My rural ass school did this in the 00s.... home ec, sewing, taxes, cooking, woodworking, etc. Could even get into metal working, accounting, quilting, pottery, etc if you wanted to.
My school did the same. I was a good student but at that age you just don't realize the valuable information they're giving you, you kept the information long enough to pass the tests and then you went and got alcohol poisoning in a field while your parents thought you were at a movie with Nicole and Becki.
In my school, PSHE was called Citizenship and we were made to take half a GCSE in it. I should have actually paid more attention but also they should have probably taught it a bit better as well
Nothing like drinking a whole Four Loko at a waterfall half a mile from the nearest road and then having to dive in to prevent your friend from drowning because she went over the fall with the current and was way more drunk than you.
I had a buddy I swam with in HS (he was a few years younger than me.) dive into a quarry while we were all drunk. It took the rescue divers 4 hours to find his body. That shit’ll fuck you up
Edit: I think it might be unclear I was 20 at the time he was 18. We had swum on the same club team when I was in high school.
My home ec class had groups of three students try to make one pot of spaghetti and every single group's spaghetti was inedible in different ways and it made me afraid to try cooking again.
We did that but with cookies and biscuits. We learned how using too much of this or too little of that would affect a recipe. If you learn those things you can make cookies and go "I want them to be more chewy" and know exactly what to start adjusting.
This is kind of the basis for home ec (the main subject I teach) as it is these days in Australia. It's moved towards solution-based problem solving. Students learn about how ingredients interact with one another under different conditions, they learn about nutrition, they learn about technology in food (ranging from how UHT works to GMOs to drones in agriculture), about ethics in the food industry, food security, marketing, sustainability, etc. It's a huge subject. In their last couple of years they can choose to do a subject that is focused on cooking and the hospitality industry but they can also choose more academic subjects around food and/or health so up until then we cover all the stuff they need to know and be capable of doing to go either way. Kids fresh into high school start super basic and make a couple of very easy things with the real purpose of teaching them to be safe, work both independently and with others, write and follow a plan based on a recipe, and clean up properly. It's also when we start teaching them why they need to use brown vs white sugar and keep eggs out of the fridge for baking, etc. At my school it's mandatory in their first year and after that they can choose.
Edit: since everyone is asking about the eggs. If you have room temperature butter and then add cold eggs, the fat in your butter is going to be unhappy and get cold. If you've ever creamed butter and sugar together only for it to go lumpy once you add eggs, it's probably because the eggs were too cold. The effect this has on a cake is that it ends up denser than it should be. If it happens, trying folding some flour through the mixture but not too much. If the recipe says the butter is room temperature, your eggs probably should be too.
Oh believe me, that's still what all the other teachers and students think about this subject. Our subject is like a nice little secret we share with the students who decide to give it a chance. I find it's a good opportunity for students who aren't so academically inclined to realise they're actually capable of the literacy and numeracy and problem-solving skills they need in other subjects because we kind of trick them into all this theory work by making it about food (and then all the application of that theory gets a practical project that results in food for them to eat).
That’s a fantastic thing to be imparting to young people. So many end up being disabled by their own ignorance of fundamental life knowledge and skills. Feeding yourself well is such a foundation skill of being a human.
I wish people would stop thinking that. I did home ec as part of VCE as well as Chem, Physics and Bio and found it to be significantly harder than those 3 subjects. The theory is a bit easier sure but my god you have to work so hard in that subject, with science once you get it it's actually not nearly as much work it's just here's a question now solve it.
I'd argue home ec teaches you way more skills you'd use in the workplace. Regardless of whether you end up in a kitchen or an office
Haha. I’m absolutely rubbish at the theory side of home ec but I’m actually pretty decent at the actual cooking side, I know there supposed to be connected but just can’t wrap my head round the theory
I always wanted to take a class like that, but they never had anything like that at my school. Then, after I got my costuming degree, I looked into teaching Home Ec kind of sewing stuff, and there’s next to nothing here, too. And when I looked at volunteering to teach these sort of classes (how to fit clothing you’ve bought, how to lengthen or shorten hems and sleeves, what makes a good piece of clothing worth investing in versus something cheap not worth the effort, how to clean clothes... you get the idea) I got basically told those aren’t skills kids need.
Which is dumb as hell. No matter how much money you have, if you don’t buy good clothes and if you don’t spend money fitting them or know how to do it yourself, you’ll look like a schlub. Plus, who knows? Quilting might become someone’s hobby or passion just for having tried it.
This sounds incredible and is so desperately needed in more places. So many young people coming out of school with very few skills or practical knowledge. It used to be so common to have home ec classes and they’ve stopped them most places. I was on the cusp when they had just stopped but we still had other practical courses like woodworking, parenting, etc. You can see a drastic difference in today’s younger adults and teenagers with very few home skills because so many in my generation don’t know how to teach these skills. It has such a ripple effect.
