You Took Shop or Sewing
...then you joined labor.
Or you joined management.
In my junior high-school all the boys took classes in woodworking and metalworking. I know I took a class in mechanical drawing also, but that was held in a regular classroom. The girls took cooking classes and sewing and - I think - typing. After class the bolder boys would compare notes with the girls wearing bras. I think.
In high-school, tracking became important. The counselors said so. If you were slated for college, then you wouldn't usually have the time to take things like shop. So it wasn't until senior year that I learned the guys in shop had an advantage: the shop wing and the gym wing shared the only (outdoor) passage that allowed smoking. Cigarette smoking only. Pipe smoking would have to wait until college. The shop guys would have thought I was pretentious. And they would have been right. I could be pretentious, and fat, but not in the smoking corridor.
Now of course times have changed. I'm sure that cigarette smoking in high-school is not allowed anymore. Otherwise, the high-school girls would be puffing too. But there are still no high-school girls taking shop. However, there is equality: the shop tools have been scrapped. Too dangerous.
As for those management people? Seems those middle management positions weren't as plentiful as we thought.
You could change your name to "Keith Rucker" perhaps?
Comments
A big subject you opened up.
Employers whining about labor shortages while they throw away employees who can't drug test or offer at least one year of related experience. They can't get one year of related experience is no one will hire them with none.
Union apprenticeship programs requiring applicants to be HS grads with grades and academic skills that would have had them on a track for college prep.
Labor shortages in the past were real and not a sham to bring in more H1B visa folks. Employers hired HS dropouts with strong backs, a desire to work, and a dose of common sense, and then they trained them to be plumbers, welders, electricians, technicians, yada, yada.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
@dkmich Thanks for replying. In
Thanks for replying. In the US, we could make some really good stuff. A little heavy sometimes, but still, good stuff.
Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long
I took mechanical drawing and typing
I got so good at typing I got stuck in data entry jobs for a decade. On the plus side, I listened to a lot of Terry Pratchett books on tape. A lot of other authors as well.
I did take metal shop in junior high and some girls also took it ... But that was long ago.
@SancheLlewellyn My grandmother re-modeled
My grandmother re-modeled the town's closed lumber yard into their house after my grandfather died (on my mother's side). My grandfather (on my dad's side) built the house my dad was reared in. As for me, I wish I had inherited their skills with wood. I should have continued on with metalworking, though.
Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long
Vocational Education and the Middle Class
There is a strong relationship between the termination of true vocational education in the U.S. and the demise of the middle class.
choices
Unlike here in the USA, where high school kids (1970s and later) had no attractive choices. Go to college and suffer from debt for most of the rest of your working life, or train for blue-collar jobs which aren't going to be there when you need them.
Some choices!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Vocational education was not just taught at school.
It was taught at home on the farm (low numbers), and by unions in apprenticeship programs.
How much of the middle class was killed by killing unions?
A good topic for labor day.
The institution of "right to work" (for less) laws, together with NAFTA etc. were probably a large part of the hollowing out of the middle class.
part of the American WWII mythology -- which is not to say
that there is no truth in it -- is that our citizen/farmer/soldiers were more adept than their enemies (or allies, for that matter) at keeping equipment running, because of the mechanical skills that so many of them learned growing up on mechanized middle-class American farms. thus, even though the Germans often had far "superior" equipment in terms of engineering, Americans had the advantage because they could jury-rig repairs to their simpler and often over-built (read: heavy) gear.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Thank you for posting your essay.
Employers have no commitment to employees. I have watched companies take hundreds of thousands tax dollars, dictate the training curriculum, supply staff to instruct, interview and select the trainees, and not hire a damn one of them. Commitment to hire? Pfft, not on your life. Left the trainee shell out tuition and spend as much as a year in training with no pay and no promise to hire. Corps are the real welfare queens.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
My typing teacher said
Her class would be the most important class in my life. (I was on the "college track", and there were several boys in the class—early 1970s.) She was wrong, the most important class turned out to be Biology. I ended up in Software, where typing was an extremely useful skill. But in Biology class, I learned to keep a good lab notebook, and that skill was the one I was most grateful for.
My Biology teacher went on to found an orphanage in Cambodia, and she was awesome in every way.
Always good to see you, jabney!
“We may not be able to change the system, but we can make the system irrelevant in our lives and in the lives of those around us.”—John Beckett
I will note that many of my college friends,
and myself as well, concluded that typing had been our most valuable high school class, though our teacher had not predicted it.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
You should've seen it when I took home ec
This was in a very small town in the Midwest in the 70's. The school put up quite the resistance because, as we all know, I'm a guy and guys take shop not home economics. Here's the deal though. I've detested anything mechanical from a very early age and there was ZERO chance I was going to take shop. On the other hand, learning how to make things like cake and brownies seemed like a fine way to spend my time. Learning to sew has stood me in good stead throughout my whole life. It's handy being able to make emergency repairs on the road even if you do have plenty of money to buy replacements.
And then again in band. I liked the flute. It was easy to carry, compact, and can sound heavenly. But flute, as we all know, is a girl's instrument. I was told I had to do bassoon. Yeah, that lasted about 4 weeks.
Gosh, even back in high school I pretty much sucked at doing what I was told.
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
When my brand-new Junior High opened in 1975
a few of the guys in grade 8 signed up for Home Ec (cooking, specifically). (It was a small school, so a few of the guys would still have been 20% or so of the class.) After that first year, some of the guys in every grade always chose cooking. Don't remember if any of them ever took sewing.
I think there were 2 or 3 girls in each grade taking shop class -- there were definitely at least 2 in my 7th grade classes, graphic arts (drafting and printing) and sheet metal.
We were right out there on the cutting edge. If anyone in admin was concerned, I don't remember hearing about it.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
@UntimelyRippdsheet metal
We didn't use the word, "Sheet." I guess that was because we each had to make an aluminum trivet from an aluminum 'ingot' (a small rectangular piece that the teacher sawed from a real ingot). We wouldn't handle the molten aluminum - that was the teacher's job - but we learned how to make our own mold using a special mixture of sand (pre-mixed, sadly), and then to watch our own mold being filled. I think, if I remember correctly, we could do acid-flux soldering - or was it brazing?
Thanks for commenting.
Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long
graphic arts and sheet metal were grade 7
woodworking and ??? were grade 8
electronics and foundry/welding/milling were grade 9
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.