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

[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...