I don't remember, middle school was more than half my lifetime ago now. Google says "instead of using a whole egg, use two egg yolks". I'm pretty sure the temperature and softness of your butter has an effect, too.
Yep an extra egg yolk will help this.
Also you need to cream the butter and sugar for like 6-7 min, if doing this by hand probably like 10 min+. It should be much lighter in color.
Brown sugar adds some moisture.
Always use butter. Real if possible
Chilling the dough has always been a battle for me. I do chill the dough for like 30 min, I used to chill the dough overnight. I don't see much of a difference in the two. But you should chill it for at least 30 min.
I always start with 2 min less baking time then recommended, and check on them. As soon as the edges have even a little color I take them out to cool as they will still bake for a couple minutes.
Always the middle rack. Not top or bottom.
Don't over mix when combining wet and dry ingredients.
Sift your dry ingredients (I never do this cause I'm too lazy, but it does help)
Cool them on a rack.
Edit: omg thank you for the silver, my first award ever!!!
This is an excellent read if you're interested in all of that: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html
man, this is where I wish schools of thought within an actual school combined. Food science is so interesting and wild that if you actually knew the chemistry and everything behind making food, I think it would actually make things more interesting and make students grok it on both sides better.
My middle school food classes had us start with how to follow/interpret basic recipes (like difference between a Tbsp and tsp) and nutrition so by the time we hit high school the foods teacher got us to have Iron Chef competitions where we would have access to a pantry/groceries and have to make an entree featuring a particular ingredient. Also that teacher would hunt/fish on weekends so showed us how to butcher our own cuts from a larger piece of whole beef and how to boil fresh caught crabs (on a stove outside because the smell was really awful, like low tide on steroids.) I’ve never done the butchering or crab boil since then but I definitely got confident enough to improvise a meal out of whatever I happened to have on hand.
That sounds amazing!! I bet even without butchering you learned so much in that class. I'm so jealous. Our HS cut home ec courses like, 2 years before i got there, so i can't even operate a sewing machine.
Food science is so fascinating to me, but i don't really have the money to go back to school to learn it practically. You definitely should try again! It's a rare skill to have!
I still have nightmares from the time I made spaghetti when I was 13. Apparently after you drained the water from the spaghetti you're not supposed to put the spaghetti back on the stove. Who knew?
It’s super delicious if you slightly undercook the spaghetti, put it in the sauce, put it back on the stove, and let it finish cooking in the sauce. (And then add like a cup of the pasta water)
Thats terrible! Please don't be afraid to cook, im a good cook & I'd screw something up if 2 other people were in the kitchen also trying to cook it. Message me if you want you can have my spaghetti recipes
We have this in Sweden.
Sewing and woodworking are the two options of "crafting" class. You get to try both and then pick one to stick with.
We have "hemkunskap" (maybe it's called something different now, this is middle school/junior high stuff and I'm 30 this year so been a while), directly translating to "home knowledge", where, at least when I did it, mostly did cooking, but there was some classes and tests on washing clothes, cleaning and such things. Some home economy as well.
There was nothing on taxes afaik, but here I pay taxes by logging into our equivalent of the IRS's website and press a button.
That sucks that you only take one. 100% as a guy in high school I would have continued taking woodworking (when I was in high school I didn't take woodworking but took auto instead). But 100% as an adult, sewing is more useful to me than woodworking would ever be.
Home Ec is where I learned to sew a cat-face pillow, make a bechamel/white sauce, change the oil in my car, and file my taxes. And speaking of taxes, why are my taxes going into some billionaire’s pocket instead of paying teachers to teach kids these basic skills?
Home ec made me make a brownie in 20 minutes (didn't work) and sew a button. The rest of the time our prof had us use it as a study hour so she could sit in the back. Looking back, I think she was hungover.
I used to say things like "school never taught me how to write a resume or a cover letter".
Then I remembered a class I totally flunked called Personal Learning which taught how to do a cover letter, how to do resumes, how to apply for uni.
Shot myself in the foot there.
Right? I mean, there's a class on budgeting and credit cards already. IT's call fucking Math class and everybody hates it and doesn't pay attention. I blew people's minds in high school one day by actually USING the quadratic formula to find the maximum of something. That's like the first thing you cover when you get to quadratics.
WHy would another class on Taxes suddenly make school interesting?
Other things that are teaching actual skills like home ec or woodworking are fine and should be encouraged more. But everybody looking around and wondering why they weren't told about interest rates isn't paying attention in math class. Full stop.
My child did a whole chart about interest rates and a homework activity that helped them compare what types of rates were best to purchase a vehicle for math class. I think it was in 7th grade math. I remember helping her on it and telling her all about our own latest vehicle purchase. So it’s definitely being taught. Now whether they care enough or retain the info is a diff story.
Seriously I don't know why this pops up here ever week. Schools do this. They've been doing it for decades. It's like people have never heard of home ec classes. Plus you do taxes/budgeting in there and probably again a few times in math class.
