Ouch, my head
For almost three decades, high school students in Montgomery County have built homes as part of a construction and trades program based at Thomas Edison High School. This year, for the first time, design students have a hand in the process.
Courtney and more than 100 of her classmates will compete to pick colors for the shutters and siding. They will decide whether the family room should be Early American, Country French or even jailbird Martha. And they will recommend a color scheme to make a soak in the second-floor spa tub that much more soothing.
In contrast to students in the carpentry program -- a testosterone-fueled group of karate-kicking teenage boys who have spent the past four months hammering together a 2,252-square-foot house -- most of Courtney's classmates in the interior design program are girls with penchants for fur-trimmed parkas and Juicy Couture bags.
Just stop for a moment and ponder that last paragraph. As my friend put it, "What year is this, 1955?" I'm assuming that, what, the girls rush home to bake dinner before the hard-working boys get back from doing their hard labor?
The worst thing about this article, however, is not even the abhorrent gender stereotypes; it's the missed opportunity. This is a story about what goes on inside classrooms, which is great, but we learn very little about the context. Where's the discussion about the pluses and minuses of vocational ed.; do these projects cause increased achievement in math, for example, or are there other externalities; what exactly is the "construction and trade" program; is this sort of program common?
The only things that you learn from the article are that this program exists, students seem to enjoy it -- oh, and girls don't like getting their hands dirty.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, January 01, 2006 at 10:29 AM.
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