About noon today we found we had no internet access.  AGAIN!  And, though we were quite sure we had no landline, either, we checked and found we were oh so right.  We didn’t call CenturyLink.  We figured we’d give it a day.

If we were betting folks we’d put our money on failure of the part they had to fabricate.  It sounded pretty difficult, in the first place.  What the nice woman at CenturyLink said was that the equipment was so old that the parts were nigh unto impossible to get… so the workmen were fabricating the broken part, themselves.  “Good for them!” I thought.  “That’s what we need more of when push comes to shove.  Workers who can actually make or jerry rig or cobble together something that will get us through the rough spots.  And do they teach those sorts skills in high school any more?”

Recently I ran across a blog by a fellow named Jerry Nix.  In 2018 he wrote “What Ever Happened to Shop Classes in High School?”  Yes!  My question exactly!  About his own experience at J. Sterling Morton East High School in Cicero, Illinois, he wrote that for two of his four years he took shop classes in Electrical Wiring, Electronics, Woodworking, Plumbing, Welding, Metal Fabrication and Automobile Repair.  He went on to say:

I believe shop classes were set up in most high schools back in the 1940’s and  1950’s.  I graduated high school almost 50 years ago in 1969 and I can tell you that in the 60’s Shop Classes were in full swing.  The idea of the Shop Class was to teach those students who were not necessarily “college material” the basics of a trade so that after high school they could get a job or start an apprenticeship in one or more skilled trades. 

To read his entire article, go to https://freewavemaker.com/2018/11/30/whatever-happened-to-shop-classes-in-high-school/  He doesn’t say much that the rest of us haven’t been saying for the past thirty or forty years, but he says it well and based on good experience.

If, indeed, the workers at CenturyLink were having to fine-tune their fabrication, I do hope they were of Jerry Nix’s era — well-grounded in high school shop or, perhaps, a trade school later on.    But then… it might have been a totally unrelated problem.  Without the internet or a landline, my mind does wander…