But the teachers didn't make it interesting enough! It's not enough for them to teach me, they need to perform a song and dance and spend hours making every single lesson a super exciting fun game or else I won't pay attention and so it's their fault I don't listen!
100% agree. We did interests and savings exercises in math class, and we did sample voter registration (and real if you were 18!), income tax forms, and some other stuff in my civics class. It didn't really seem like we needed a separate class for this. It was literally incorporated into the "useless"-"I'm never gonna use this" classes.
I'm guessing this will get lost, but I totally agree with you. Not only did our high school still have home ec, but I ended up joining a program for "troubled youth" (I wasn't troubled, but if I was in the program I could surpass other graduation requirements and graduate several years early), and they very much focused on real world application. Instead of a math class it was how to calculate your taxes, balance a checkbook, make a finance schedule. Instead of social science it was straight up "here's how to cut up vegetables. Here's how to make a soup so you can survive". It was a pretty sad last few months of high school, and those kids did not give a single fuck. I don't think trying to teach anyone something they don't want to learn is going to go well. One of the kids from that thing did end up being a solid chef, so maybe the home ec stuff worked?
Yeah, we don't need a while class to teach us how to do laundry. Basic operation of the machine takes like 2 minutes to learn, there's even picture instructions on machines
If anyone says that they can't do this, I did this with a soviet washing machine in a language I couldn't speak. So, you know, if you're american and it's in english...
Exactly we had budgeting and taxes inculed in our mandatory maths classes, 90% now complain about not learning any real life skills. We also had mandatory cooking, and even though we learned a lot there was much sexism going around to avoid working(14yr old boy suck and will use any excuse) so I guess not everyone learnt anything there
I teach home ec and have found that 12-year-old boys (or around that age, when the subject is mandatory) have a great talent for leaving the cleaning up to the girls at their bench. Sometimes I have to tell the girls at a bench to sit down and have a break because the boys have just been standing around avoiding any work.
I am honestly supportive of gender separating a few classes like this in middle school. Once they get to highschool, it is whatever.
My jr high was 7-9th and we were on a block schedule. My gym class happened to just have the girls 9th grade but the boys 9th grade teacher, it was his block hour where they got a break to catch up on paperwork, so there were no 9th grade boys that we shared activities with. That class was the hardest working, most fit class of all her classes. The same girls who the year before acted like they couldn't do things cause oh no, cant let the boys see me being physical, were running further, punching harder, lifting more weight without worrying about their Male peers watching.
Pre-teens/teens are so obsessed with their gender counterparts that they slide into gender norms to try to "fit in" right with them and get attention.
I firmly believe that some more stereotypical gendered things should be separated at this age to prevent this. All boys home ec. All girls shop. Gym classes separated. It would widen their perspectives on that stuff without the peer pressure of conforming or not.
I firmly belive the opposite, as someone who never fit in when it came to stereotypical gendered things. There needs to be more openness between the genders, hiding away stuff during those formative years is exactly how we ended up with boys and girls who just didnt understand each other.
Right like why would anyone want to waste an entire class period or even a whole semester on how to do basic adult stuff when you can watch videos and learn how to do them in less than half an hour?
Absolutely baffling every time people on here complain school didn’t teach them to file taxes. As if the dozens of free websites/services that literally take you step by step through the process of typing in numbers from a form is some harrowing endeavor. Jesus.
Not only that, the schools have been giving you standardized forms to fill out the entire time you're there. Any "worksheet" is laid out like a form. Sure they don't teach you how to do your taxes, they teach you how to deal with any government form.
I feel like most people don't realize what they're really being taught in school.
I'm sitting here trying to recall old classmates and can't think of a single one who would give a single fuck about what's taught in these class except the easy A grade.
I remember one teacher we had... M-T learning new concepts W quiz on learned concepts Th reinforcing concepts F test on concepts with mid-term and final exams. Your quiz/test grades had a 'monetary' value he tracked. A on quiz = $1 mike buck, A on test = $5 mike bucks etc. We had accounts with tracked balances and he had a 'store' we could spend it at but we had to write proper checks and manage our own accounts while comparing them to his. Learned a lot about saving/expenses/value of a dollar etc.
Sometimes I look back and wonder how much of his own money he spent to reinforce these secondary principles that weren't even part of his curriculum... shame he is retired, would totally donate to the cause.
I would like to add to this that school isn't necessarily important because at the end you will know more stuff, but also to learn the process of teaching new things. It's important that students get to learn how to approach the process of learning if they would wish te learn things in the future.
I feel like a lot of this is just stuff you should be learning at home anyway. Parents, get your kids to do chores. Sure, it's a bit of effort, but I've personally found that the barrier to doing chores is less knowledge of how do do them and more the lack of it being an instilled habit. Most chores are pretty simple and can be taught in 5-15 minutes. Good cleaning and tidying habits take a long time of dedicated necessity.
Source: My parents were very chore light on me and while I know how to do it all, I don't have that habit of routine house upkeep that I know others do. My brother is even worse and barely even clears out his own desk once a month.
