodworking, both of which I turned out to be quite good at. But I can empathize with those who felt like they were set up to fail. I took piano one year and immediately discovered that I stink at it. Of course there was no changing after you started, so I had to limp through the entire half-year not being able to remember which key was what. Nothing I “played” had even the vaguest resemblance to any piece of music, not even twinkle-twinkle.
I took shop in the 7th grade and loved it. I had the same shop teacher my dad did when he was in high school, some guy who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln. We didn’t do anything as complex as birdhouses, mainly things like building bridges out of toothpicks and making some type of…heart…hook thingy. My favorite project was creating pinewood cars and racing them against the other classmates.
I was supposed to take a second shop class my 8th grade year but something got severely messed up with everyones schedules and I was pulled out of it and placed into gym again, even though I hated that class and took all my gym credits as soon as I could to get them out of the way. :mad: Then I got placed into some parenting class that was even worse. :mad::mad::mad:
I kind of regret that I had no available time for another shoplike class, be it wood, CAD, or auto. I will always remember having Abraham Lincoln as my teacher and how fast my plain, aerodynamic little car went.
At my high school, both genders had to do the same classes in years 7 and 8. We did sewing, cooking, woodworking, sheetmetal, plastics, electronics… I can’t think of any others. From year 9, all our classes were essentially electives and we could choose from extra classes including automotive, welding, jewelry-making, leadlighting (those last two were in the student handbook as art classes rather than trades), I think they offered photography and pottery, and I remember doing gardening one year. We didn’t successfully grow a thing because the chickens escaped into the gardens one weekend and destroyed all our planting.
We also repainted our classroom over the course of a couple of science classes but I suspect that was more of a funding issue.
In both junior high and high school (late 70’s to early 80’s). I hated it and was awful at it, except for drafting (a separate class from shop in high school), which I was reasonable at and which in fact I liked better than a regular class because there was never any homework and never a test. These classes were all required, though in junior high it was only for one semester, and you ostensibly had a choice between it and home ec (that is, if you had enough of a macho reputation you might get away with opting for home ec).
I did dodge one major bullet, though. In junior high, my teacher hated me (he probably didn’t* actually* hate me, but it felt like hate to my junior high self and I probably deserved to be hated), and sometime late in the term, I somehow allowed or caused my major piece of wood to split down the middle. This would totally have ended life as I knew it had the teacher found out, especially once he picked up a saw to help me with something and I just sat back to watch him as though the wood were not already in two pieces, but not the two pieces they were supposed to be in. Anyway, miraculously, the wood fell to the floor, so the teacher now appeared to have caused the break, and I was excused from completing my project (table sconce; a popular choice), which I was unlikely to have completed, and so passed the class by the skin of his teeth.
I never took shop. I chose home ec in 8th grade (could not take both because I was taking band as well). My family moved to a different state right before I started high school, and there were wood and metal shops in the basement, but I don’t think that school offered wood or metal shop classes anymore (lack of demand, it was public school, but full of preppies who thought working with their hands was beneath them.) I took photography from the “Tech Ed” department during my junior year, and the photo lab was created out of part of the old metal shop, IIRC.
My daughter, on the other hand, is in 9th grade now, and is taking wood shop this trimester. Her middle school did not offer it. She is the only girl in her class, which kind of surprises me in this day and age. She says that a lot of her friends tell her, “Oh, I thought about taking that…” She is currently making a cutting board, which is the only required project. Later, they can choose what they want to/can afford to make (we have to pay for materials).
I took it in middle school, although it was called “Industrial Tech.” I loved it - one of our projects was designing a wooden race car with AutoCAD and then building it.
I had the typical hardass shop teachers, resented us longhaired kids, wanted to kick us with his steel-toe shoes, etc.
But my high school shop teacher was entierly cool. First day of class he told us all not to make pot pipes with copper tubing, because it would release toxic fumes. I was an art kid, not a shop one (although, later in college art school, the former "shop"kids settled right into their sculpture majors), so I didn’t stick around for the Habitat-For-Humanity style house the advanced students built every year.
The year after I graduated, some emotionally-disturbed kid deliberately burnt the shop down. One of the few shop teacher on earth who wasn’t like Red on “That 70’s Show,” and that was his thanks.
