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Home Economics, more commonly known as Home Ec for short.

(Or at least, that was what the class was called circa 1994. That might well have changed without my knowledge since then.)

 

Not sure if the US and Canada are the same, but here (circa late 2000s) sewing class was called Sewing and Textiles. "Home Ec" I believe (at least in Canada) is no longer used.

 

It is sometimes taught in school, I'm not sure I would say it is common. Home Ec is often an elective, so not every student has to take it. And Home Ec covers a lot of different topics, probably only spending a week or two (maybe less?) on sewing.... What I'm trying to say is, I wouldn't say the average high school graduate is proficient in sewing, even if they took Home Ec and completed a sewing project.

 

Sorry. Missed the initial question. Again, Canada, so take with a grain of salt if you want this very US based. I'd say Sewing and Textiles is a commonly offered elective (even my relatively small school had it), but I don't think a large population took it. I think out of our graduating class of about 100 kids, the Sewing and Textiles grade 11/12 class was maybe 10 girls.

If you want a character with the ability to sew, there are other venues to learn, particularly specific skills. I took quilting lessons as a pre-teen and I'm fairly proficient with sewing various projects, despite not taking it in high school.

 

Sorry, meant to respond to this with the other question... I would imagine steampunk, with lots of over-the-top daVinci-esque inventions

 

In my school, sewing is covered in the Fashion and Clothing Design class, which is under the department called Family and Consumer Sciences. FCS also offers classes in culinary and early childhood education. (You can take early childhood education for college credit.)

Like @Briannakin mentioned above, these are elective classes.

 

Sounds like a combination of steampunk and Leonardo DaVinci-esque contraptions.

P.S. Looks like @Tarsier beat me to this, but I'm posting it anyway.

 

Something along the line of Lifeskills?

 

Over here 'home economics' (where we learn how to cock, clean and similar) is a different class from the one where we leran to sew, both are obligatory.

do it, I want as many answers as possible

I meant in RL

 

How neat that your curriculum supports necessary skills training! Good for you!

And "Lifeskills" was the name of the required class; Youngest was in an academy within his high school and their classes named simply, like that. I recall that cooking was in the realm of the class, too. The academy had a core of amazing teachers, true Renaissance folks who could take apart a carburetor and teach the latest coding language all in the same afternoon.

As for me, "Home Economics" lasted one year and we girls could choose "Auto Mechanics" or "Woodshop" if we wanted for that year, too; for graduation, one of these three was required. Maybe a few girls did, but that knowledge is lost in the mists of time. It does seem like one boy selected "Home Ec", with one quarter for cooking, the next for sewing, the last an umbrella for various subjects. *closes door firmly on the past, because 2018 is way more interesting*

 

I believe Sewing and Textiles was under the umbrella term of Home Economics (but that was being phased out), along with an elective called Food and Nutrition (cooking class) but they were two different classes for us (neither one I took... I was a band nerd ALL the way through high school! But my sister did both).

But believe some US schools are now offering "Lifeskills" classes. I recall one of my friends in the US talking about a class where he learned the basics of sewing on a button, hemming pants, mending clothes, how to change a tire on a car, basic cooking skills, how to do his taxes (I remember because I was like "WHY DIDN'T I LEARN THAT!").

 

When my parents were in high school, the girls took Home Ec, and the boys took shop. When I was in high school, for ninth grade, everyone had to take both. There were more advanced elective shop classes after that, which one of my sisters took; and one other more advanced elective home economics class that was called something much like Life Skills. I never took it myself, but I was reminded recently--when working with local newspaper photographs in a professional capacity--that the graduating class two years ahead of me who did all made quilts.

There was, besides the sewing unit--where I can't say I learned any skills I did not already possess--a cooking unit, where I didn't learn anything much at all. Naturally, we had to prepare the assigned dishes in groups, and my group just laughed as our dishes (which included Baked Alaska) bombed one after another. It's a lucky thing I learned to cook when I was nine.

As an aside, my school really was small, and explains why my definition of what a "small school" is is not the same as others'. There were twenty-eight students in my graduating class. Yes, twenty-eight: I was able to shock people at my college with this hard-to-believe fact multiple times. It's a good thing I didn't tell them about the really small Class C schools in Montana, where there are about forty kids in the entire school--and they all play basketball very well and go to the state basketball tournament.