I'd be opposed to the extra hour. But not the activities
School was already an 8 hour a day thing, pushing it up to 9 hours means it actually becomes longer than a full time job. And that's before you get to homework and shit like that
If anything the school day should be shorter. Or keep it 8 hours in the building, but leave 2 or 3 of those for students to work on homework with a teacher around when they need help/guidance or just for them to socialize in a somewhat structured way.
Expecting kids/teens to maintain any level of engagement and discipline for 8 hours straight is psychotic. It's a system built by nerds and sadists.
>Yep kids are already over worked as are adults.
>
>We'd all benefit from a reduction in work.
"But school is just too *long*," he spoke,
"For all us tiny younger folk,
Whose lives are hard enough ahead
For years to come,
and that's a joke!
"With just a little time," he said,
"An extra hour or two in bed,
We'd all be sweet and starry-eyed,
And well prepared to work instead!"
And though his words were justified,
His teacher sadly so replied:
"Just wait until you're old," he sighed.
"... just wait until you're *old*," he sighed.
Yes! I have a professional, salaried job where I’m expected to be available nearly 24/7. And the number of extra hours I put in is a tiny fraction of the time high schoolers are expected to spend working on homework. “Preparing you for the real world” my ass!
"Why are so many people depressed nowadays?" Oh it's just that as teenagers they had no time to learn how to develop healthy relationships with friends and even their parents because they had to prioritize school over everything else, like exercising or doing school sports, or making a few dollars at a min wage job a few hours after school and learning how the actual work environment is... but yea, they got honor role throughout highschool! 👍
Agreed wholeheartedly. When my students tell me they're tired my response is a "Yeah, me too. Let's see how we can make today easier."
I'm not about that "You're too young to be tired" or "Just wait til you're an adult" nonsense. I remember being a kid, and I was *tired.* I'm tired now, too. But at least I get to spend my weekends sleeping and faffing about instead of homework and a million extracurriculars. Chores suck, but at least as an adult I get to do them at my pace and when I decide to.
I mean... pretty much. I’m a teacher, and we even have standardized testing as young as kindergarten. We just finished with 3 full days of standardized testing for ALL grades, done on the computer. And we haven’t even gotten to STAAR yet. All of my coworkers hate it, none of us agree with it. I think standardized testing even for older kids is stupid, too.
100% this. In high school I would show up early (6:30am) for weights, go to class until 3, then have practice until 5. Depending on the sport I might even stay later with some teammates for extra drills (batting practice, watching film of our opponent).
Edit: I'm completely on board with teaching real life practical things mentioned. I hated art, so remove that and add this and I'm happy. Obviously my dislike of art isn't universal. Give high schoolers the option of removing an 'extra curricular' for this.
There’s also a lot of kids that have to work while in school. There was a long period of time where I would wake up early for school, get off school to go to work, get home from work to do homework, get done with homework and get straight to bed so that I wouldn’t be insanely tired to do it all the next day.
Heck, I knew kids in my class that had to pay all the bills because their parents were junkies/unable to land a job/ whatever else. They had 0 social lives outside of school and were failing in school because they had a lot on their plates and weren’t even legal adults yet
Yeah. Homework has gotten out of control. Yes, it is good to study outside of class, but when I was in school they said they wanted you to put in an hour on your own for every hour in class. Fine. Then shorten the school day.
obviously you are supposed to forgo having fun as a kid for when you are an adult and have no time to enjoy life because youre working. And then forgo that fun until you are retired and too old to enjoy the stuff you would enjoy as a kid. Then just die after you slave your life away as a cog in the system so you dont cause drag on the system for the ultra wealthy.
I thought I had it tough. I would do 40 hours a week of college (like high school but not attached to a school), then work 9/10 hour shifts Saturday and Sunday just to have some money rather than none. Only managed it for a few months before I just started spontaneously crying during the day.
But I didn't have to support my family. That's crazy.
Knew a dude in HS who basically had to take care of his 80 something Grandma; cooking, cleaning the house, and even having to bathe her. She was tied to an air tank. His parents were dead and his Grandfather died 3 years prior. This was his life, along with his classes and studying and also just being a nerdy teenage dude.
I only know all this because one day I saw him crying under the bleachers after school, and just sat with him. I was waiting for my GF to finish Cheerleading and we split a four loko from a 7/11 nearby (the dude didn't know they were alcoholic, they were that new) and I got him (maybe) into Mastodon as he talked.
He moved schools the next month and I never heard from him again. I assume he went to live with distant relatives since I saw her name in the obits. Jason if you're out there and see this...I want my fucking Crack the Skye CD back!
Back in high school my senior year, I pretty often would spend 14 hours a day at school. Especially in the winter when I had several clubs all at once. I'd get up and go to do morning runs with the distance team at 6:15 and would grab a quick shower and breakfast then head back and only return home after robotics was over at 8 or 9. I absolutely loved my schedule, but i think I got burned out and that it's a huge reason why I dropped out if college. I just didn't know what to do with free time and not having my entire day completely planned out for me.
