Americans/anyone who had “home economics” class: how long did you have that class for? I only had about 1.5 hours of cookery class every 2 weeks as an 11-12 year old, and while i think it was a good idea, it wasn’t where i learned abt cooking in a way that sticked. That was from my parents, and getting old enough to have autonomy over making myself food (15 yo or thereabouts).
So home ec for me was just too short and hassled to pick up meaningful knowledge.
Sex ed was an elective? Huh, and here I thought schools either made it mandatory or outright forbid it. My school had us take it as a portion of phys ed class, just like we did for health class and preparing for the written driver’s test.
I could definitely be misremembering. I just remember not taking home ec while others were. But we had a non-optional sex ed class when I was younger, so it might have just been the year of school.
I didn’t get home ec, but I had a life skills class. It was about half budgeting and half cooking. And it was actually shockingly in depth, I remember we made donuts and stromboli from scratch. But, each recipe you only got one of a few roles in so the person frying the donuts didn’t learn to make the dough, etc. While the recipes were good and cheap, they weren’t really the sort of everyday meals that would have been better.
every year at my middle school. I think they had it split up like home ec for the first two semesters and health for the last two, or vice versa. It’s been a while, but I know we had a different main subject each year. like sixth grade was sewing and learning basic nutrition, seventh grade was basic cooking/cleaning/laundry, eighth grade a little more advanced cooking as we were trusted with more tools and techniques.
i also took another home ec style class as a senior in high school because… easy A and free food lol
i also took another home ec style class as a senior in high school because… easy A and free food lol
Just thinking about getting free food as a teenager makes me feel good inside. A lot of people at my school chose it in High School for the same reasoning as you
My school had a “multi-cultural day” every year where the kids taking foreign languages would bring in food from cultures that spoke them. We’d spend the period wandering through the language hallway, going classroom to classroom, eating all the free food we could handle.
I took it a step further my senior year. I took both French and Spanish for three years, so I knew most of the language teachers by then. They’re the only classes I actually gave a damn about, so my reputation was very good among them. When the multi-cultural day was coming up, I decided to ask my language teachers if they needed help with the event.
In exchange for helping set up and clean up each period, I got to spend the entire day out of class, trying food that every class period brought. I was even able to pull some strings and get my brother in on it, so we both got to enjoy an easy day of free food. It was amazing.
Back in middle school, 1hr a day for a semester. But you had to choose between home ec. and wood shop. Most people, even the girls, picked wood shop since it wasn’t much more than how to microwave & sew.
In 10th grade, I was put into home ec for some reason. I think i need a credit or something. I was the only boy in the class and the teacher was also the sex ed teacher. I spent 1.5 hours 3 days a week listening to things like how to insert tampons, or makeup tips and hair care, or The Pill, or whatever things the teacher felt like that day. It was an awful class that almost always devolved into an extremely loud chatty room with all the girls just girl talking. We never cooked anything. Though to be fair, the teacher did talk about things like balancing checkbooks, healthy relationship dynamics and other normal things on occasion, but very rarely.
That sounds like an actually helpful class, albeit billed in an inauthentic way. On the plus side, you got to see a window into the world girls and women have. Some of us are never taught about any of those things, but we’re expected to just figure it out somehow.
I think we had it for about 3 months of a single grade in middle school, maybe once a week. We rolled out a ton of cookie dough in the shape of a pizza, put candy on top and called it cookie dough pizza, then said “To hell with learning how to cook” and spent the reminder of our time back in the classroom, sewing and stuffing fuzzy little American footballs. With all of two things done, one of which just required opening packaging and squishing the dough a bit, we had nothing else lined up for the rest of the year, and never did home ec again once we left for summer vacation. At peak boredom, towards the end of the school year, it became something of a game for the boys in the class to see how much of their fuzzy football they could sew to their hands before the teacher noticed and made them undo it.
