Thanks to my school experiences, I have the same reaction to "project" that many of us have to "craft" -- "I'm not doing a project, I'm making a duffel bag!" Half a century later, some of that is wearing off.
On 9/28/10 12:02 PM, bev walker wrote:
Also known as needlecraft?
"Craft" retains some of its proper meaning: "needlecraft", "the craft of writing", "a well-crafted story" -- but "crafty" has slithered to meaning "inclined to play with glue" and "doing crafts" is a new phrase meaning "to occupy children with a dead-end activity." (And the kids know the difference, my they *do* know the difference when I get the rare opportunity to sneak in embroidery lessons.) (Sigh. For the last few years, every opportunity to care for children has co-incided with a prior commitment.) This has been going on for a long time. Back in the early sixties, when Mom was an R.N. at a mental hospital, she was assigned to "occupational therapy". This did not mean stuff like a therapy center I once drove past where people who had been sick or injured could rebuild their endurance at operating heavy machinery before going back to work; it meant occupying the patients with busywork. The original theory appears to have been that making something will make the patients feel better, but in practice it was "Buy absurdly-expensive kit. Assemble the pieces. Throw out the resulting trash." (Hard to tell this "Occupational Therapy" from another therapy called "Monotonous Unrewarding Labor!) Being a thirties-era farmwife, she taught them *real* crafts, and, for a change, occupational therapy really did make them feel better. This did not last long; the hospital was told it had to hire a Licensed Therapist, and the training for the license didn't include learning anything to teach the patients. -- Joy Beeson http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com.
