toy clocks

Today in the CSS wood shop, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade students are making toy clocks, to use in learning to tell time. This was a project suggested by their teacher, when she noticed that some of the students were not able to read the time from a standard clock. These will be passed along to younger family members as toys when the the lessons are learned, or they may be kept as a great memory of the wood shop experience.

I have been once again reading excerpts from the proceedings of the 1905 and 1906 Eastern Manual Training Teachers Association. I should note that the organization included teachers of both wood shop and domestic science. While one might disagree with the segregation of young men and women into separate tracks based on the stereotypes prevalent in those times, one cannot overlook the value of domestic science as a foundation for learning in all subject areas. It is a great shame that while cooking schools have become popular, cooking in public schools is all but abandoned. And yet, all children really need to know something about it in order to raise healthy families. One of the interesting suggestions made by a teacher at that 1906 conference was that all students be prepared in domestic science as a requirement for university admission. Like those involved in teaching wood shop, teachers of the domestic arts proposed that such training fostered a respect for the dignity of all labor.