Five Things I Wish They Taught Me in School

By Lauren | September 14, 2017 | 0 Comment

Education is important, we all know that, however, I’m a person that strongly believes our education system is a bit dated. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m successfully pursuing my career thanks to school, but there are some things that I wish they would have taught me about life in school that they just didn’t. These life skills are essential for everyone yet we’re forced to fend for ourselves once we are thrown out into the real world. Here are some of those things I wish they would have taught me.

Budgeting

I hated math as a kid and that was mainly because I found it pointless. Aside from the basic addition and subtraction, I knew I would personally have no use for calculating “X” in an equation or figuring out the angle of a triangle. I get it, some professions need math but what would’ve been more valuable to learn is about budgeting. I had no idea how much living cost until I was thrown out on my own. How do you make ends meet? When you’re thrown out into the workforce or even just paying for university/college you have no idea how to budget. You’re making more money than you probably ever did or you have a ton of money deposited in your account from student loans but how do you stretch it to make sure you’re able to live the life you want? Why don’t they teach us this! Gah!

How to do my taxes

We have to do our taxes every year and I still to this day have no idea how they work. Thankfully you can hire an accountant or find help for this but wouldn’t it be so great if you could quickly and effectively do this yourself and actually understand it? This year I had to pay back $1,500 because I had no idea how to properly claim the money I was making outside of my job (freelance work). This should be essential in any life skills or math class because this is the math we’ll actually use!

Mortgages, RRSP’s and fancy bank things

I still have no idea how any of these things work. The other day I had to call my bank to up my RRSP contributions and the lady sat on the phone with me for an hour listing off a questionnaire about what my money would be invested in. I had no idea what she was talking about and just had to “trust” her recommendations without really knowing what they were. First off, bank people should know how to dumb it down, but second of all, they shouldn’t have to, why don’t we learn about this before we need to actually use these services?

Handy skills

How do you change a tire? How do you properly hang things on the wall? What do you do when your toilet overflows? I mean, yes, these are all things we’ll learn, likely the hard way, but wouldn’t you have felt more prepared for living on your own if you knew this in advance? Imagine how much more prepared we’d be to live independently if these sort of things were taught to us.

Mental health

I don’t know what the school system is like now, but when I was in school talking about mental health and taking care of yourself was not a thing. Kids need to learn that having feelings of depression, anxiety, or any other mental illness isn’t something they need to hide and conquer on their own. Why don’t they teach kids about these feelings and what to do or where to go for help? A scary statistic of 1 in 5 students live with a mental health issue and 50% of those students will drop out before graduation. Students should be given the education and resources they need to take care of themselves and also take care of other people and friends who may be going through it.

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