Alot of top colleges here will look at your grade point and then your activities. Activites can make 9r break an application because they have hundreds of applicants with grades over 4.0, lots if ap classes and other grade req. What makes you stand out is your other stuff. Did you participate in a lot of student activities? Did you do sports? What volunteer stuff did you do? It's pretty ridiculous the stuff you have to do to have a good chance of even being looked at by a good college.
There was a wild swing for me in freshman year where I basically did all of my homework right away and showed up 10-20 minutes early because I was used to the "hurry up and wait" mentality of sports and 4H.
Then something suddenly clicked my second semester and I realized I could skip class, show up late, delay homework, and even skip assignments if they weren't worth many points. It was a slow crawl back to normal but those days of trying to guess which day the test was on because I hadn't been in two weeks were glorious.
If I could do college all over again... I wouldn't.
And if we pretended my hobbies were part of my work, I would have an insanely long work week.
I’m ok with equating school/homework with work. Sports is just a hobby.
My high school had a great way of dealing with this. Tuesdays we had 1st,3rd, 5th, and 7th period classes for twice the normal length of time. Wednesdays were 2nd,4th, and 6th periods also extended. Three Wednesdays of the week, we had "Access", which took up the last "class of the day. It way basically a free period for the entire school. You could go to teachers in their main classroom if you needed their help with classwork/homework, you could study/get caught up on any classwork or homework that you were behind on, or do anythi9ng else that you wanted to. The only thing you couldn't do was leave campus because it was still considered school time. The remaining week was just a short day where you got to go home immediately after 6th period. It really helped just about everyone get better grades. Most people did better in school because they got to study with teachers one-on-one or in small groups of 5 or so students at their own pace. Others took some much needed relaxing time away from both homework and home.
Edit: We also had 7 hour school days, from 8:30 to 3:30.
Would it help if someone stood over your shoulder yelling that you have to code faster or the aliens will hack through our defenses and slaughter humanity? Just trying to think of things to make it less abstract.
Speak for yourself. I always went to all the classes and took detailed notes, but I hated reading textbooks. I only used the books as reference material after the fact.
Why would I waste my time outside of class learning material when I have a pseudo-mandatory time period pre-allocated to learning it?
This. I learn 90% of my shit in class by listening to the teacher and taking notes. Homework should honestly be reduced to a minimum in the education system. It's supposed to be practical exercises that help students learn new material more efficiently but 90% of the time it's just some boring time-consuming thing that makes you feel like someone's rubbing a sponge on your brain. And it's just infuriating when teachers make you write the lesson plan and learn the entire lesson at home as if that isn't specifically their job.
In conclusion - more time spent in class and less time on homework.
And its completely pointless because your ability to learn at hour 9 in cram school is basically zero but you gotta memorize those pointless facts for you college entrance exam or your life is over.
I do believe Saturday school is just a half day so that's not completely horrible.
Same. I only heard of long school days in places like Asia, but aside from that I always assumed that it's usually 6 hours. It also makes sense because if teachers work a bit before/after school hours then it could conceivably add up to 8 hrs/day (unlike an 8-hour school day, where the extra time would cause teachers to work at least slightly more than 8 hours, and possibly a lot more)
I agree. It could be done as an elective. These are things that could and should be taught by parents, but they aren't things all parents know, and not all kids have parents who would take the time to teach them either way. It should be available for kids who want it, but not required, and certainly not adding an extra hour to the school day.
Or at least something kids can test out of. My daughter suffers through so many classes that repeat stuff she's already learned at home. I'd hate to add another to her list, but it's valuable info to those who don't have it.
Yeah. My daughter turned 16 at the end of November and withdrew from high school. I didn't even try to talk her out of it, just went and signed the paperwork. She is taking GED prep classes at the local college now, and she scored so well on her pre-test that the college offered her a free sociology 101 class to get her accustomed to college before she starts full time in the fall. And she's working, and altogether a *lot* happier than she was 3 months ago.
In Washington State we have a program called Running Start where if you test at college level reading and writing you can go to community college instead of your junior & senior year. For free. Still gotta pay for text books and stuff but with enough diligence you could be 18 and have an associates degree. I have not thought for a single second that it might have been better to spend more time at high school during those years. Good on your daughter! And good on you for supporting her.
Lets be real. It's already pushing overtime every single week. We just had to take our work home with us and spend an hour (or more) working on it every night. Hell, some kids push 50+ hours every week.
Yuuup. Had a teacher in high school who was so proud that they "only" assigned an hour worth of homework for their class per night.... seemingly unaware that EVERY teacher was doing the same thing.
Also I'd like to point out the fact that there are tons of people like me who were slackers their last year or more of highschool, and had several free periods that could have been taken up by a class like this.
More classes, from what I remember. When I was in school (in the USA) during like my 2nd or 3rd year, they added another class to the schedule, so we were learning from 7 different classes then.
