In article ,
"Jim GM4DHJ ..." writes:

brilliant ! .....wood doesn't grow on trees...tee hee

First woodwork lesson at school was making a cross-halving join.
I started by cutting the two pieces of wood in half, and then
had to go and ask for two new bits.
"Wood doesn't grow on trees you know" was the teacher's response...

After that rather unfortunate start, I was actually very good at
woodwork at school (still have some of the things I made), but
sadly I had to give it up as it clashed with Latin which I was
told I had to do because I was good at science, and was a complete
and utter waste of time. My dad was also good at workwork, and
all the tables in my parents' house are made by him.

I was able to continue with Technical Drawing (also taught by
a woodwork teacher) right through to O-level, and that's
something I've found invaluable many times since (e.g. when
writing up experiments at university - a brilliant technical
drawing could mask an otherwise not very satifactory experimental
result). It was also how I found out how things like gate valves,
oil pumps, and many other similar things worked, as a result of
having to draw them accurately.

No idea if it still exists as a school subject, but even back
when I was at university with my age peers, almost no one else
had learned Technical Drawing at school.

A year or so back, I was explaining to someone in the office
how a drill bit cut, and not actually having a drill bit in
the office, I drew one freehand much to the amazement of a few
people around who saw it.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
news
First woodwork lesson at school was making a cross-halving join.
I started by cutting the two pieces of wood in half, and then
had to go and ask for two new bits.
"Wood doesn't grow on trees you know" was the teacher's response...

Reminds me of Tony Tibble, the woodwork teacher at my school, who used to
regale people with his tales of exploits "with Monty" in the desert during
the war and who waved a length of wooden fence post and smacked it down on
the desk to "encourage" people to pay attention. He was a great one for
sayings like "wood doesn't grow on trees".

For some reason, I had to do art rather than woodwork, apart from a few
"taster" lessons in my first year.

After that rather unfortunate start, I was actually very good at
woodwork at school (still have some of the things I made), but
sadly I had to give it up as it clashed with Latin which I was
told I had to do because I was good at science, and was a complete
and utter waste of time.

My school was rather the same with inflexible clashes of subjects. There
were two forms in each year, the supposedly cleverer A form and the
supposedly less clever B form. The A form did Latin and German, the B form
did biology and ancient history - no choice. I'd have liked to do German and
biology, but that was not on offer. Latin was the only subject that I found
exceptionally difficult and exceptionally boring. If it had been taught as
"how Latin words are used in English" or "applications of Latin in British
life (eg family history records, legal records)" that would have been fine,
but to learn Latin grammar is painful. I had a complete mental block with
Latin and I think it's because there's no redundancy and no auxiliary
words - in other languages you can use cues like a pronoun (he, she)
indicates that the next word is a verb; an article (the, a) indicates that
the next word is a noun; adjectives always come just before or after the
noun. But Latin encodes everything into word endings. The word order is no
clue: indeed the Latin teacher got very excited every time he spotted a
"chi-rhoic" sentence in which the writer had deliberately mixed up the words
so "the red cat saw the blue dog" would be written as (in Latin) "the blue
cat saw the red dog" and the agreement of word endings supposedly allowed
you to disentangle the meaning of the sentence.

Biology would have been interesting, even if I loathed the teacher, a
certain Mr Walker who was my form teacher. It was rumoured that he kept a
crocodile in the school pond as part of his biology research.

By the time I left that school and went to another one, everything was
decided: it was too late to switch to biology even though it was an option
for people if they started it early enough in their school life.

In message , Andrew Gabriel
writes

No idea if it still exists as a school subject, but even back
when I was at university with my age peers, almost no one else
had learned Technical Drawing at school.

Up to a point, at least in Scotland. My son studied TD up to 4th year,
at which point he sat National 4, which I understand to be roughly old
CSE standard. However, TD itself was lumped in as part of Graphic
Communications which covers 2D and 3D communication, including CAD. He
dropped the subject at that point, but at least he has used a proper
drawing board, and has a basic understanding of the subject.
--
Graeme

In article ,
Graeme wrote:
In message , Andrew Gabriel
writes

No idea if it still exists as a school subject, but even back
when I was at university with my age peers, almost no one else
had learned Technical Drawing at school.

Up to a point, at least in Scotland. My son studied TD up to 4th year,
at which point he sat National 4, which I understand to be roughly old
CSE standard. However, TD itself was lumped in as part of Graphic
Communications which covers 2D and 3D communication, including CAD. He
dropped the subject at that point, but at least he has used a proper
drawing board, and has a basic understanding of the subject.

Interestingly, Technical Drawing was part of my degree course. It was the
only subject you had to pass. All the other subjects were lumped together
for a final total. I knew some people who had to retake it twice.

--
from KT24 in Surrey, England