By Jessica Trinh, staff writer
As a senior soon to be graduating from high school, I should feel confident in the knowledge that I’ve acquired from Galileo. Completing classwork, homework, projects, tests, getting good grades, and even earning a high school diploma, should make me feel ready to become an adult, but I don’t feel as confident because there are a number of things I think school should have taught, that I’ve had to learn through somewhere else.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe school has helped me. Galileo’s the place where I learn, question things, construct ideas, and build great bonds with lovely people, but I feel like there are basic life skills and essentials that school never covers. These are life skills that students should learn and want to know but are deprived of simply because it’s not taught as much.
One lesson I found most useful was learning how to mail letters. In school, we’d make these simple little thank you letters to somebody but It wasn’t the real thing, so when it came time for me to actually mail a letter to somebody I was lost. My mom and I were in the post office because she had to mail an important paper. I guess my mom assumed that I already knew how to do this so she did her thing as I watched. While I’m watching her write down the addresses I start to realize that I had no clue how to send a letter.
I didn’t know there was a certain order in which the addresses had to go. I had no clue it required a stamp, and I didn’t even know you had to pay about 60 cents for a stamp. You would expect those stamps to be like 25 cents! To this day I still don’t really know the purpose of the stamp. My mom knew I didn’t know how to mail anything, so the next time we made a stop at the post office she’d tell me to watch carefully and learn. If the school had taught me the real thing it would spare me the confusion, humiliation, and correction. I think it’s good to know how to send mail or even packages because in the future I’d probably have to send checks, packages, or maybe even rent money. If my mom didn’t correct me on this I’d probably walk into the world unequipped.
Another thing I had to find out from other people outside of school was how to create a resume and go through the process of job interviews. I learned this from my football coach, Coach Black, who led an internship program and it was extremely helpful. I left that internship feeling prepared to apply for any job because we were also taught how to communicate in a work environment, and honestly if it weren’t for me joining that internship I don’t even know when or where I’d learn those things.
Another thing that I think needs to be taught in school but I learned outside of it is CPR. I guess I expected the school to teach us how to do CPR, so I found it quite odd when I never got the lesson. A few months before, I had to watch over some kids at church and the leaders required that I know how to do CPR, so because I wasn’t familiar with CPR I had to take a paid course online enable to learn it. I spent a few hours studying the material trying to memorize everything, then went on to do the test, and eventually passed and got a certificate. Although I got to take the CPR course online, I’d prefer to learn these things in person instead of reading and watching videos on how to do it just because it’s more hands-on and that’s what CPR requires. It would be extremely helpful if teachers taught all high school students how to do CPR. Students wouldn’t have to spend extra time or money learning to do it on their own as I did, and just imagine how many lives could be saved just by students learning CPR. I mean all of us will eventually have to learn to do CPR, so why not make it a teaching that is required?
Students shouldn’t have to seek outside sources, if school is the place that teaches things. If school had taught me more everyday useful things, it definitely would’ve saved me some time and money. We go to school for about 7 hours a day. It’d be nice if everybody at least had one of those hours for a lesson that would teach them things that could help them out in the real world. This would help students worry less about figuring out how to get a job, or how to do certain things out there in the world.
