a.k.a. Real Living 101 or, What They Should Have Been Teaching Instead of Letting Us Suffer Through the Nominative Case.
Like most of my generation, I never took a Home Ec class. By the time I reached school it had gone out of style and been replaced by computer classes because, for some reason, the ‘90s decided that watching pixilated characters procure venison for dinner on the Oregon Trail was better for kids than learning how to do it themselves.
I went to an all girls private school that for sure used to have a Home Ec class. Once upon a time, every graduate’s dream was to go to Wellesley and become the next Mrs. Jones. Then something happened called the 1970s and the school hasn’t been the same since*. According to dusty and off color yearbooks held in the library, the girls spent that decade cheering at sporting events holding handmade signs that bore not-so-subtle sexual messages. Shocking. We would never have gotten away with that when I attended in the 2000s.
The whole point of this was to say that I didn’t take Home Ec and I think that it’s unfortunate that that class has been largely phased out in the U.S. Sometime during high school my classmates and I started to realize that we were being done a disservice by not being taught to reattach a button. This probably happened around the same time as SAT panic and awareness of the looming realities of college began to set in.
Instead, we had mandatory Latin and Art History. Not that instruction in either of these is a waste of time per se, but, well, yeah actually Latin was a total waste of time.** Of course, at a school where some girls flew to Paris for the weekend to buy their junior prom dresses (yes, that really happened), not everyone was worried about having to live in the real world without basic Little House on the Prairie skills. I know I graduated with girls who didn’t know how to prepare a hard boiled egg. And not only didn’t know, but didn’t care that they didn’t know.
I’ve been able to get by in the years since graduation and moving away from my parents thanks to the luxury of school dining halls (last year, I even lived in the same building. You know you’ve reached new heights of laziness when you can’t even get up and go to dinner in your own building). I saved damaged articles of clothing until winter break when, upon handing the sweater to my mother, she handed it back along with a needle and a box of buttons and pursued a tough love method of forcing me to sew one on myself.
Now that I’ll be living in an on campus apartment come September, I’ll be foregoing a full meal plan. And we know what that means. Menu planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and, you know, real living, which is different from dorm living. My mother shoved me out into the world equipped with some basic cooking skills on which to build (basic as in, this is a measuring cup, fill to this line). But menu planning every night and hemming a pair of slacks? Those are a bit complicated and I’d like to have some mastery of them sooner rather than later. (Plus, I’ve seen tons of great ideas on do-it-yourself websites that I’d love to be handy enough to pull off.)
As the reality of it begins to set in and having missed the boat the first time around (although a neighbor of mine went to public school and had the option of taking Home Ec), I’ve decided to put myself through a catch-up Home Ec class run by myself and Google. Probably with guest lectures by my mom and certain inexplicably talented friends.
The first lesson is tomorrow. We’ll be making lemonade. Yes, there will be a test.
*Although it does still cling to many traditional currents. There are huge French and Latin programs, for example, and Art History is required.
**It was a waste because we took it in 7th grade when everyone was a goofy middle schooler who hadn’t the patience to sit in that hot room and conjugate verbs. The students only wanted to scour the textbook for sex-related words like sex (which means 6), and the duller than paint grammar teacher could never control the class. Naturally, it was long enough ago that the only word I remember now is the number six (sex). {And farmer (agricola) for some reason}.
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