Americans/anyone who had “home economics” class: how long did you have that class for? I only had about 1.5 hours of cookery class every 2 weeks as an 11-12 year old, and while i think it was a good idea, it wasn’t where i learned abt cooking in a way that sticked. That was from my parents, and getting old enough to have autonomy over making myself food (15 yo or thereabouts).
So home ec for me was just too short and hassled to pick up meaningful knowledge.
We had the option for home ec. Never took it. Took sex ed instead.
Sex ed was an elective? Huh, and here I thought schools either made it mandatory or outright forbid it. My school had us take it as a portion of phys ed class, just like we did for health class and preparing for the written driver’s test.
I could definitely be misremembering. I just remember not taking home ec while others were. But we had a non-optional sex ed class when I was younger, so it might have just been the year of school.
I didn’t get home ec, but I had a life skills class. It was about half budgeting and half cooking. And it was actually shockingly in depth, I remember we made donuts and stromboli from scratch. But, each recipe you only got one of a few roles in so the person frying the donuts didn’t learn to make the dough, etc. While the recipes were good and cheap, they weren’t really the sort of everyday meals that would have been better.
every year at my middle school. I think they had it split up like home ec for the first two semesters and health for the last two, or vice versa. It’s been a while, but I know we had a different main subject each year. like sixth grade was sewing and learning basic nutrition, seventh grade was basic cooking/cleaning/laundry, eighth grade a little more advanced cooking as we were trusted with more tools and techniques.
i also took another home ec style class as a senior in high school because… easy A and free food lol
Just thinking about getting free food as a teenager makes me feel good inside. A lot of people at my school chose it in High School for the same reasoning as you
My school had a “multi-cultural day” every year where the kids taking foreign languages would bring in food from cultures that spoke them. We’d spend the period wandering through the language hallway, going classroom to classroom, eating all the free food we could handle.
I took it a step further my senior year. I took both French and Spanish for three years, so I knew most of the language teachers by then. They’re the only classes I actually gave a damn about, so my reputation was very good among them. When the multi-cultural day was coming up, I decided to ask my language teachers if they needed help with the event.
In exchange for helping set up and clean up each period, I got to spend the entire day out of class, trying food that every class period brought. I was even able to pull some strings and get my brother in on it, so we both got to enjoy an easy day of free food. It was amazing.
Sounds woke to me
That sounds awesome so long as the school doesn’t offer Latin. You’d definitely get homemade garum that way
Back in middle school, 1hr a day for a semester. But you had to choose between home ec. and wood shop. Most people, even the girls, picked wood shop since it wasn’t much more than how to microwave & sew.
In 10th grade, I was put into home ec for some reason. I think i need a credit or something. I was the only boy in the class and the teacher was also the sex ed teacher. I spent 1.5 hours 3 days a week listening to things like how to insert tampons, or makeup tips and hair care, or The Pill, or whatever things the teacher felt like that day. It was an awful class that almost always devolved into an extremely loud chatty room with all the girls just girl talking. We never cooked anything. Though to be fair, the teacher did talk about things like balancing checkbooks, healthy relationship dynamics and other normal things on occasion, but very rarely.
That sounds like an actually helpful class, albeit billed in an inauthentic way. On the plus side, you got to see a window into the world girls and women have. Some of us are never taught about any of those things, but we’re expected to just figure it out somehow.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong, the class itself was ok. It just wasn’t a home ec class. It should have been called something else.
I think we had it for about 3 months of a single grade in middle school, maybe once a week. We rolled out a ton of cookie dough in the shape of a pizza, put candy on top and called it cookie dough pizza, then said “To hell with learning how to cook” and spent the reminder of our time back in the classroom, sewing and stuffing fuzzy little American footballs. With all of two things done, one of which just required opening packaging and squishing the dough a bit, we had nothing else lined up for the rest of the year, and never did home ec again once we left for summer vacation. At peak boredom, towards the end of the school year, it became something of a game for the boys in the class to see how much of their fuzzy football they could sew to their hands before the teacher noticed and made them undo it.