High School Never Taught Me How To "Adult" by Michaela

Michaelaof Joplin's entry into Varsity Tutor's March 2017 scholarship contest

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Michaela of Joplin, MO
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High School Never Taught Me How To "Adult" by Michaela - March 2017 Scholarship Essay

As a child you are told education is very important. That you are going to graduate high school and go to college. All the Basics are taught to you in elementary school and some of middle school. Things we actually need, such as grammar rules, spelling, and basic math. Then high school hits. This is a place where there are supposed to be endless possibilities that you can experience and figure out what you’ll do for the rest of your life, right? Sadly, that is not the case. In reality high school is all about cramming you with an overload of information you probably will never use again. We all know y=mx+b and that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell because we are taught it over and over again. In learning these things did anyone actually tell us how we could use this past high school? No, we were just told you would use it in college.

Life skills are an important thing we all need to know. Though, in high school we aren’t taught any life skills. Yes, we get taught how to cram information the night before a test or how to take standardized tests, but what about learning how to do our taxes or balance your checkbook. Some people have taken high school and turned it into how can I do as little as possible to get done. Basically high school teaches you how to do school the easiest fastest way without learning too much. If this is all high school is then what is the point of actually trying. All students will do is come to school and talk to their friends. Going to class has no meaning to anyone unless it’s a subject you find interesting, which most the time you only have a couple of classes you enjoy. You don’t always get to choose what you want you’re just told you will need this in the future. Again there’s the, you need this for your life, but how? How exactly will we use the classes we don’t want in our life? The classes don’t have anything to teach us about cooking, sewing, maintaining a car, how to budget your money, fixing little things around the house or knowing about your car, etc. These are the classes that should be required, not an option. Even if it seems boing to some people, once you get out into the “real world” you realize you really need those classes in school. In four years of high school I had one class that actually taught me how to use a checkbook and to balance it correctly. Students that had a different teacher than I did, though, did not learn any of that information. We are here to learn, so why is it that we leave high school not knowing anything we were supposed to learn. If for the school it’s all about passing the students for their benefits and to the students it’s all about getting out as soon as possible, then what is the point of high school? The point isn’t clear to me at all because we are told constantly to stay in school, but we learn nothing useful for life.

There has to be another way that the school can figure out how to better their student’s lives. If all teachers taught like the few amazing teachers I have had our student’s would be better off in the future. If you get a teacher who is just there to get through paying bills, the student won’t learn anything. A teacher needs to care for their students and what they are teaching. The few teachers I have had that I enjoyed their class brought real life experiences into the classroom. It had to do with the subject, but it brought a better aspect to the information being taught. If we can be taught with real life experiences and given the opportunity to take classes that can help us better out future students will take that opportunity. I don’t know where my education would be without the personal finance, marketing, and English classes. We have the opportunity to do so much with our education and our lives, but that can’t happen if high school is about the easy way out.

High school is just a four-year sequence of cramming as much information as you can, reiterate to take a test, and right as you turn that test in you lose everything you just learned. I find this completely pointless and a waste of time. Schools need to learn that there are more important things in life than learning the correct way to study and take tests. All that does is gives the school district more money instead of teaching us important skills. Life isn’t all fun and games and school teaches you to find the easiest way out instead of actually thinking.

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