Posted on 05/13/2008 1:12:55 PM PDT by Uncledave
bump
My young daughter was eagerly anticipating taking Welding next year at school. But we have just found out the Shop teacher is retiring at the end of this school year and the high school will not be hiring a replacement, since there are no applicants. She actually cried at the news. If there are any Shop teachers out there that would like to relocate to a nice small town, low to no crime and kids who actually want to learn and a very non-PC school board, give us a shout!
Manual labor is indeed ‘soulwork’. I worked out my grief at losing my husband by remodeling our house (power tools... yeah, baby!) and have become quite competent at doing simple car mechanics. (why yes, I even change my own oil!)
you sound like a catch. ;)
Not in my lifetime, and I've been reading Sears catalogs "for the articles" for 50 years now.
I bet you say that to allll the girls. ; )
Actually, my late husband was in the construction biz and one of them ‘man’s man’ guys- so I guess I picked up skills just from observing.
Never dreamed I would need ‘em. *sigh* But I’m glad I do. Sets a good example for my kids, too-self reliance and all that.
The "educators" are brain-dead morons. They're spending assloads of money to churn out hoards of kids who have no skills that add value to anything and couldn't earn a living without paying 50k for another four years of school. A kid who knows his way around a machine shop won't have that problem.
Bump for later
Back in the day, at my high school, the boys took shop and the girls took home-ec. My 3 best friends and I were “allowed” to take shop, due to the fact that we were all the oldest girls of families of 13, 7, 6 & 5! I guess the school figured we had that whole “cooking and cleaning” thing down pat!
It was fun! Doing my nails on the belt sander, making giraffes and painting them a lovely hot pink and lime green...good times! And the shop teacher never threatened us with the belt, that was a boys only threat!!
My wife is not mechanically inclined...she gets mad at me when HER house plants wither and die because I didn’t water them. But, in her defense she has a keen eye for tools that have flowered handles.
Interesting foundation created by John Ratzenberger, ‘Cliff’ from “Cheers.”
http://www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org/
As someone put it, we are rapidly becoming the new Urban Barbarians.
A people who have no idea how everday things work or can be fixed.
Meanwhile—thanks to the free traitors—those people who—BY NATURE—love to work with their hands, will be forced into the drudgery of college educations in the hope of being made into some kind of tech worker.
LOL. Like that will ever work.
Whatever money globalism saves us, we’ll end up paying in welfare to displaced workers.
Workers who by nature would have been great craftsman but make lousy brain workers (and bless them for it, because brain work is for freaks).
Seems to me I recently saw a line of power tools designed for women-made by one of the big dogs in that field. (Delta? Milwaukee? I can’t recall.)And I do believe they were a pinkish shade! It was in an article about how women are now becoming a major demographic in the diy field.
When I was in high school were were some of the first girls allowed to take the Shop classes (mid 70’s) I passed, opting for Graphic Arts. But one of my friends took Auto Shop. I used to laugh at her in her greasey coveralls. She was only 4’8” and even the class’s smallest pair bagged all over her. She totally tricked out her Maverick thanks to that class.
To this very day The name given to that mythic belief is used in common ever-day life. The eggheads of the time thought that the heat generated when metals were machined was “caloric” that was released from within the metals.
Today the term “Calorie” used as a term for food energy was derived from that. In fact, a calorie is a measure of thermal units of energy that can be produced by burning a known quantity of a substance. ( Most often used in terms of food)
To determine calories, a known quantity ( X# grams) is put in a very accurate temp lab furnace and when burned the temp rise is the measure of calories, or in fact, the thermal units generated.
The bottom line is that machinists know there was no such thing as “Caloric” but today it is used as a measure of thermal energy in the use of the word Calorie.
Witness the Tech Shop in Menlo Park, CA
bump
dead nuts bump
I think that's becoming less and less true, to the detriment of our engineering graduates. They need to know how to design things that can be built and repaired. Granted, some things are not worth repairing. I would never advocate trying to take a soldering iron to the insides of an integrated circuit. Nevertheless, designing things that can't be repaired, but could be repaired if designed differently, is not the best design.
Moreover, the country desperately needs good auto mechanics, good plumbers, good electricians, good carpenters, and lots of other "trade" skills. Right now they all make good money. Schools ought to be directing people to those trades, not to "no value added" college courses.
I still like to hop on the manuals for fine-tuning prototypes but people look at me like I'm nuts.
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