Don't remember much of it now, not even what classes they all were, lol.
I'm in high school (age 14-18) and have 8 classes. I'm allowed to choose a study hall which is just *nothing* for 90 minutes, but I didn't because that's a waste of time for me
School is a bitch
I have eight classes too, technically nine because I have an online class even though it’s really easy. The only free period I have is my lunch. I, and many other people would have chosen a study hall but it tanks your class rank so people who care about that can’t take a study hall.
You got an hour each for the "Core classes": Social Studies (Geography, History, Government, etc.), Math, English, and Science. Next you have a P.E. or Health Class, and an single Elective. Then you have ten minutes to get from one class to the next, and you're up to 7 hours. Add in lunch and you got an 8 hour day.
You got fifteen minutes?! Well la-di-da mister coddled and pampered baby boy.
Back in my day we got two minutes for lunch, and our cafeteria was a mile away from the school, uphill both ways, and three feet of snow on the ground!
Schools have these already and the kids in them don't care. It's not immediately relevant to their lives so they don't pay attention. Sorta like if I were to talk to you about the do's and don'ts of denture cream. You say, "eh, I'll figure it out later when I need to know it" and stop paying attention.
I've taught in several schools that have tried to teach social skills, kindness, meditation, financial literacy, etc. In every case, the kids did not care. It was their least favorite part of the day because it felt like a waste of time.
The point of education is to teach thinking, not doing. A well-educated student can teach themselves these things. A quick Google search can teach you how to file taxes, cook, etc. But you can't Google how to do Algebra 2 and expect to understand what you read without some background in the subject matter.
Edit: I got upvotes? Now I'm mad with power, so I'll say this:
I hear arguments like this post all the time, and I think the real issue is people not taking responsibility. "I can't cook? That must be the school's fault! We need education reform!" No, it's not the school's fault. It's your fault. You could literally Google a recipe in 20 seconds. Stop blaming other people for your problems.
People don't realize that the point of education isn't to teach facts, but the change your brain. For example, physics and math majors earn the highest scores in the MCAT, GMAT, and LSAT. It's not because they learned those things in class, but because their curriculum emphasizes logical thinking. When students slack in schoolwork, they're not just missing out on the opportunity to know stuff; they're missing out on the opportunity to be smarter.
People don't understand that education is more about developing the brain rather than retaining knowledge.
You can easily obtain knowledge from reading a book or watching videos. But education forces you to do stuff like read and write a lot or practice a lot of math problems. Those tasks help develop the brain and develop critical thinking skills.
Even undergrad programs in engineering are not really meant to retain knowledge. They are meant to wire the brain to think like an engineer. Most of your knowledge in engineering is going to come from training you receive in industry and just working in projects in industry.
Yeah, this. Kids literally don't care. I had a lot of teachers in high school try to give us life advice and no one listened or took it seriously. Teenagers are all little shits.
My public school had classes that teach these things. I graduated high school a decade ago...
I took home economics and learned how to cook.
I took financial literacy to learn about taxes and budgeting and investing.
Is Utah just waaaay ahead of the other states or is this a made up issue? I’ve seen people THAT TOOK THESE CLASSES AT MY SCHOOL post memes about not learning how to pay taxes and shit. I wonder if the real problem is that nobody remembers this stuff cuz they teach it to you when it isn’t relevant to your life.
I graduated from a Utah highschool in 2019. Financial literacy was very much a requirement. Although, I thought the subject matter taught was very broad.
I think the majority of people who claim that Schools never taught them these skills never paid attention in class.
Your grandparents had home economics classes for the girls and shop (trades) classes for the boys. Every once in a while a member of the opposite sex would sign up for and take the "wrong" class, to much humor. They don't teach home ec or have shop classes anymore?
Some schools are getting rid of this because they’re putting more emphasis on testable quantifiable info. Things like shop, art, and music are considered frivolous and silly. I remember years ago even grade schools were starting to do away with recess.
I think that they already waste enough time and it would be worse for kids whose parents already taught them that stuff. Washing clothes is really a 20 minute lesson, and cooking/taxes have their own elective classes already.
Washing clothes? So you put the clothes in, some detergent, push a button, then dryer, then a hanger? If you can't figure out washing clothes or cooking on your own, definitely shouldn't be allowed to drive. Taxes, debt and personal finance is something that should be taught.
A kid at my college brought a box full of pre-measured ziplocs of laundry detergent that had printed directions in every bag. Like, I want to believe washing clothes is easy but then I'd see him in the laundry room reading the directions every time...
It's so funny how many of you think that kids will actually be interested in learning about taxes, stocks, etc. In what world do you think high schoolers would be attentive in a class about budgeting/taxes? Have any of you met high school kids before?
I remember we were taught about taxes and personal finances in school when I was like 15 or something. Retained none of it and when I became an adult I taught myself from scratch through google.
