random poll

[rm]

Super busy. Am suddenly curious about this. Apparently most kids entering college in the US this year don't know how to write in cursive. I suspect this is less a sign of the apocalypse than it feels like to me.

So, tell me things (as usual, poll is un-scientific and reflects my biases and experiences (and 49-year-olds can choose which age category they like better!) -- if the boxes don't work, my apologies and comments super welcome.):

[Poll #1607173]

Comments

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

In terms of the gender impact, I said no ... but ...

In our middle school -- grades 6-8 -- every student did stints in home ec (basically cooking), sewing, wood shop, metal shop, and I think we had a leather crafting segment to. Also typing. MANUAL typewriters :)

When you got to high school you could elect to pick up more advanced versions of most of these. And of course at that point you didn't see too many girls taking shop ... and even fewer (if any) boys electing to do the home arts/child minding stuff.

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

oh, and p.s. the cursive thing was only in Elementary school... where we had regular weekly penmanship time.

[arianhwyvar.livejournal.com]

My middle school was like this too -- it was only grades 7-8, but in 7th grade everyone did a rotation that included home ec (cooking and sewing, but I didn't mark cooking because I only recall us using a stove to make candy), woodshop, metal shop, 2D fine art, and music; the last half-term you could choose one of those to go back to.

In 8th grade we could pick from art electives which included variants or advanced versions of all of those, but also included some new stuff: the woodshop teacher also taught silk screening, so I took several terms of that.

In my high school for me, too, things seemed to break down into more gendered lines in terms of what classes people chose to take, such classes being fully elective, but I seem to recall that the new stuff like drafting and photography had a mix of genders.

And cursive was taught in early-to-mid elementary school, and penmanship completely ignored after that.

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

silk-screening would have been awesome! also photography -- but that was the purview of our yearbook club ...

[weirdquark]

I said no to the gender impact for much the same reasons, and the same caveat probably applies, though since I never took the non-required classes, I have no idea what the gender balance was actually like.

I'm pretty sure my high school had metalworking, but I didn't have time time take the class. Ditto the advanced woodshop -- I had no interest in the advanced home ec past the two required (for everyone) sections. I loved shop.

We also had auto mechanics and home repair classes. I wanted to take those too because they seemed useful things for adults to know how to do, but being in the advanced/AP college track classes made that never work out. So more of an academic snobbery thing than a gender thing, though I would not be at all surprised if there were not very many girls taking auto mechanics either.

We did a bit of electronics in physics. (I also was in a super advanced reading group in second grade where we could read on our own and one of the books they had sitting around was a book about electronics.) Physics was technically not required, because most people took it their senior year and we didn't have to take a science class each year. So that might explain why I was one of four girls in a twenty/twenty-five person class. Calculus was the same. Not officially limited by gender, and I never ran into anyone who claimed I should not do math or science because I was a girl, but I did know some girls who got less encouragement than I did because they weren't as good at math as I was even though they liked it.

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

yeah, we definitely had that divide between the kids who were going to DO things who ended up on the vocational/technical track ... and the kids where there going to STUDY things (college track). I saw this SO clearly my senior year when, although I was on the college track end of things, I had to take an earth-science class for my science credit since I had failed chemistry (I couldn't do the maths). The earth-science class was entirely except for me, Vo-Tech kids. But I was so much happier studying rocks and weather than atoms and things I couldn't see. :) There was, though, a pervading vibe that I wasn't where I was supposed to be...

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

This is exactly how it worked at my school, only the middle schoolers did voc ag instead of metal shop.