Yup - it was mandatory from ages 11 to 14, and still is. Back then they were separate woodwork and metalwork classes, one lesson a week each. Now it’s called Design Technology and they do termly rotations of woodwork and metalwork.
Unlike the American rotations mentioned in this thread, Home Ec (cooking and textiles) is a separate class, also mandatory both then and now and given various different names like Domestic Science, and art is also a separate class that’s compulsory for those years.
In Grade 7 (elementary school) and Grade 9 (high school), it was mandatory to take either Home Ec or Industrial Arts (=drafting + woodworking). I took Industrial Arts both times. In Grade 7, I made an emery board (i.e. a piece of wood with an emery cloth glued to it) and a cribbage board (i.e. a piece of wood with 121 holes drilled in it). In Grade 9, I made a small box with a sliding lid and a lock. I think they’re all still floating around my parents’ house 25 years later.
We had to take it in 7th and 8th grades, but by that time “industrial arts” had been combined with “home economics” and you could choose from any of the courses to make up a total of four semesters. I took metalworking, leatherworking, drafting, and drawing. You could also take cooking, sewing, woodworking, and other things. For the most part, it was a matter of figuring out what courses were available for your elective periods once things like math, science, english, social studies, etc., had been filled into your schedule.
Yup yup, it in Grade 9, it was mandatory. We had to take Industrial Arts and Home Ec. They split up the classes by gender just for those classes, so guys didn’t feel intimidated by the girls at cooking and sewing and the girls didn’t feel intimidated by the guys at welding and woodworking. It’s a sexist premise, but it worked out really well for us anyway. Plus, we had moved to the block format with two classes a day, so it was awesome to have 2.5hrs a day to do projects.
Made a shaped candy dish from warming plastic and molding it, made a wooden shelf, made a wooden oven opener thinger, did some darkroom photo development and attempted welding.
In junior high, there was a requirement: either I.A. (Industrial Arts) or Home Economics. Guess how the gender lines fell.
I took I.A., of course, because when you’re 12 you don’t want to look like a sissy, even though I am, and have always been, about the least mechanically inclined person you’ll every find. I think we made epoxy screwdriver handles and little wooden cars.
Then in high school I split it up - one year I took Small Engine Repair and the next semester I took Foods and Nutrition.
Seventh and eighth grades. We covered woodworking, plastics, metals, small engine repair, and drafting. I learned a lot, and built a couple of things I still own four decades later.
In 7th grade (which was 1995-1996 for me), we had one period of middle school that was broken into five chunks of about. . .I don’t know, seven weeks? Somewhere around there. Those chunks were devoted to cooking, sewing, shop, drafting, and art. Everyone had to take all of them; the order was always as I posted, except that some people started at different points.
For me, cooking was the most useful. I was the worst at drafting (somehow, I couldn’t draw a straight line with a T-square). Shop was pretty hard for me, since I’m uncoordinated and was scared of loud and heavy machinery. I was still better at it than drafting and sewing, though (I traded lunch money to this kid who sat by me so that he’d thread my sewing machine at the beginning of class, since I just couldn’t do it).
They replaced drafting the next year with technology modules, one of which was something like AutoCad. That was the same year that they had their first computer class. Shop still stuck around in its original form, though. We made a nameplate and a grocery list. About the only thing I learned in that class was how to properly sand. I mean, we were allegedly supposed to learn about varnishes and using saws and safety and stuff, but anything loud just freaked the hell out of me.
That brought back memories. I’ve been trying to recall what our shop class was called. Industrial Arts. Its been thirty years since I heard that phrase.
7th grade: Hobby Shop. Worked with leather (key fob, wallet), plastic (letter opener), and wood (thermometer on a wood-burned plaque).
8th grade: Wood Shop. Small book shelf, lamp (anyone else make a ‘pump lamp’?)
9th grade: Metal shop. Small soldered metal box, address bracket.
I am amazed to think that, at that young age, we were free to use jigsaws, brazing torches, molten metal, lathes, woodburners, electric sanders, band saws, etc. largely unsupervised.
mmm