I was also a "band nerd" (though no one ever ever called us that) in that other faraway life, despite my complete lack of musical talent.

And returning to the main subject: one thing I did not learn in Home Ec, which I wish I had, was to learn to use a sewing machine. To this day, I don't know how to, and there have been times when it would be useful. Interestingly, the aforementioned sister does know how, but she doesn't remember quite how/when/where she learned.

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ETA: I just now spoke with my father, and it turns out that, at his high school, everyone did in fact have to take both shop and home ec: the class was split in half (and no, not along gender lines) and alternated semesters, just as my own class would thirty years later. It was only my mother who went to a school where that wasn't the case.

 

Oh, my mistake. To me 'lifeskills' just sounded so... "author trying to come up with a SF-term for something common".

 

Again, in my school Life Skills is a class for students who are intellectually challenged. But every district has its own terminology; there is no reason that a class called life skills wouldn’t exist. It could cover not just domestic skills but also basic repair skills and even financial skills. Sounds good to me!

 

We had home economics for a year in 1994/95, but it was discontinued after our generation, sadly, just like first aid was. We never baked, but we had to weave a tiny place mat type of a thing. Only one person had a (toy) loom, the rest of us had to make our own. Lucky, it worked because we also had something called tech-ed, where we spent years using a small saw, making various objects.

 

Is there any Japanese word that could be used instead of the English 'damsel' or 'squire'?


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Thanks and since I don't seem to get any more answers on the original question I have a follow up question: what do you mean when you say steampunk? I'm asking because the term seems to be used for lots of different things, some which I don't think is steampunk (I actually did a short word explanation for 'steampunk' for a paper I did for a Literature class and come up with 4 different points what it could mean and have come up with some personal terms for some of my own subcategories of what other people call steampunk).

 

@Gamiel I think of steampunk as mostly Victorian era in terms of fashion and style, with various machines that run on steam power. Superfluous rivets and gears everywhere. Hot air balloons seem to be popular.... I'm not an expert on steampunk by any means, just seen other people talk about it (mostly here).

 

What TPAM said, lots of leather and brass.

After some googling, here is a steampunk R2-D2 for you.
https://pin.it/cebvk5locfbiwm

 

Great question! Some years ago, I saw steampunk devices online, read the term frequently and said, "Hey, that's just like Wild Wild West of '60s TV fame!" Someone else said "Yeah, that's its beginning" and herpderp, there's this article.

 

So I´ve asked my best friend who studies japanese and he suggested, "deshi" for squire and "otome" for damsel.

 

Thanks for the answers

My own definition is:
Steampunk: 1) retro science-fiction based on 19th-century technology and ideas, a.k.a. "Jules Verne science fiction", technology can be just a bit more advanced than the real 19th-century to far more advanced. Take place in a world based on the real historical world or the literal works of the 19th-century; 2) A world where the majority of all technology (which is on the level of 19th century tech, if not more advanced) is powered by steam technology; 3) A world where technology has an aesthetics reminiscent of the one in the 19th century, but it does not need to follow what is possible a.k.a. Jugendpunk; 4) A style of clothing inspired by the pop-culture ideas of Victorian clothing with gears, mechanical and/or mechanically-like knick-knacks fixed on.



If I instead ask: What would people think "daVinci-science-fiction" would mean if I used it to describe a worlds technological level?

 

double posting because I have a new and completely different question:

Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man with Stan Lee, was a big fan of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism and I'm right now writing some works inspired by the Spider-verse event (where spider people from all over the multiverse gather together to stop an seemingly unstoppable threat to them all) and was thinking that it would be fun to have an appearance of an highly Objectivistic Spider-Man. Now I'm a bit uncertain how to write such an character, at least when interacting with non bag guys, and was wondering if people had any suggestion on how to write such a character?

 

Futuristic crazy inventions? I think you are going to need to describe things in a bit more detail to really show your readers what you are going for.

 

It has been many years since I last visited theForce.net's FanFic forums. Is there a newer Beta Reader index than the locked v.4? -still getting my bearings...

 

I found it:

Code:

<a href="https://boards.theforce.net/threads/the-all-new-beta-readers-index-need-a-beta-want-to-beta-come-on-in.50033831/" title="https://boards.theforce.net/threads/the-all-new-beta-readers-index-need-a-beta-want-to-beta-come-on-in.50033831/">The All New Beta Readers Index</a>

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