In twelve years of primary and secondary education, I spent only two of them in the public school system; 7th and 8th grades were maybe not the wisest choice for that kind of educational switch, but my adolescent misery is a topic for another time. Nonetheless, one of the most interesting things about public middle school was home ec; even though the school system had long since shuttered the wood shop, the gymnastics gym, and the ceramics studio because of budget cuts, in the late-1980s Maplewood Middle School still had fully functioning teaching classrooms for cooking and sewing. Maybe I've mentioned this before?
As with so many other things, any student who'd gone through the program in the last several decades could tell you the home ec curricula, scheduled down to the week; pizza day in cooking class was legendary. Also, the classes had long since been gender-neutralized, a process that yielded some spectacularly bizarre sewing projects -- 7th grade, footballs; 8th grade, surf boards. The other day I was digging through a few things in my parents' house and came across this, my pink and yellow corduroy football. Because doesn't that just make you want to go out and toss a ball around? Really, what could have been less useful? The way I remember it, we were graded on how clean the seams were and how precise the corners were, as well as the evenness of the post-production hand embroidery. My form here, as you can see, was pretty good; as it turned out, I liked to sew. Not visible here: my initials, embroidered into the opposite pink panel (another assignment requirement; the decorative heart, however, I doubt was).
You'll have to click through for that one.
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