So life after high school gets real pretty darn fast. I mean, you still goof around a lot. You don't have TOO many obligations at this point but either you choose to immediately go to college or you take a year or two off and join the work force. Slowly but surely, life hits you with things that you must deal with on a daily basis but were never really shown how.
If you have decided to go look for a job, you start realizing that, wow, you have no real clue how to survive a job interview. Or (not to generalize this ladies because I know many of you were awesome enough to learn this at a young age) you're a young girl and were never shown how to change your flat tire. It's dangerous to be on the road if your tire isn't bolted on right.
Maybe you're just sick of take out and Ramen and you miss an actual home cooked meal. Or you were that unlucky person that found out the hard way in your apartment about grease fires and why you can't pour water on them to put them out.
I don't know if the school systems just assume your parents teach you these things or what. Yes, your parents SHOULD teach you these things but a lot of kids don't have parents available to teach them for countless reasons.
All these things that should really be common knowledge in life were never taught. A list of things your high school should be teaching and why.
Common Car Maintenance
Because the one machine you will rely on for the rest of your life is your vehicle. It would be nice to know how to change your tires yourself, change your oil, check your filters. Vehicles are a lot of money and one thing you shouldn't have to do is pay someone to take care of simple maintenance on your vehicle that you could do yourself.
How to Make Simple Meals
Wouldn't it be nice to be in your apartment cooking home made lasagna? Or meatloaf? or Chili? Pretty fuckin nice I would think. Now, there is always something to learn about cooking but once you get the basics down, you can perfect your dishes the way you like. What a great skill to be able to make common dishes for dinner. All the prep work, the translation of tsp, to tbsp, to cups.... Why should the simple act of preparing food to sustain my body be such a difficult thing to do?
These are the times when it would have been cool to learn this stuff in school like a Home Ec class. All the time saved learning this stuff, all the money saved my not burning your food. For the record, I did have an awesome stay at home mom throughout my life and she taught me what i needed to learn but not every kid has a stay at home mom.
How to File Your Taxes
Why? Because most people still don't know how to and they're in their 40's fumbling through and hoping they don't get an audit.
Since turning 18, I've had 5 complete tax years under my belt and I do them through Turbo Tax.
The Importance of Having A Good Credit Score
This is something I took lightly. I had convinced myself that I would just pay cash for everything except my house. The naive thought process was that if I could not afford to buy it cash, i could not afford it. Great idea, wrong for real life. I am currently struggling now to get my credit score up and to save for down payments on cars and a house.
And here I sit, waiting another year for my credit score to slowly climb as I make payments on debt instead of buying a house. Ugh, if only I knew then what I know now. Would have gone to a Credit Union and at least gotten like a $500 limit credit card or something just to start off.
Mending Your Clothes
Clothes rip, lets face it. They all do. So the question is, do you want to throw out a shirt you've only had for a month just because the sleeve ripped and buy a new shirt? Or do you want to spend 50 cents on a needle and thread and fix the thing? I'd rather fix it. Maybe that Home Ec class sounds pretty great right now. Then I wouldn't have a pile of ripped clothes sitting in my closet waiting to be mended either by hand or by sewing machine.
Wouldn't it be great to know how to use and re-thread your sewing machine?
Disclaimer: I am not a trained educational expert or a financial expert. All points of view are my own. I am in no way guaranteeing that adding the above to grade school education curriculum would improve over all life and education of the student body....
...but you and I both know it would...
Maybe I really am just sitting here belly aching about things I can't do instead of going out there and learning how to do all of them but it would have been so nice to learn all that stuff in school (before I had a full time job sucking my life away or before I had a child taking up all my time) so I would have been prepared. And maybe the educational system is right. I'm sure one day I will be so glad I have this calculus knowledge in my head. I bet one day, I'll really need that to survive the damn zombie apocalypse or some shit.
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