On Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:39:30 -0700 (PDT), Jim Wilkins
wrote:

On Jun 18, 9:31*am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
...
....And that's because their origin, in terms of pedagogical
philosophy, was not intended to train them for vocations. It was to
"socialize" them into the culture. If you understand that, you understand
much of what happened. That's all I was saying.
...
Ed Huntress

From my perspective shop classes introduced them to the "language" of
mechanical, visual, non-verbal thinking that was completely absent in
other classes, possibly excepting art, and physics if well taught. It
also gave them more confidence to risk failure and embarrassment if
they couldn't drill a hole straight the first time, for example.

For engineers it took them across a mental threshold between theory
and practice which was a leap outside their comfort zone, a hesitation
to lose face in front of the lowly lab tech. I really had to baby some
peoples' egos along to bring them to understand the impracticality of
what they couldn't possibly do themselves but demanded of me.

Actually they could do it if they were shown how.

In that sense the shop classes did "socialize" them into a culture,
but one not that many educational professionals have sampled
themselves. Mensa taught me a lot about the limitations of very smart
"left-brain" people, and their mechanisms of denial and
rationalization, particularly when they found that greasy-handed Jim
had a larger vocabulary than they did, in several languages. Though I
couldn't keep up with Richard Lederer or his proofreader.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lederer

The group was surprisingly diverse. A reported scheduled to interview
us missed us in the restaurant because we didn't match her stereotype.
She wrote afterwards that the head of the group looked more like a
Bulgarian weight lifter than an intellectual.

Occasionally he would pop a test on us, like say "Elephant" suddenly
out of context and then ask us our first mental impression. I was the
only one of ~50 who saw both a word and an image.

How about all of you?

jsw

I seem to be new to this ego thing, within the last 5 years I've seen
way too many examples of this face value and the cost of being exposed
and trying to negotiate without it being misplaced.

I don't think that can be done in text. It would be like a cartoon
strip and not subconsciously viewing the last frame.

SW