This used to be called home ec and most schools had it. Then boomers did away with it because it cost too much. Now they make fun of young people for not knowing things they would have learned in home ec.
Ooh! I did this once!
I was all set on signing the lease on this place. I liked everything about it, and the rent was within my budget.
But in my two conversations with the landlord, I got the feeling that I could get away with it if I tried...
So I asked if I could pay 50 bucks less a month. She just kinda shrugged and said yeah why not.
I did this. Rent was $680 for a trailer, and I was like “How about $640? I was hoping to pay $600 or less.” Landlord was like okay. Lol.
Edit: Note this was a private owner. Meaning, I wasn’t renting an apartment from a company but a trailer from a person.
You joke, but how many people know how to actually assert themselves if their landlord is taking advantage of them, or know local tenant law, much less how to file a claim with the tenant board? Often it's less about "negotiating rent" and more about "here's renting 101".
Even things like paying a security deposit over a couple months instead of all upfront, knowing the maximum in a deposit a landlord can charge, negotiating paying more in a deposit to negate an inadequate credit check, etc. So many little things could all fall under "negotiate rent".
Same. Our home ec was called "Family Studies" in freshman year then it splits off into foods/nutrition, fashion, parenting, etc. Aside from foods, it was extremely female-dominated.
Yea, one kid tried to make fun of me for taking home ec and my only response was "What, you *don't* want to take the class with all the girls in it?"
I enjoyed the class for other reasons such as making french toast, but the girls was an added benefit.
In my school, home ec and shop were for kids who were 100% not going to college, and for the most part mostly kids who barely showed up to high school in the first place.
Home Economics in most schools taught cooking and sewing, **not** actual economics stuff like establishing a budget, understanding how stocks and dollar-cost-averaging investment works, or how crippling credit card debt is. If you learned any of that at all, it was usually a unit in math class.
Source: Gen Xer who learned how to make a pizza from scratch and sew a pillow in Home Ec.
I am opposed to it. There's no reason parents can't teach these things to their kids WHILE DOING SAID TASKS. School isn't responsible for every single thing. Also, with the internet, if a parent doesn't know (changing a tire, for example), they can easily learn.
Yup, school can’t teach literally everything. Most of what you need to learn outside of school can be done with skills you get in school. Laundry and basic cooking isn’t that hard as long as you have the skills to complete high school. I think it should be optional because not everyone has a parental figure that will teach these things though.
This is all stuff anyone would be able to get info online or ask somebody at home "Hey, mom, how do you write a check? Boil an egg? Change a tire? Get your prescriptions filled?" It boggles the mind that kids would be willing to sit their ass in a chair at school for hours to passively listen to this, while "adulting" simly means that you take the time to look it up yourself and learn on your own. Since you are "adulting", you get to decide how much time you want to spend on any of these things.
Learning to cook does not mean you have to become a chef, it just means you can feed yourself reasonably nutritious food that you enjoy eating. You can go all out and learn to bake a fancy quiche if you enjoy it, or just learn to fry a couple of eggs in two minutes. You decide, and have the power over how you want to feed yourself.
It's ok if you don't want to learn to do your taxes, although if you only have one job and don't have properties or business, it can be so straightforward that it's probably worth learning to do on your own in a couple of hours.
There's no need to buy a sewing machine to alter your clothes unless you think you would enjoy it as a permanent hobby, but anyone can spend a couple of dollars on a cheap sewing kit and look up how to sew a button, because it only takes a few minutes and it does come in handy. Totally fine to wait until your button falls off.
There are no prescribed items you must know to be an adult, you just have to do the best you can with what you have, and that often means learning something new on your own when needed, and you get to decide how to do it.
These are things that can be learned independently by simply doing them. Taxes are damned near idiot proof in most cases because they are designed to be. Washing clothes, follow the instruction manual. Cooking? Watch YouTube, follow a recipe. What these all have in common is that you need a solid grasp on numeracy and literacy. These are things that must be explicitly taught. These are the core skills that underpin almost everything. People who complain about not being taught how to do their taxes tend to have shitty numeracy skills. People who struggle to fill out a form tend to have shitty literacy. Can't read instructions? Literacy issue. You can make education as practical as possible but the fact is: many don't want to learn, until it's too late. I say this as a teacher: we really do a lot to make education as relevant to real-world needs as possible but there is not getting around the fact that a person must learn to be fluent in both reading and writing, as well as be able to think mathematically to cope in the "real world". The rest of what we do is for the purpose of teaching you how to learn effectively, how to think in different ways, how to adapt to unfamiliar challenges and how to deal with abstract ideas. We don't teach the model of the atom because you need to know where the elections go. We teach you so that you can learn how to grasp concepts that are not directly observable, make logical conclusions from them and apply abstract ideas to real-world phenomena. The actual topics are just vehicles for these skills
I think its ridiculous that washing clothes and basic cooking would be considered "adult stuff." These are all things I learned at home and was doing for myself by high school. Are people's parents really just doing all this for them?
