Teresa Santoski

Industrial arts classes, more colloquially known as shop classes, used to be a mainstay in high schools and even middle schools throughout the country. Designed to teach necessary and practical skills, they were part of the curriculum. The typical student graduated having made – with varying degrees of success – at least one shop project.

These days, however, the required shop class seems to have gone the way of the buffalo, replaced by specialized vocational educational paths that may only be available at certain schools. If you’re a college-bound student who’d like to try their hand at woodworking, chances are your options will be limited or even nonexistent.

As a middle school student in New York state, I was required to take both shop and home economics. Home economics was enjoyable until we got to the sewing project, which was one bobbin catastrophe after another, but I really loved shop class. You haven’t truly lived until you’ve used a scroll saw – with appropriate adult supervision, of course.

When we moved to New Hampshire right before my freshman year of high school, I was looking forward to taking more shop classes. Unfortunately, those classes conflicted with the honors classes that would help me to prepare for a rigorous college curriculum. I had to choose between scroll saws and pre-calc parabolas.

Though I learned a lot in high school and discovered several lifelong passions, it was disappointing that taking the honors classes I needed for college meant it was virtually impossible to take electives that taught more practical skills. Sure, it’s useful to know how to analyze the themes of a novel, but it would also be nice to know how to build a bookshelf so I have somewhere to put my books.

Oldest Younger Brother had the full benefit of the middle school shop program in our New Hampshire school district, making a mirror in a wooden frame, a puzzle shaped like a dinosaur and a box with a hinged lid. But by the time he reached high school, the shop program had been completely phased out.

Youngest Brother was the last of us kids to take shop class, during which he also made a box with a hinged lid. When Younger Sister entered middle school a year later, shop class was no longer offered at all. She is the only sibling who hasn’t contributed a shop project of dubious usefulness to Mom and Dad’s extensive collection of things we made at school.

My lone shop project was something our instructor referred to as a bird knocker. It was a flat wooden bird that we attached to a block of wood, which was then supposed to be mounted on a wall.

When you pulled on the string affixed to the bird, it rocked back and forth and knocked its beak against the block of wood, like a woodpecker pecking a tree trunk. It was certainly more aesthetic than useful, but I remember being very proud that I had made it myself.

I recently asked some of my relatives what they remember making in shop classes, and really, the responses have put my bird knocker to shame. Mom made a silver ring, set with a tiger’s eye stone she shaped and polished by hand, which she still has today. I was quite impressed – and a little jealous – that her high school had taught metalworking and jewelry-making.

My uncle, Mom’s brother, attended the same high school – though not at the same time – and he remembers learning tin smithing, among other skills. Of the projects he made in shop class, the one he remembers best is a set of wooden salad serving utensils.

He gave them to my grandparents, who used them regularly and for such a long time that they stopped being just something their son had made and became part of the household’s daily batterie de cuisine.

Mom now uses the salad serving utensils in her kitchen. They’re so well made that I didn’t even realize they had been a shop project until my uncle shared that story with me.

The salad serving utensils are the second most useful shop project I came across in my conversations with my family. The most useful projects, I must say, are the ones that Dad made.

Dad made coffins in his high school shop class. It sounds a little macabre at first, but it’s not like he and his classmates were bringing the coffins home and giving them to their family members as Christmas gifts.

Dad went to a Catholic high school, which had connections to the local Catholic hospitals and churches. The simple pine boxes made by the shop classes were distributed to these institutions and used to give proper burials to people who were homeless or who had no living family or friends.

It’s difficult for me to imagine a shop project more useful than that. A coffin will most definitely serve its purpose. There’s no chance of it sitting around on a coffee table and gathering dust for years until it’s put in a box in the attic and forgotten about. Which is what I suspect may have happened to my bird knocker.

Today, the once ubiquitous shop class seems to have been replaced by YouTube tutorials and Pinterest boards. The sheer proliferation of DIY projects online shows that younger generations are interested in building things with their own hands, whether it’s a bed frame made out of reclaimed pallets or a window box for a mini vegetable garden.

Why not teach them how to plan out a project, measure materials and use tools safely so they can have good results? Make shop classes a school staple again and make them available to all students whether they’re pursuing a vocational path or an academic path.

Perhaps have the students focus on projects that will benefit the community, like coffins or bookshelves. After all, the world probably has enough bird knockers.

Tete-a-tete is published monthly. Teresa Santoski can be reached at tsantoski@gmail.com or via www.teresasantoski.com.