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Sunday Procrastination
Sep. 17th, 2023 09:38 amStolen from 
anais_pf
1. If you were a girl in the 70’s in the U.S., you were expected to take Home Ec. in high school. Did you and what did you take from the class, if anything? I was not "a girl in the 70s," but I was required to take Home Ec. It was co-ed, so both boys and girls learned about cooking and sewing. I want to mention that we also had co-ed Shop Class, which was woodworking, some minor wiring, and even some minor coding (sending commands to a robot arm to make it pick up blocks, that kind of thing.) In the cooking class we learned about all the parts of the egg, and learned to cook eggs in a zillion ways including scrambled, sunny side up, in quiches, and to make puddings. Which, while not very expansive, did teach me the versatility of eggs. The sewing side, we learned the parts of the sewing machine, how to make different stitches and work with a few kinds of fabrics, and we made a few small simple items like a "laundry bag" (it was a big cotton cloth bag with a drawstring, looked like Santa's sack) and an oven mit. It would have been a lot more useful to learn how to patch or hem things, IMO. But overall, not everyone gets to learn this stuff, so I thought it was a good class.
The cooking class final assignment ended up being a traumatic experience: we had to cook a meal for our family. I made French toast, bacon, eggs, and regular toast. And my dad was in a foul mood that day I guess, or maybe I was taking too long, because he followed me around the kitchen screaming at me, telling me all the things I was doing wrong, yelling for me to "Move it!", and then when I finally had everything on plates he complained that it was awful, that I'd burnt the toast and the eggs were cold and I hadn't done anything right. As my whole family ate in silence because everyone was afraid of his anger. Thereafter all of us girls were required to cook at least twice per week, meaning the terror and dread associated with cooking was now going to be a weekly occurrence.
So yeah, Home Ec was just great.
2. How were your school lunches? My parents packed our lunches, and overall they were really healthy and good. We did not have a lot of money so our lunches contained a lot of canned tuna and a lot of apples in various forms: raw apples, cut apples, apples in tuna salad, applesauce. As a result I couldn't eat apples for a few years after grade school (but I can eat them now!) Sandwiches were either tuna, PB&J, or off-brand thick-sliced ham. Mostly that was great but I always threw the ham sandwiches away because the texture was horrible by the time lunch rolled around, the ham or mayo somehow made the bread even more soggy than the tuna salad sandwiches. I was working at the age of 14 so I usually had a bit of pocket money, and our school lunches were $1.40. They were pretty typical...doesn't everyone remember "Salisbury steak" with the prefrozen patty, instant mashed potatoes, corn, applesauce, and roll? My friends and I used to make little Salisbury sandwiches. And the cheap plastic-y pizza, and the little tiny salad in a paper cup, and the little carton of chocolate milk.
3. Did you walk, take a bus, or have someone drive you to school? We walked to a bus stop maybe 1/2 mile down the road, which was fine most times of year but in the winter could get kinda ugly. It was also possible to walk to school if you missed the bus but that was 1.3 miles up a gradual incline, so you'd probably miss your first class. We never got rides in the morning because both our parents worked, but our stepmom was a teacher at the elementary school and we had some after-school programs, so in the evening we'd usually stay and do our activities, or if we didn't have any, walk to the elementary school to wait for our stepmom. Or we could ride the bus home and have an hour or two unsupervised, wherein we got away with lots of bad things like eating snacks or running off to play in the woods instead of doing our chores.
4. Were there any classes there were off limits to you because of your sex? Football of course. The others were not off-limits, and were specifically co-ed, but shop class was torture mainly because my stepmom INSISTED that we girls wear dresses to school at least twice a week. It's one thing to take shop class and another to take shop class in a frilly floral-print dress and Mary Jane shoes with your hair curled. I was made fun of relentlessly...not by other students, but by the TEACHERS. Two middle-aged dudes who thought it was HILARIOUS that I showed up dressed for church. Eventually I learned to cram some gym clothes into my backpack and sneak them out of the house, and change into those as soon as I got to school. So people thought I was super poor or homeless or a weirdo, but it was better than being openly laughed at by adults for being frilly.
