High school vo tech

Lifted from a comment thread on a favorite blog (Angry Bear):

“In 7th grade the shop classes started. Wood the first semester, metal the second. I took one look at a band saw and refused to get near it. My teacher said I would fail. I told him OK by me. Same thing happened in metals.

My other grades were good enough that those F’s never stopped me from graduating. The problem jumped up in high school. By that time I was one of the best athletes in my class, starting in all three sports (they only had three in my day).

So my football coach comes up to me the first day in class and asks me how I am going to do in shop. I told him I was going to fail. He said you could not play sports with any F’s, and I said I just couldn’t do it.

He found a solution though. He put me in the home economics class. While I struggled with sewing, I was fine with cooking. I took a lot of ribbing by my teammates the first couple of weeks of school. But that changed pretty quickly.

They noticed I was always eating lunch with five or six girls.

Next year, 5 or 6 guys took Home Ec. By my senior year, half of all three teams were in Home Ec. They actually had to hire two more Home Ec teachers.”

I never took shop or home ec in high school, and it wasn’t required. My cross-country and track coaches didn’t even ask about my grades.

I got an amateur radio license in junior high and built a radio transmitter and a receiver. I also built an electric motor from wire and a juice can, and a primitive microphone from a pencil lead and the carbon terminal of a D battery. That was enough shop for me.

When my mom went back to school for her PhD, I had to cook meals to be ready when she and my dad came home. We all had domestic chores like washing and drying dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. We all had an allowance, so we could learn basic money management. I learned how to sew on buttons that fell off. That was enough home ec for me.

I did take one practical skills class in junior high: typing. While I was mediocre (speed and accuracy were always in inverse proportion), I learned enough to make a little money typing term papers in college and to transition to writing and note-taking on a desk-top or lap-top in my professional career. But I can’t say that not having taken shop or home ec classes has held me back in any meaningful way.