#11
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At most public schools, the shop classes were shut down between 20 and 30 years ago because of those icky and dangerous tools/machines did not fit into the "everyone goes to college" mantra. One of my wife's cousins was a longtime shop teacher in the Chicago Public Schools system. He finally got tired of having to spend the first 3 months of shop class teaching the kids how to read and do simple arithmetic before he could start teaching them how to make wood bowls and jewelry boxes. He retired and moved to Nebraska. |
#12
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Today they force advanced math concepts down kids' throats before their brains are mature enough to really grasp it. They can't wrap their heads around simple fractions, but they can do slope-intercept. They have ZERO decimal discipline. They have no clue how to divide with a pencil and paper and nobody can write in cursive. They are taught very little grammar, but are expected to read books and write good papers on them. This isn't a teacher problem. It is a state standards problem.
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I love sanding. |
#13
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I hear you. As a grade 8 student around 1970 or so I was within a cohort of young kids that were transferred into a brand new entity for our particular school district: a "Senior Public School" (gr. 7-8). Although the concept was new (to us), the designated school building had previously been a "Collegiate Institute", a high school with a number of dedicated technical classrooms. Woodworking, metalworking, you name it, the school board not only required ALL of us to do such really cool things but also provided highly experienced "shop" teachers to guide our devious little minds and bodies in such pursuits. I still have a wooden billy club that I turned on a lathe and there's probably a cookie cutter in a kitchen drawer somewhere that I personally cut out of sheet metal, folded, snipped and soldered in place. And all these years later I still remember what the teachers drilled into us about oxy-acetylene safety! Although my education and career path ultimately took me away from the technical trades track, I am grateful for the grounding that even such a brief sojourn gave me in handling tools and heeding (if not always precisely following!) instructions.
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