Life besides Poser

[Pendraia]

wow! Love it Pom...one of these days I will get around to using all of my material and finish some of my ufo's. I used to love to sew and used to teach needle turn applique at the local patchwork shop. I have Baltimore quilt that just needs a border and quilting somewhere.

Hot glueing sounds a great idea! I've been known to stick things together with boat epoxy which becomes a little...crispy you might say

Shudders...I hate gluing things. Give me a needle and thread and I can do anything but I rarely use my hot glue gun.

Home Ec was a great class. I don't know why so many schools have done away with it. I learned some very valuable life skills in there. With how busy parents are these days, I think it is helpful for kids to have someone show them some basic plumbing or kitchen safety and things like that.

They still do some things in Australia but they are called different things. Cooking which was a large part of home ec when I was at school is now called Food Technology and if the school is a good one they have their course linked up to a TAFE and it gets called iirc a VET subject and they get the certicates that they would have got if they did the equivalent course at a TAFE.
I don't think they would do plumbing though not since they got rid of the tech schools. The school I'm at is a P-9 campus and we have a Food Technology Program and they also grow a lot of the food that the kids cook. We even have some chickens.

When I was a kid, back in the dark ages, home ec was for the girls and woodwork was for the boys. Guess which I wanted to do?! I became a feminist before the word was even invented! Not allowed to do woodwork, not allowed to play rugby, not allowed to go out on the farm on the weekend cos I had to help with the housework but my brother didn't even have TO MAKE HIS OWN BED!!

Nowadays, it's not called home ec but both girls and boys do everything together: cooking, sewing, woodwork.

The school I was at actually gave all students 6 weeks doing all areas we did Home Ec, Sewing, woodwork, clay and art...I think there might have been something else as well but can't remember its too long ago.

I did Woodwork for the first two years at high school and then I focussed on Sewing and Art.

 

[pommerlis]

Oops, two pages allready?

Our schoolsystem use to be alot different when you reached highschool. Alot has changed since I went to school somewhere in the last century. The school I went to was all Home Ec, as you would call it. Literally translated it would be Domestic Highschool but that wouldn't do it justice. In the Netherlands we had back in the day a highschool system that would prepare you for the career you chose.
Like for instance nurse, doctor but also hairdresser would start at the Domestic Highschool. You would leatn basic skills in what were the "bridge years". Cooking, sewing but also childcare, math, science and art. The bridge years were the hardest because they would be filled with classes of all sort of topics. To see where the talents were and the interests.
Usually those would take 1 or 2 years. If a child couldn't decide still, he or she would continu in what they would call "the Main direction" or go a level higher in that same direction. Like if they wouldn't know what to do but they would love a caring job, or a serving job the school Dean would find a path of learning suitable for the kid needs and wants.
We had, some of them are still there, a specialized school for every job. Hotelschools, Art & Music, Animalcare, Cookingschools, Theaterschools but also for specialized administrative jobs as accountants or secretary and of course the universities with their own specialized educations.
People with low incomes or who had never ever had a familymember go to uni had a change to let their kids "climb" the ladder this way or sidetrack out to a specialized career.
You don't get into a University that easy where I'm from, scholarships are rare and they do not give you acces to a Uni, nor does a sporting talent because they aren't interested in how you can play football. We don't have a sportleague attached to schools so that's not relevant>
You have to have Atheneum, or Gymnasium at least to be considered to University. Or pass the exam they will give you and even then there are just a few spots available and the annual lottery starts. The places for medical jobs are the most popular and the hardest to get into, then the Law studies.
But they have changed alot since I went to school. The school I went to no longer exsists....time moves on I guess.

 

[Lorraine]

Hope you don't mind, Pom, we do have a habit here of going off on tangents and lots joining in. I found your school experience very interesting.

Getting back on track, how is the gorgeous Noedels today?

 

[pommerlis]

I don't mind at all Lorraine.
Noedels is doing fine, we just went out for some playtime at our local dogpark where she ran circles around Lola, a British Bulldog who is just to gentle for this world.

 

[Lorraine]

That's great! Lola sounds a real sweetie. I will be looking after a Bichon called Joycie from Tuesday for a few days. She is a darling but a little ratbag too. She is eight years old now and I've been looking after her when her mum and dad go away since she was eight weeks old.

 

[JOdel]

You are all conflating Home Ec as taught in Jr High (7th-8th grade) and Home Ec as taught in High School. The first IS mandatory. Or at any rate it was in my day (late 1950s). Mandatory for girls, that is. For boys what was mandatory was shop classes (wood and machine shop, I think). And it was a very cursory bit of instruction. One semester concentrated on cooking -- by which I recall we were taught how to make tea and coffee, and a basic white sauce. I don't remember anything else, but it was mainly how to handle the equipment without injuring ourselves. (Which I suspect went for the boys' shop classes as well.) We also were instructed in basic house cleaning, dusting, vacuuming, furniture polishing, and making a bed with hospital corners (and no fitted lower sheet).

