Without revealing your age....

[PJMcK]

73. At my school, boys took shop

The girls had a half year of Home Economics using the classroom with numerous kitchen set ups. The other half of the year the class learned sewing, knitting and the like. Meanwhile, the boys had half a year of wood shop and half a year of metal shop. My grade was the last year for that segregation; the following year, the new co-ed classes spent a quarter of the year in each of those four disciplines.

As a boy, I loved the shop classes. The wood shop was terrific and I still have two of the projects I made: a jewelry box and a lamp. We learned architectural drawing which I've used throughout my life whenever I had a home improvement project. Likewise, the metal shop was infectious and I have an aluminum jar on my desk that I turned on a metal lathe. Those classes were great learning experiences and I'm glad that the school expanded their enrollment to include the girls. Unfortunately, I never did learn to sew but I did learn how to cook!

There's a frightening and curious side story to the metal shop class. The teacher was a great guy who spent extra time with every kid to help make their projects interesting and good learning experiences. He was one of the first teachers I had who rarely answered a question; instead, he would ask leading questions to make the student think through their problem in search of the solution. This cognitive process has stayed with me.

Many years later, after he had retired, a story came out that this former teacher was arrested for having child pornography on his computer. In his plea deal/jail sentence, he turned over evidence of a nationwide child-sex ring that resulted in dozens of arrests and the freeing of dozens of young girls and boys from sexual slavery. It was a strange realization for me that a teacher I had respected and liked could turn out to be such a ghoul.