It was the ultimate autonomy class.  Our notebooks were slabs of wood and our pencils were hand saws.  Before us stood that white smocked teacher who spent ninety percent of class time preaching safety.

Well, what can you expect from a classroom that wasn't even really a classroom?  It was more a combination of laboratory, warehouse, and your dad's garage.  Eschewing pens and calculators for lathes and band saws, shop class seemed dedicated not so much to making us useful in society, per se, as useful in our own homes.  Thanks to shop class, our increasingly urbanized selves were taught the rudiments of manual craftsmanship, home repair, machine upkeep and repair, and more.  Ostensibly, we could fix an uneven table leg, sand down and put a new finish coat on a beaten up coffee table, replace the battered trim around the storm door, diagnose and fix a leaky faucet, and more.

Sometimes, shop class was simply about doing with our hands what had been confined to our minds in other classes.  While math classes had us put levers and such on paper, shop class gave us the tactile opportunity to see levers, pulleys, gears, and ratios in action (or, if we were really inept, inaction).  Anything was possible, perhaps because shop class seemed somehow like every other class rolled into one.  It's physics one day as you're studying how engine placement in a car effects aerodynamics, and botany the next as you're learning about the difference between pine, maple, and oak.

Of course, for most of us, shop class meant building one of two things:  a birdhouse or baseball bat.  Sure, a few of the more vocationally adept students went home with a somewhat ornate shelf or night stand, and there was the occasional student with the mind and moxy to make a new kitchen island for his mom (show off), but for the large part, most of us probably measured, chopped, chipped, cut, hammered, sawed, sanded, welded, and celebrated something rather mundane.