2nd semester is when we were to sew a blouse or top for ourselves. And that's where we hit a bottleneck, because I was first year baby boom and none of the classrooms were prepared for the number of students. There weren't enough machines, so hardly anyone got enough time on them to finish their projects.

High School Home Ec was something else altogether. It was completely elective, and no one who was preparing for college ever took any of those courses apart from typing. Consequently it got a rep of being simple classes for dummies. The shop classes were basically also targeted at non-college prep students, (although everyone was required to take basic driving instruction) but at least those classes were operating on the assumption that the boys were learning something that they would use for *paid* work. The girls' classes were not.

 

[Pendraia]

I'm from Australia Jodel...we don't have Jr High and High School. When I was at high school it started after Grade 6 and was called Form 1 but now they call it Year 7 and it goes until you enter Uni or start working. I was lucky it seems because I got to try woodwork and all the other options...the US seems to do things very differently. Nowadays kids have more choice...at least here they do and the Home Ec(Food technology ) often gives them a certificate they can use to get a job in the food industry. To work in a Restaurant here they need a certificate in Food Handling.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

the US seems to do things very differently.

Yeah, it does do things a bit differently. It also does things differently now than when Jodel was in school.

I was in junior high in the mid 1990's, and in high school in the late 1990's (I graduated in 1997). When I was there, there was one "Home-Ec" class in 7th grade that was required for both boys and girls, and it concentrated on cooking and one sewing project - which as I mentioned earlier in the thread, was too far over ALL of our heads, and rather than change to a more beginner project and actually teach us how to work with a sewing machine, the teacher simply pulled the project entirely and gave us another cooking project instead.

When I was in high school, there was no such thing as Home-Ec at all.

Shop class was also in Junior High, and I do recall that I took both classes that same year. I also vividly recall doing MUCH better in wood shop than I was doing in Home-Ec. I also had a Shop teacher who told me that it was "too bad I'd been born a girl" because otherwise "I could have really gone somewhere" with it. This is the 1990's, mind you.

He turned out to be correct, because my one attempt to actually go to college, I ended up going for machine shop. I was pulling straight-A's and the professor still has one of my shop projects that he asked if he could keep to use as a teaching aid for future classes. But I could not even get an apprenticeship, because as soon as the employers found out I was female, they came up with an excuse why they didn't need an apprentice. The professor thought I was making it up, so he took my portfolio and made some phone calls himself... and found out firsthand the same thing. As soon as they found his "promising student" was female, all of a sudden there were "no openings." Apprenticeship was required to graduate and obtain a degree. I was basically forced to switch majors, and I never graduated, because I really had no interest in anything else the college was offering at that time.

My daughter (now 17), had one year of Home-Ec, but not until she reached the high school. Her 9th grade year home-ec was required for all students, and all they did in that class was cook. Nothing else. Not one bit of useful life skills other than cooking.

Home-Ec I think is one of those things that just constantly changes - and it differs from one school to another, as well as one country to another...

 

[Pendraia]

That's such a shame Seliah...I do know that in Australia in the late nineties that we were starting to get a few female apprentices for a variety of jobs but it wasn't common back then and I doubt that many do it even now but I believe with the discrimination laws that we have that it would be very hard for an employer to do that without repercussions these days.

Back in the 80's when I first started work as a Purchasing officer I used to be the only female or one of two that used to go to the Professional development...10 years later it was at least 50% of the people attending. There are still many issues that women have to face in the work force but these days I think the focus is more about glass ceilings in the work place at least over here.

 

[Miss B]

Yeah, it does do things a bit differently. It also does things differently now than when Jodel was in school.

I was in junior high in the mid 1990's, and in high school in the late 1990's (I graduated in 1997). When I was there, there was one "Home-Ec" class in 7th grade that was required for both boys and girls, and it concentrated on cooking and one sewing project - which as I mentioned earlier in the thread, was too far over ALL of our heads, and rather than change to a more beginner project and actually teach us how to work with a sewing machine, the teacher simply pulled the project entirely and gave us another cooking project instead.

When I was in high school, there was no such thing as Home-Ec at all.

This is pretty much how it was when I had those classes too, though the sewing class was in 8th grade. IIRC now, cooking was in the 7th grade, and I graduated Junior High in 1957, so it didn't change that much between then and when you were in Junior High, even if you were living in another state back then.

 

[Satira Capriccio]

Welll ... I graduated High School in 1971. I don't recall Home Economics or Shop being taught in Junior High, but they were available as electives in High School. Unfortunately, Home Economics was only available to the girls and Shop to the boys. I am not sure whether Typing was girl only or if anyone could take it. Unfortunately, I sorta ran out of interesting electives my senior year, and so ended up taking Home Economics and Typing the last semester. Ick. Or rather ... make that double and triple ick. Typing involved clunky typewriters, and the emphasis was on working in an office after High School. I had no interest, nor any desire to work in an office, so I hated every character I typed.

