Telling Tales out of School

A typical shop class would number fifteen to twenty students under one teacher, who spent most of his time going from pupil to pupil to check their work. The layout of the technical department frequently meant that two such classes would share a room. In this case the two teachers involved would work together, though the work of each class remained distinct.

Male students in their first year took classes in the range of specialties available: woodworking, machine shop, electricity, building construction, draughting, motor mechanics, printing and sheet metal work. They would be expected to produce a variety of standard projects in each of these subjects.

For their second year, male technical students picked one subject in which to specialize, and produced much more complex projects. Indeed, the projects were frequently much more "practical" in the sense that they attended to the needs of the school itself: students in woodworking built all the teachers' desks, while printing students provided all the printed material the school needed, from standard forms to report cards and even school yearbooks.

The workshops operated under very specific rules, as one student recalled:

We had all the tools in a big tool room; every week...one of the students was assigned to the tool room, and he was in charge of tools. I mean you'd go for tools and there was a board and your number - you had six tags on each peg. Say my number was 26, well there'd be six "26" tags there. Now, if I wanted some tool they'd go and get me my tool and hang my tag where they took the tool off, and that was the way they'd keep track of it. And we never left there at night, until every tag was back on that board. If there was a tool missing, the whole class was looking for it (Walsh).

While boys in the technical courses worked in their shops, female technical students were studying domestic subjects. In these classes, teachers spent a lot of time discussing efficient methods of housekeeping, including particular dusting, sweeping or floor-washing techniques. Sewing class featured various forms of needlework: sewing, crochet, embroidery, and petite-point. The students' first projects usually involved making petticoats and lampshades.

The school provided three rooms on the third floor for the cooking side of domestic science. Each had a couple of big stoves, along with burners for each student. The teacher would announce the day's work, give a demonstration, and then, depending on the teacher, either sit quietly at the other end of the room, or roam from student to student. The class seemed to spend a great deal of their time cleaning up.

The flamboyant Mrs. Cryderman taught Art - the only technical course open to both males and females. Although she emphasized the fine arts, Cryderman taught more commercial applications, such as sign painting, as well.

For the first year it was a lot more varied crafts really than, in conjunction with art. Like the silk batik work. And she was good at all of those things. And of course we did life drawing, with these plaster casts, we didn't have any nude models then (Carter).

In contrast to the variety of trades taught in technical courses, commercial courses focused on three subjects: typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping. Passing the year depended on adequate speeds in typing and shorthand, so teachers ran a lot of drills and tests for speed; one teacher substituted a timed piece of music for a stopwatch (Allison).