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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

My high school was the regional hub for vocational training, so we had an entire wing devoted to these things. There was even a small restaurant and I remember one of the capstone projects for the year was actually building a house. Fortunately it has continued to be well-funded.

Unfortunately, an honors-level academic load meant there was no time in the schedule to take many of these classes.

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35 years ago I had to argue quite a bit with my high school advisor to be allowed to take drafting. She was adamant that a “college bound” student shouldn’t take shop classes. I use things I learned in that class to this day (it was all hand drafting but there was an Apple II sitting in the corner with a primitive CAD program that I was allowed to play with towards the end of the semester)

Hah, my Engineering School in college required drafting courses (one dedicated hand drafting course, one dedicated CAD course) as low level requirements for every major, including Industrial, Chemistry, and Computer engineering students that didn't always know how/where it would come in handy (but there are indeed lessons applicable to everything). It's a general knowledge communication skill, even if you aren't communicating mechanical diagrams, there are still plenty of carry-over to all the other sorts of diagrams we all see in every field.

My only saving grace there was that my dad was a Land Surveyor and made heavy use of AutoCAD. We had the full digitizer tablet and access to a color plotter.

I didn't care so much for the 2D stuff, but over time I taught myself a lot about modeling stuff in 3D. I blew people away in drama club one year when I showed up with a rendering of the auditorium, stage, and lighting locations for one of the plays.

This is uncanny. I have the same exact story from 25 years ago.

Before freshman year, I had to sit down with my guidance councilor to select my electives. I chose Spanish and Drafting. She said both of those were a "bad fit for an honors student"; that I should take French and Art instead.

I acquiesced, not too happy about it but also trusting she knew what was better.

A few weeks later I got my schedule. Apparently French was booked up so I got Spanish. But still had to go to Art class.

I dropped that a week later and switched to drafting, which I did all four years of high school. The first two years were technical drawing and the next two were architectural drafting. This is when I convinced the teacher to let me fire up the 386s in the back of the room. They all had Generic CADD[0] on them, which remains one of my favorite CAD programs of all time. Simple, but wicked fast with two-key commands for everything. (i.e. "ZB" for zoom to box, "C3" for a 3-point circle, etc.)

[0] https://winworldpc.com/product/generic-cadd/60

I took am automotive technology class in highschool and my teacher was amazing at teaching students the art diagnostics and troubleshooting. The skills I learned from that teacher did far more to get me where I am today in my career (started out at the bottom ring of IT Support and have since moved up through Sysadmin roles and now in the dev process automation game) than any other class.

Ha! I was the only one taking AP-level everything and electronics and power mechanics as my electives!

The shop teacher was so grateful that he finally had someone super-interested in more advanced topics that I got to do extra projects he'd had on his wish list for years. One of my favorite high school memories and experiences.

Unfortunately I think a lot of kids would shy away from doing this today as it can hurt your GPA -- because of weighting, an A in an AP class is worth more then an A in a shop class.

So if a school is mostly focused on college-bound students, it's kind of natural that these programs have fallen away.

I'm old enough that I did basic shop stuff in middle school -- soldering, bandsaw, even a table saw. No way that would fly today.

Colleges don't care about weighted GPAs, only unweighted. Of course, they'd prefer if you take more advanced courses but they'd rather see that you perform well in the courses that you do take rather than struggle in courses that are too hard for you.

You touch on one of my frustrations with high school. In most schools, tracking means that you either take APs or you take classes that teach hands on skills. As if someone with a BA will never need to know how her car works.

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