📙 Part 2: Describe a skill that you learned when you were a teenager

This episode's vocabulary

A good/great deal (phrase) - a large amount.

Tearaway (noun) - a young person, usually male, who behaves in an uncontrolled way and is often causing trouble.

Vaguely (adverb) - in a way that is not clearly expressed, known, described, or decided.

To sew (verb) - to join two pieces of cloth together by putting thread through them with a needle.

Apron (noun) - a piece of clothing worn over the front of other clothes to keep them clean when doing a dirty or messy job, especially cooking.

The latter (adj.) - the second of two people, things, or groups previously mentioned.

Precision (noun) - the quality of being exact.

To pan out (phrasal verb) - to develop in a particular way or in a successful way.

Formative (adj.) - relating to the time when someone or something is starting to develop in character.

Appalling (adj.) - very bad.

Questions and Answers

R: Well, I was a teenager a long time ago, and I'm not sure I learned a great deal back then, to be honest, since I was a bit of a tearaway. But one thing I vaguely recall is learning how to sew in my home economics class. Specifically, we had to learn how to put together this apron in the first half of the year. So we could wear it when cooking in the latter half. The class was taught by our home ec teacher, Miss Christie. And dear god was it one of the most boring experiences I've ever had in my entire life? She was so focused on precision and doing things perfectly that it just sucked all the fun and joy out of everything that we did. I mean, she was like that for cooking as well. To the extent that I lost interest in both skills for the rest of my life. Any development I made was extremely limited after that experience. Anyway, back to sewing. This was another case of the curriculum being far behind the times in all honesty, because they talked about being able to make and mend your own clothes. And in the age of fast fashion we have now, this seems completely useless and pointless, especially to a young teenager like I was at that time. It might have been better for us. In fact, I have no idea what might... What a better alternative would have been, frankly. But we definitely shouldn't have been learning it just because some government document said we should have been. If I hadn't had this experience, I might have been more keen on the idea of making and mending clothing later in life, although it's never really come up. And things seem to have panned out rather well regardless. So it was a formative experience nonetheless, even if it didn't have the intended result. And to this day, I still have extreme problems with sewing things together. Well, to the limited extent that I have to do it.

M: And what about your classmates? Did they enjoy this subject?

R: There were two groups of us, the ones that hated it, and were appalling, and the ones that loved it and did extremely well.