Hooo boy. I never did take Home Ec, but I did take 'shop' class.We went through two different teachers for this class while I was in high school. The first turned out to be a drug dealer, who was busted at the post office with a frankly alarming amount of weed. The second was a basketball coach... who kept a loaded gun in his filing cabinet, and on multiple occasions is known to have pulled it on students.
I was technically 'in' that class for four years (school I went to had basically zero electives)... and we never learned how to use a single piece of shop machinery, for which I shall always be angry, because dammit, I wanted to make stuff.