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[–] 72 points 3 days ago (11 children)

I feel like most shop equipment should have a similar plaque.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 days ago*

    At a Danish boarding school (think hippies more than Eaton) on the wall next to the drill press in the woodshop:
    a piece of scalp with long hair
    A "subtle" reminder to wear a hair-net when working with rotating equipment.

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  • [–] 41 points 3 days ago (8 children)

    I took shop class in jr high. There was a dried spray of blood on the wall behind the band saw. First day of class the shop teacher pointed it out while clarifying that the safety rules were there for a reason. At some point in the previous years the room had been repainted, but that section was left alone to leave the blood on the wall.

    That was 1985. I'm guessing today it would be properly cleaned, but everyone in the class would have taken pictures to share anyway.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    My junior high shop class was in 1980. Both teachers were missing fingers, although I don't think they lost them in the junior high shop.

    Incidentally, this was when Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" was playing regularly on the radio. The other kids in shop class achieved the rapture whenever it came on, singing along especially loudly to the "we don't need no education" line. I'm not sure Roger Waters ever really grasped why The Wall was so successful in the US.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 days ago

    Yeah, that's a song I both love and hate. Love it because it was obvious he wasn't really talking about education but "education" aka "thought control" as he specifies in the song itself. Hate it because I'm sure it contributed to the anti-intellectualism we see today because so many people thought he meant like math class instead of the propaganda kids in schools were fed like "it's good to sign up for the military to fight in some foreign war". Which applied specifically in the case of the character the wall was about because he was constantly told at school that the father that abandoned him was a hero for it and he was bad for not being happy about it, which just became another brick in the wall.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 days ago* (3 children)

    Today it wouldn't be there because all the tools would be in storage and the room repurposed for some other kind of class.

    (Source: I took AP Physics circa 2000 in the large room that used to be my school's shop, and wished I could've had the chance to use the equipment. It even had two generations of equipment -- manual table saws and such stuffed in a large walk-in closet, and CNC mills, oscilloscopes, and other sorts of "high-tech" stuff still sitting out -- and none of it was still being used.)

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    Depends on the school. The high school my kids graduated from offered all forms of trade classes, from home maintenance to welding, cabinetry, auto, etc. They graduated in 2017, 19, & 20.

    There was a moment in time several years back where there was talk of cutting back on those classes, but a large enough group of students kept enrolling in them, so the classes stayed.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    My school system did have a high school like that, but it was only one for the whole county and you had to transfer to it instead of going to your normal zoned school. And it was only for kids trying to learn a trade, which meant it didn't offer stuff like AP classes. So yeah: if you were a a "smart" kid planning on college, you didn't get to have any hands-on sorts of classes. It's fucked up.

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  • Unused CNC mills? Damn. When I was in college I did an internship at IBM's TJ Watson research center. They had so much fantastic shit and nowhere to store it. There was a scanning (or a tunneling?) electron microscope sitting in the hallway outside of our lab.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    In the late naughties, I worked at a facility that had a server room with very visible scorch marks around an outlet for the entire four years I was there. I realize that's not a biohazard but I still wouldn't rely on an organization cleaning up.

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