Learning by Making Rockets & Robots

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by IKE

At my school, the "vocational" classes got centralized between several schools. Students that were on a college prep course took course at the regular school. Students on the vocational track were required to take certain mandated courses during the morning (english, math, and history/government), but were then allowed to go to vocational in the afternoon. (Late 90s timeframe).

I have recently been in a handful of large schools that had auto & body shops at the schools that are all but closed down. Judging by the condition, I would say most of those closed around 2005-ish timeframe. Several FRC teams have taken over these spaces.

This is all anecdotal, but it would seem that the shop classes got the axe as more students moved to College Prep routes, and the funds got tighter.

Interesting. Before I jumped ship to a magnet school my local high school had what was once clearly shop space but had since been converted to an art classroom. When my dad was in high school (early 80s) it had still been shop space. We too had a local vocational school, but they scheduled all of the vocational classes during the honors classes so it was impossible to do both. :rollseyes: We did still have middle school woodshop though. That was pretty cool. I'll never forget a bunch of kids didn't want to do one of the projects and Mr. Weatherbee said "Okay by me, but don't come complaining when you fail." -- they did the project. The voc school principal for most of my high school team's existence was really supportive as he thought FIRST was a great way to get honors kids into the voc school since he couldn't get them into regularly scheduled classes. Unfortunately his successor didn't feel the same way.

Maine actually uses the SAT test as their high school standardized testing. We also had to take a science supplement which was a joke. Over 80% of my high school class got a perfect score. I'm not sure AP tests are really a great standardized test either. I got a 5 on AP Calc BC and would not be surprised if I got more than 90% of the test right. I also got a 5 on AP Chemistry and would be very surprised if I got 50% of test correct.