Well - just been up the road to see the local community college (secondary) as they had an open day and it's 2 roads away.
The good news and the bad news:
1) They still do proper woodwork and metalwork (sort of).
There was a proper room with wooden tables, vices and those little dog- legged wooden thingies - and a pupil was ragging danish oil onto a wooden candle holder. Looked quite nice. Did not see any dovetail joints though.
I asked the teacher of they still did proper metalwork - brazing, lathes etc. He said yes to brazing and he was trying to get the lathe fixed so he could start teaching with it again.
2) GCSE Maths is gay. No calculus and no matrices. 1/4 stats for some reason...
3) Science was fun. They still do the van de Graaf hair-on-end trick - in fact my son (6) got done and rather enjoyed being Electro-Man and zapping daddy. There was blowing up hydrogen and colouring bunsen flames with metal salts.
4) ICT is slightly better than the worst case I imagined. No hard-assed programming, but they do teach Scratch (sort of GUI programming) and making games with it. Some web skills, Dreamweaver.
I think the H&S may be a media hype-up. There was a 4-5th former ragging on danish oil - no gloves (not saying you'd need gloves, but the H&S...)
Chemistry - in the experiment where you add magnesium to HCl to make H2, then light it, again probably a 3-4th form girl happily holding the test tube with bare hands whilst adding dilute HCl. Not much wrong with that, but an H&S freak would have had tongs out.
Bunsens everywhere and the only PPE were the standard issue goggles.
Seemed all very familiar, except for the lack of asbestos mats!
Wandering round our eldest prospective school last year, they proudly introduced the "woodwork room". Took me a while to work out that was what it was! (several powered fret saws, but no table saw, planer, thicknesser etc). Still it is a girls school....
That will presumably be a baccalaureate by the time it matters?
Lots of the schools seem to use a games maker package, which is not a bad approximation of writing even driven GUI stuff.
*The lathe!!!* Would that be the ubiquitous and tiny Emco? My secondary school was small (just over 500 pupils) and was a grammar school and therefore biased towards academic subjects, but we still had the following:
Woodworking room:
2 pillar drills
3 woodworking lathes - two fitted with sanding disks and tables on the back of the head
1 circular saw handtools
Metalworking room:
1 forge
1 anvil
1 furnace (suitable for casting aluminium)
1 oxyacetylene set handtools
Engineering workshop:
3 drawing boards
1 power hacksaw
1 shaper
1 surface grinder
1 horizontal miller
4 lathes (three 10" swing and a 14" IIRC [more with the gap bed]) handtools
As it happened, I also had access to a pillar drill, lathe (Raglan Little-John Mk2) and jig-borer (small vertical miller), drawing board, Autocad 2.6 and an A3 HP plotter at home.
When designing our conservatory last year, I had a complicated bit with a roof slope and an angled wall (to satisfy the council over sightlines) and, although I can't remember why now, I actually solved a quadratic equation for the first time in real life!
I remember the cathode ray tube - 3500V, tube provided with connections in the form of male banana plugs sealed into the glass - hence connected with two rear stacking plugs, leaving two metal points sticking out with
3500V across them - 2 feet from someone conducting a water based experiment!
Oxy-acetylene was more fun. Ammonium Tri-Iodide was best!
Someone accidentally setting fire to the curtains while using a bunsen on the side bench was a highlight for us. Curtains in a lab did seem a bit ridiculous, but I suppose they were necessary for the projector.
Back when I did computer studies, the teacher marked your O-level project, which was then sent off for "adjustment" by the exam board. I think I gained many extra marks when the teacher couldn't understand the elegant loops and conditionals of Sinclair SuperBasic on the QL when the school only used BBC model Bs! I later "sold" my O-level project to QL World magazine and used the money to but one of those new-fangled CD players.
We only ever got lungs and hearts from the local butcher, but maybe if I'd continued Biology after the second year?
I wonder what they would have made of distilling tear gas? I spent a lower 6th lesson in the Junior Chemi lab while the upper 6th were doing this and it all drifted through the connecting prep room.
Or Lassaigne?s test. The first part of which involves fusing a small amount of organic substance with small quantity of sodium metal in a fusion tube. The red hot fusion tube is then plunged into distilled water.
One teacher did a demonstration that produced a solid block a foot high and caused the evacuation of half the school as the South block filled with Iodine gas!
Concentrated acids in the fume cupboards and depressions in every wooden sink cover where pupils had borrowed a bottle to try and eat through it?
I'm really pleasantly surprised, Back in the dark ages (60s) we did proper soldering (hatchet-type irons, killed spirits et. al.), case hardening, blacksmith-type forge work, moulding, brazing, lathe work, scraping (engineer's blue and all that). AND in woodwork we had to use glue from a double-wall kettle at the insistence of "Basher" Bates.
The elegant loops and conditionals of QL Basic actually exist in BBC BASIC. Probably the teachers had never progressed beyond doing anything other than MS-Basic-clone-compatible programming on the Beebs.
Yep, that's how they came to us. That was in 1974 or thereabouts. I didn't actually get to lay hands on a live one until University. I still have the bite marks. The little sods learn pretty quickly that you're going to take a blood sample and that it hurts.
Laser cutting, CNC and vac forming are the order of the day at the local grammar. You can produce some very nice marquetry with a laser cutter, but I suppose it's cheating.
The more stats the better, they should especially teach how to see through all the phoney science stories in the press these days.
I remember the flayed skin of a lab rat being pinned to the underside of my desk lid when I was in the upper fourth in 1956. I didn't do Biology but the other bastards did. I seem to remember behaving with considerable sang-froid...
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