We had the mandatory home ec in my junior high school. Even with it, they didn't teach me any more than my mother did. In fact, she taught me a lot more. I could make a mean meringue by the time I was 10, long before home ec, which didn't teach us that. About the most complicated thing we made was potato pancakes. Same with the sewing. I'd already won a prize in a local sewing contest by the time I had to take it in home ec. I got to make slightly more complicated class project because I was so ahead of the other girls. I was just interested in all that stuff as a kid and loved to watch/help my mother. She was very good about encouraging me to try new things. I couldn't understand how so many of my fellow students didn't have at least a rudimentary knowledge of any of it. Until my daughter came to live with me, then I understood. My mother had the patience of a saint.

I don't remember home ec at any of my US schools. I would have been too young for it in my UK schools, which stopped when I was not quite nine years old.

I suck at sewing, cook and bake by instinct and training, and am lousy at woodworking for the same reason I suck at sewing: you need math sense. There's geometry in there, which I can do, but also algebra.

I wish I'd taken a few practical courses like that, Fay. Agricolae / agricolarum / agricolis / agricolas hasn't come in handy. Who knew?

Oh, we had to do Latin too. But only for two years (and I was in the Latin-for-pillocks' class in IV Middle, having been pants at it the year before). You beat me, though - all I remember is 'amo, amas, amat'

For us, all foreign languages were electives. Most years, I only had two free periods in which to take electives, I took Spanish from the 8th (when the started offering it, in my town) through the 12th grades, and Latin in the 9th grade, and again in the 11th grade. I forget why I didn't take it in 10th grade, or what I took in its place. I took art classes, probably, or maybe voice lessons.

I leave the root end on the onion and try to work fast. Usually that way I'm only beginning to tear once I'm done.

I didn't learn to cook till after college, except for some basic cookie and appetizer recipes, since I didn't have a strong interest, and my mother preferred doing it herself to forcing a complaining daughter. She did, however, enlist me for enough holiday prep work that I knew the basics of working with all the common vegetables.

Now when I offer to cook dinner at my parents' house, I always hate the prep work because my mom doesn't have any good knives--they're all too dull and too short. I don't see how she hasn't sliced her hand open on those things.

I went through my grandmother's high school yearbook (1934) with her a few years ago. They didn't have Home Ec. as a regular class, but there some sort of extra-curricular cooking club, I forget what it was called, but from the pictures it was mostly fancy baking. On the next page was the girls' rifle team. Made an interesting contrast. She wasn't a member of either club, but I asked my grandmother whether the rifle team ever brought in game for the cooking club, and she laughed, and said no, they were limited to paper targets at the range. The rifle clubs (boys & girls) were discontinued in the '40s.

My mother went back to work when I was 11 or so, and so a lot of nights, I had to have dinner in the oven, before she got home. It was good training, and she left me more and more to do as I got older. I think I also learned through observation. Nobody told me how to cook most stuff I cook, I just made it up as I went along.

I learned to cook early, like Cindy, out of necessity. I went to live with my parents in the States when I was 9, my father was a type one critical insulin-dependent diabetic, and my mother was, literally, the worst cook on planet earth. He'd have died without someone feeding him decent healthy properly-cooked food that wasn't (ick ick ick) fried.

I learned to operate a treadle sewing machine in Home Ec, and to make stupid recipes I never, ever, made again. And I sewed a dress I never wore, but my mom wouldn't let me cut it up or burn it. It hung in my closet until I moved out, like a rebuke.

Under the wire with Cooking:

Her insides twist with wanting, and she can feel the enamel on her teeth ringing in tune with the note her blood wants to sing, and her mouth is open, a little, so the sound inside her head isn't so loud. She waits for him to pick up the matches and light the candle. He tosses her the tubing and she shoves up her sleeve and ties off, and she watches as he tips the powder into the spoon. Her eyes are dark and fevered as he holds the spoon over the flame and her heaven starts to cook.