Claudia Madeline Darin was born in 1947 in Michigan, the daughter of Andrew Darin and Jane (Sinelli) Darin. Her parents were married in 1939 in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan; her father was a native of New York state, and her mother was a Michigan native. In 1950, Claudia was living in Highland Park, Wayne County, Michigan with her parents and two older brothers, Thomas and John. Her father, Andrew, was employed as a mason contractor with a construction company; her mother was keeping house. In 1964, Claudia was pictured in the Highland Park High School yearbook, a member of the junior class. Before 1985, Claudia was married to Frederick A. Agemy, also a Michigan native and a classmate – Fred was also listed in the junior class of Highland Park High School in 1964. In the 1980s, Fred Agemy was the Madison Heights High School basketball coach. Madison Heights High School is only about thirty minutes from Avondale Middle School, and the Agemys lived in Troy, about halfway between their two workplaces.
I met Mrs. Agemy in the spring of 1985, when I was taking sixth grade home economics at Avondale Middle School. She was also my home economics teacher in seventh grade. As a member of the band, I didn’t take home economics in eighth grade. We spent half of the thirteen weeks in home economics on a cooking and baking unit, and the other half on a sewing unit. By the 1980s, though schools were still teaching home economics for all students, it had been reduced to those two basic skills. I went into sixth-grade home economics with a chip on my shoulder and didn’t lose it the entire time I had to be in the class. I would rather have been doing anything else. I had been working in my parents’ kitchen since I was four years old – doing dishes, using the refrigerator, microwave, stove and oven, helping my mom cook and bake, and cooking and baking on my own. I was allowed to use knives and the stove and oven well before the age of twelve. I had already become so comfortable with the math of increasing and decreasing recipes that I was famous among my family for the mistake I made attempting to double the zucchini cookie recipe (it was a teaspoon-tablespoon mistake, and I ended up sextupling the batch – we ate zucchini cookies for months).
Mrs. Agemy’s calculus did not allow for any student to know more than nothing about cooking and baking. Everyone had to start from zero. When we made chocolate chip cookies, she caught me dipping and leveling flour instead of adding one spoonful of it at a time to a cup measure. After yelling at me for not following directions, she made an example of me to the whole class, embarrassing and humiliating me. After that, I made a point of sullenly following every direction to the letter, rolling my eyes and muttering to my kitchen mates about how stupid it was.
The sewing unit wasn’t much better. We all had to make a stuffed animal. I had heard about the home economics classes my mom took in school, where the students were allowed to choose their projects, and learned useful skills like mending, darning, making their own clothes and household items. We were allowed to choose the stuffed animal from a list, and then Mrs. Agemy ordered kits that included the fabric, thread, stuffing, decorative items, etc. Everyone who chose the butterfly had to make it the same way – the same colors, the same everything. Again, I had been sewing since I was about five years old, when my mom taught me how to use her sewing machine to make clothes for my dolls. She helped me a lot, but by the age of twelve, I was certainly capable of doing most sewing tasks on my own. I resented having to make a stuffed animal I didn’t want, and I resented having to plod through the instructions like I didn’t know what a presser foot was or that embroidery floss was for hand sewing. I followed the directions to the letter, though, having learned my lesson with the flour. Until I reached the end of the project – the butterfly was completed and stuffed, I just had to sew shut the hole I’d used to fill it with stuffing. The instructions said we were to close the hole with black embroidery floss (presumably so that the teacher could see and grade our stitching). I refused to make the already ugly object even uglier, and closed the hole with invisible stitching, matching the light-yellow fabric with light yellow thread. I got in trouble for that, too – Mrs. Agemy lowered my grade and pointed out – again in front of everyone – that I had again not followed instructions.
As an adult, I do recognize that many children reach the age of twelve – and often the age of eighteen – without the skills required to cook or sew for themselves. I still believe there should have been a mechanism in 1985 for me to “test out” of taking home economics. I still cook, bake and sew every day, forty years after being forced to take home economics – and I never use anything I learned in that class. I do often use a metric scale to measure ingredients these days, but there is no spooning of flour. I do often finish projects with hand sewing, but there is no intentional showing of finishing stitches.
We only had “specials” (shop, art and home economics) three times a week in sixth grade, and only twice a week in seventh grade – physical education took up the other days of the week. So all told, I probably spent less than 65 hours of my entire middle school career with Mrs. Agemy. I didn’t know her well, but I knew her to be inflexible. In her turn, she probably had me pegged as a disobedient authority-hater. She did give me a “1” (excellent) in the citizenship column, next to my A-, though. It is tough to say what she thought of me, as I spent so little time in her class – but it is likely she thought of me not at all when I wasn’t right in front of her. I’m not certain when Avondale phased out home economics in the middle school, but it was probably before she was ready to retire. I also don’t know whether she was certified to teach in any other area, or whether she was able to find another job when schools gave up teaching home economics. Claudia and Fred Agemy still reside in Troy, Oakland County, Michigan.
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