Home Economics involved cooking and housekeeping. Neither of which interested me in the least. Part of the reward (spelled p u n i s h m e n t) for being a girl was that I was expected to help my dad prepare dinner. This wasn't because he was a better cook than my mother, but that he got home at 3 pm since he worked in plywood mills, and it would be too late for dinner for my dad if we waited for mom to get home to cook. Then she'd be off to Real Estate meetings (she was an Escrow Closer and served on the board), bible study, choir, or even a late closing.

When we went on vacations, I was then expected to help my mother cleanup after we'd eaten. Which involved hauling everything down to the rest rooms/showers/utility room and washing everything in pretty much cold water. Meanwhile, my brothers got to run off back to the beach to place. I loved the coast and the ocean, so it was majorly unfair I wasn't able to do the same.

As for housekeeping ... well, that was also one of my punishments. I'd also learned to sew my own clothes since my mom ... who was tall and thin ... didn't adjust the patterns ... or didn't adjust them enough ... for me being short, "chubby," and a pear, so the dresses she made for me looked even worse because they were too tight in the hips.

So ... why the heck did I need to take a class in any of those skills ... especially, as once again, boys got off scot free!

Now, the absolutely funniest part is that we were required to participant in the tests for the Homemaker of the Year award. It involved both demonstrating you knew how to do all those "homemaker" skills like vacuuming and ironing, etc., as well as a written test. Don't you know it ... I won the award for our high school. Say what?!? As I told my ex who absolutely couldn't believe what a lousy housekeeper I was given I'd won that award ... it was the written test where I excelled.

Now ... a life skills class that focused on finances, budgeting, shopping ... as well as basic cooking, cleaning, and simple home maintenance tasks should be required for all students.

 

[frogimus]

It seems now that US High Schools have set aside life skills to concentrate on teaching students how to score high on standardized assessments because the higher the school averages, the more funding they get. Of course none of that funding apparently goes to supply the classroom, evidenced by all the magazines and popcorn tins the students are expected to sell.

Spawn1 and Spawn2 are both in dual credit courses so they are pushing themselves beyond expectations, but any kids that just want to cruise through end up unprepared for life past school.

 

[Pendraia]

OMG...I remember those typewriters. I only did it in 3rd or 4th form though and the boys had to do it as well.

I was lucky growing up as my parents used to get us all to do the chores...it was very much everyone helps until it's all done. That sounds so unfair Satira....

 

[Pendraia]

Funding at schools is abysmal doesn't seem to matter where in the world you are...except perhaps places like Sweden.

 

[frogimus]

Now that we have seemed to completely derailed your thread again...

I'm not surprised that you do needlecraft. My non-digital hobby is painting tiny figures. And gaming, especially RPG's.

 

[pommerlis]

Now that we have seemed to completely derailed your thread again...

I'm not surprised that you do needlecraft. My non-digital hobby is painting tiny figures. And gaming, especially RPG's.

I don't mind derailing the thread, it's fun chatting a bit this way.
You should be surprised that I do needlecraft though, I hated everything about it. Because of the teacher(s) I had, they always seem to hire sour old spinsters for that job. It's the dog that got me thinking about sleepingbags, dogcoats.
My latest project has been a collar with her name on it.

She really seems to like it so I've been thinking of making more since this one is for winter.
My next big very ambitious thing is a coat with Scottisch Tartan as an accent. It will be a project though since it's more for the "advanced" seamstresses, wich I'm not.

I like gaming aswell, not RPG but just simple computergames. I still have to finish Siberia.

 

[Lorraine]

Cute, Pom! I hope you will post a photo of Noedels in her new finery And a tartin coat sounds wonderful...being as I'm part Scottish

 

[Alisa]

Real cute, Pommie!

 

[Faery_Light]

Those are really nice, Pom.
I never got to high school but I sew, crochet, knit, cook and was pretty good at remodeling our house when needed.
all self taught.
My first sewing machine was the old treadle type, non-electric and I loved it.
But most of my sewing is hand stitching, just suits me better.

Pom, for the size of your little fur baby, your need to think of one of those halter things to replace the collar.
The way you sew you could make one nice and soft but so it does not rub her neck or legs areas yet still be strong.

Our little girl hated collars and was hard to manage when taken for walks, she had been tortured with a shock collar as a puppy till the fur was burned off her neck.
We got her when she was still less than a year old and now she is spoiled but really a sweetie.
She used to pull against the collar and was hard to control but once I bought the right kind of halter (made like that coat) she settled down and is well behaved on walks now.

Small dogs pull against a collar and it chokes them and that is why they are hard to take on walks..
I do like the collar you made, it is pretty.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Pom, I just love that! So very cute.