Remembering school classes

Back when I was in grade school, depending on the school, we either moved from classroom to classroom, or the teacher came in to our room for class. (Usually we moved from room to room. And in the very early grades often our homeroom teacher also taught the "basics" of reading, math, science, social studies).

I think about the classes I had as a kid:

Reading (sometimes called "Language Arts," in later grades called English - of course, we did more writing in English than we did back in Reading)

Math (General math up until 8th grade, when Algebra and its kin started up)

Science (often done as a rotation where different teachers had different specialties; I remember in third grade science especially we moved around to different classrooms for different "units")

Social Studies (there was no more "history," "civics" or "geography" by the time I got to school; they had all been rolled into one)

Phys Ed. (never my favorite)

Art

Music

Some years, art and music traded off, one for one half the year, the other for the other half of the year. Later on, maybe music even ended? I don't remember....maybe if you were in choir of band that was considered your music?

It was a daily round and now that I think about it, I like the idea of different things at different times. Oh, I have "different things" now - most days I will be teaching Principles of Biology first, and then Biostatistics, and then later on, Ecology - but they're not as DIFFERENT different as the different subjects in grade school (or even high school) were.

One thing I always liked was having art, at least once a week. It was a nice break - a chance to do something other than take in information. Even though I enjoyed (and was good at) the different academic classes (occasionally I was not so sure about math but that all worked out in the end and I turned out to be pretty good at it, even despite the momentary problems with things like decimals and the quadratic formula when I first had to deal with them).

But art was special - like I said, it was a break from taking in information. Oh, we still LEARNED stuff in art, like about perspective and shading and a little art history. But we also got to make stuff, and I always enjoyed making stuff. Also, for seventh and eighth grade years, we had Mr. Adams, who was a good teacher and was super nice and supportive - I still have a drawing I did that he wrote a nice comment on the back of. It was good having him as a teacher for those years because those were my two really-low-self-confidence years, and it did mean a lot to have someone who thought I could do art. (He may partly have been nice to me because I was polite and worked hard in his class; a lot of the kids saw art as a blow-off)

Probably part of the reason I knit and quilt today is related to the reasons why I enjoyed art class in school - a break, a chance to "send out" rather than "take in," something non-verbal to do....

I liked music class, also, but not as much. I think part of it was that there was a lot of singing and I was always self-conscious about my voice (Though perhaps I needed not be; recently someone in the choir at church, who wound up standing near me during a "sing service," commented that I had a "nice" voice...). Also, I think there was more direct learning in music than there was in art, so it felt like less of a break.

(Also, one year, the teacher taught us to "conduct" - well, keep time using the standard hand motions - and made us get up one by one and "conduct" to recorded music and for the shy kids, that was AGONIZING. Especially for shy kids afraid of seeming a bit silly....)

I remember in seventh and eighth grade, they went to a rotation - so we only had art for one marking period. The other marking periods were:

Metal Shop (which I actually kind of liked even if I was a little afraid of the spot-welder and was REALLY afraid of the idea of doing cast-metal stuff, which Mr. Tipton gave us the option to do in eighth grade)

Wood Shop (and to this day I don't know if the teacher really was THAT sexist, or if he was using reverse psychology on us....the first day he made an offhand comment about how the "boys" would probably wind up doing a lot of the work for the "girls" because we wouldn't pass the safety tests you had to pass in order to use the drill press, jigsaw, etc. Well, it turned out most of the girls passed ALL the safety tests and a few of the boys did not....so they'd have to go up to someone else in the class and go, "Um, would you mind cutting this out for me with the jigsaw, I didn't pass the safety test." Still, I liked Metal Shop better, even if I was afraid of the spot-welder.)

Home Economics, better known as Cooking and Sewing. (If I hadn't already known how to cook and sew, this class would not have inspired me. It was pretty useless - the kids who already knew and liked to cook or sew were bored, the ones who didn't know how, well, what was done was so trivial that it was pretty useless. I tend to think that Home Ec would be better reconfigured as a cooking AND nutrition class, and maybe leave the sewing as an optional elective for those that want it?)

Computers (I guess we learned BASIC? I think we also played a little Oregon Trail. Again, I don't remember a lot of this. Of all the classes, I think Art was the most useful to me, actually, and perhaps more for emotional/spiritual reasons than actual LEARNING reasons.)

I know they were trying to make well-rounded kids, but I wonder if letting each person PICK a particular class (Art or Computers or Home Ec or whatever) and stick with it for the full year wouldn't be better. Then again, you might get the "we want our kid to have maximum earning potential" parents might push their kid to choose Computers, even if he really wanted Wood Shop, or someone like me might get attracted by the idea of getting class credit for being able to do something I already liked (sewing) and wind up bored and sad and frustrated with the teacher....