What happened to shop class?

I've had students ask me that recently. It's not a question that I think I can answer easily, and not at all without a little history. What most of us refer to as shop classes, I would call Industrial Arts classes. Industrial Arts included courses like woodworking, metalworking, drafting, electricity/electronics, graphic arts, and power mechanics. When those courses were developed, they represented the industrial base of our nation. But as our world evolved into the "information age" we began developing courses based more on technology and less on industry. The Industrial Arts profession now primarily calls itself Technology Education.

Some of the old classes survived with significant changes. We still offer drafting, but every year more of the work is done on computers and less on the drawing board with pencil and paper. We still offer graphic arts, but the offset presses have been replaced by inkjet and laser printers. Photography has moved from the darkroom to the desktop. Electronics is less about discreet components and more about integrated circuits and microprocessors. Machine shops live on primarily in our Vo-Tech Centers.

The "shop" classes like woodworking, metalworking, and power mechanics have nearly disappeared from high schools while new courses in engineering principals have proliferated. On top of those changes in philosophy, economic pressures have forced changes in the schools. Shop classes need expensive equipment and teachers with the expertise to maintain the equipment and teach their use have almost always been in short supply.

There are other factors, of course, that I won't address here. Shop class as we knew it is probably gone forever.

Remember Me?

I recently saw two former students under two very different circumstances. One was a guest for Teach-In in a math class down the hall from me. The other was in the parking lot before the Jimmy Buffet Hurricane Relief Concert. They both, however, were in my classes when I taught at Oak Ridge High School. I left that school in 1992, so they have changed considerably. I last saw them as 17- or 18-year-olds and now they're young 30-somethings.

I was flattered that they remembered me and pleased that they said they enjoyed my classes. While I recognized their names, I have to admit that I don't really remember either of them very well and would not have recognized them as former students. I estimate that I've had over 3,000 students in my classes and worked less directly with several thousand more. I can't remember them all. I'm sorry.

Anyway, one of those students worked as a drafter and is now in real estate. The other is a mechanical engineer who works with NASA. I may be no rocket scientist, but I have taught at least one future rocket scientist in my life.

These two recent encounters are not the first time I have seen former students, of course, but seeing two from over a dozen years ago within a few days of each other is a bit novel. I've seen former students just about everywhere from the mall to the grocery store to my eye doctor's office to... well, to the parking lot before a Jimmy Buffet concert. One of the School Resource Officers at our school now is also a former student of mine. I remember him a little better because a good friend of mine was one of his middle school teachers. I have not yet had a student that is the child of a former student. Since I've been in the same county (though not at the same school) for 20 years now, it's a real possibility.

Most of the time, I don't know what happens to my students for more than a few years at most after they are in my class. Of course I care what happens to them, but as I've moved from school to school and their numbers grow it gets more and more difficult to keep track of them. I have come to accept that I will never know how much of their future I influence. I believe that I have some positive affect on them or I probably wouldn't continue teaching. I wish I had gone back to more of my teachers after I got into this business to let them know how much I appreciate what they did for me. I encourage you to find your old teachers to thank them, but please understand if we don't remember you as well as you remember us.