5. Looking back on it now, what was the biggest life lesson you took from high school? 1 - There were actually good opportunities to learn, you just had to recognize them. I mean our school had a mini-planetarium for christsakes. 2 - Teachers are just as human as everyone else. 3 - Grades are not nearly as important as they are made out to be; what's important is what you personally learn, educationally and socially. 4 - I learned the priorities of my fellow students, and also the adults in my area, from high school. And I realized that I should not stay in my hometown. That was the biggest lesson that I learned.
anais_pf1. If you were a girl in the 70’s in the U.S., you were expected to take Home Ec. in high school. Did you and what did you take from the class, if anything? I was not "a girl in the 70s," but I was required to take Home Ec. It was co-ed, so both boys and girls learned about cooking and sewing. I want to mention that we also had co-ed Shop Class, which was woodworking, some minor wiring, and even some minor coding (sending commands to a robot arm to make it pick up blocks, that kind of thing.) In the cooking class we learned about all the parts of the egg, and learned to cook eggs in a zillion ways including scrambled, sunny side up, in quiches, and to make puddings. Which, while not very expansive, did teach me the versatility of eggs. The sewing side, we learned the parts of the sewing machine, how to make different stitches and work with a few kinds of fabrics, and we made a few small simple items like a "laundry bag" (it was a big cotton cloth bag with a drawstring, looked like Santa's sack) and an oven mit. It would have been a lot more useful to learn how to patch or hem things, IMO. But overall, not everyone gets to learn this stuff, so I thought it was a good class.
The cooking class final assignment ended up being a traumatic experience: we had to cook a meal for our family. I made French toast, bacon, eggs, and regular toast. And my dad was in a foul mood that day I guess, or maybe I was taking too long, because he followed me around the kitchen screaming at me, telling me all the things I was doing wrong, yelling for me to "Move it!", and then when I finally had everything on plates he complained that it was awful, that I'd burnt the toast and the eggs were cold and I hadn't done anything right. As my whole family ate in silence because everyone was afraid of his anger. Thereafter all of us girls were required to cook at least twice per week, meaning the terror and dread associated with cooking was now going to be a weekly occurrence.
So yeah, Home Ec was just great.
2. How were your school lunches? My parents packed our lunches, and overall they were really healthy and good. We did not have a lot of money so our lunches contained a lot of canned tuna and a lot of apples in various forms: raw apples, cut apples, apples in tuna salad, applesauce. As a result I couldn't eat apples for a few years after grade school (but I can eat them now!) Sandwiches were either tuna, PB&J, or off-brand thick-sliced ham. Mostly that was great but I always threw the ham sandwiches away because the texture was horrible by the time lunch rolled around, the ham or mayo somehow made the bread even more soggy than the tuna salad sandwiches. I was working at the age of 14 so I usually had a bit of pocket money, and our school lunches were $1.40. They were pretty typical...doesn't everyone remember "Salisbury steak" with the prefrozen patty, instant mashed potatoes, corn, applesauce, and roll? My friends and I used to make little Salisbury sandwiches. And the cheap plastic-y pizza, and the little tiny salad in a paper cup, and the little carton of chocolate milk.
3. Did you walk, take a bus, or have someone drive you to school? We walked to a bus stop maybe 1/2 mile down the road, which was fine most times of year but in the winter could get kinda ugly. It was also possible to walk to school if you missed the bus but that was 1.3 miles up a gradual incline, so you'd probably miss your first class. We never got rides in the morning because both our parents worked, but our stepmom was a teacher at the elementary school and we had some after-school programs, so in the evening we'd usually stay and do our activities, or if we didn't have any, walk to the elementary school to wait for our stepmom. Or we could ride the bus home and have an hour or two unsupervised, wherein we got away with lots of bad things like eating snacks or running off to play in the woods instead of doing our chores.
4. Were there any classes there were off limits to you because of your sex? Football of course. The others were not off-limits, and were specifically co-ed, but shop class was torture mainly because my stepmom INSISTED that we girls wear dresses to school at least twice a week. It's one thing to take shop class and another to take shop class in a frilly floral-print dress and Mary Jane shoes with your hair curled. I was made fun of relentlessly...not by other students, but by the TEACHERS. Two middle-aged dudes who thought it was HILARIOUS that I showed up dressed for church. Eventually I learned to cram some gym clothes into my backpack and sneak them out of the house, and change into those as soon as I got to school. So people thought I was super poor or homeless or a weirdo, but it was better than being openly laughed at by adults for being frilly.
5. Looking back on it now, what was the biggest life lesson you took from high school? 1 - There were actually good opportunities to learn, you just had to recognize them. I mean our school had a mini-planetarium for christsakes. 2 - Teachers are just as human as everyone else. 3 - Grades are not nearly as important as they are made out to be; what's important is what you personally learn, educationally and socially. 4 - I learned the priorities of my fellow students, and also the adults in my area, from high school. And I realized that I should not stay in my hometown. That was the biggest lesson that I learned.