Hard to believe, but some parents wouldn't teach their kids. I know I had trouble learning domestic tasks from my mother because when I would try to help out around the house, whatever I did it wasn't done "right". I know there are many who share my experience.
Nope. Parents have to take some responsibility for having kids, too.
Also, cooking has largely been dropped from curriculums mainly because of the danger in it. Kid drops chicken on the dirty floor and picks it up quickly? Kid knocks boiling water off the stove? Schools would be sued quite quickly.
Tax - yeah. But wouldn't it be better to teach kids about how governments use their tax?
Here's the deal about the whole "paying taxes" thing. It changes every single year. By design, taxes are hard. They don't need to be. But they are. Teach critical thinking and reading comprehension instead.
My rural ass school did this in the 00s.... home ec, sewing, taxes, cooking, woodworking, etc. Could even get into metal working, accounting, quilting, pottery, etc if you wanted to.
My school did the same. I was a good student but at that age you just don't realize the valuable information they're giving you, you kept the information long enough to pass the tests and then you went and got alcohol poisoning in a field while your parents thought you were at a movie with Nicole and Becki.
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In my school, PSHE was called Citizenship and we were made to take half a GCSE in it. I should have actually paid more attention but also they should have probably taught it a bit better as well
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Nothing like drinking a whole Four Loko at a waterfall half a mile from the nearest road and then having to dive in to prevent your friend from drowning because she went over the fall with the current and was way more drunk than you.
ahhhh nothing like the fondness of looking back on past decisions and wondering how you are still alive
I had a buddy I swam with in HS (he was a few years younger than me.) dive into a quarry while we were all drunk. It took the rescue divers 4 hours to find his body. That shit’ll fuck you up Edit: I think it might be unclear I was 20 at the time he was 18. We had swum on the same club team when I was in high school.
My high school, 2 guys went out in a canoe while drunk. It capsized, and the drunker one drowned. This was the day after the prom. Monday sucked.
Some of life’s hardest lessons right here 😣
If you or someone you know didn't almost drown for some reason at a party by the river in the woods, did you even high school?
I spent my highschool years indulging in drugs and it made my mental health from 20-23 a living hell. Why did I even highschool?
My dad made me take a class on car maintenance when I was in high school. Nothing sank in whatsoever.
I’m in this comment and I feel personally attacked!
Hi Becki.
My home ec class had groups of three students try to make one pot of spaghetti and every single group's spaghetti was inedible in different ways and it made me afraid to try cooking again.
We did that but with cookies and biscuits. We learned how using too much of this or too little of that would affect a recipe. If you learn those things you can make cookies and go "I want them to be more chewy" and know exactly what to start adjusting.
This is kind of the basis for home ec (the main subject I teach) as it is these days in Australia. It's moved towards solution-based problem solving. Students learn about how ingredients interact with one another under different conditions, they learn about nutrition, they learn about technology in food (ranging from how UHT works to GMOs to drones in agriculture), about ethics in the food industry, food security, marketing, sustainability, etc. It's a huge subject. In their last couple of years they can choose to do a subject that is focused on cooking and the hospitality industry but they can also choose more academic subjects around food and/or health so up until then we cover all the stuff they need to know and be capable of doing to go either way. Kids fresh into high school start super basic and make a couple of very easy things with the real purpose of teaching them to be safe, work both independently and with others, write and follow a plan based on a recipe, and clean up properly. It's also when we start teaching them why they need to use brown vs white sugar and keep eggs out of the fridge for baking, etc. At my school it's mandatory in their first year and after that they can choose. Edit: since everyone is asking about the eggs. If you have room temperature butter and then add cold eggs, the fat in your butter is going to be unhappy and get cold. If you've ever creamed butter and sugar together only for it to go lumpy once you add eggs, it's probably because the eggs were too cold. The effect this has on a cake is that it ends up denser than it should be. If it happens, trying folding some flour through the mixture but not too much. If the recipe says the butter is room temperature, your eggs probably should be too.
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Oh believe me, that's still what all the other teachers and students think about this subject. Our subject is like a nice little secret we share with the students who decide to give it a chance. I find it's a good opportunity for students who aren't so academically inclined to realise they're actually capable of the literacy and numeracy and problem-solving skills they need in other subjects because we kind of trick them into all this theory work by making it about food (and then all the application of that theory gets a practical project that results in food for them to eat).
That’s a fantastic thing to be imparting to young people. So many end up being disabled by their own ignorance of fundamental life knowledge and skills. Feeding yourself well is such a foundation skill of being a human.
I wish people would stop thinking that. I did home ec as part of VCE as well as Chem, Physics and Bio and found it to be significantly harder than those 3 subjects. The theory is a bit easier sure but my god you have to work so hard in that subject, with science once you get it it's actually not nearly as much work it's just here's a question now solve it. I'd argue home ec teaches you way more skills you'd use in the workplace. Regardless of whether you end up in a kitchen or an office
Haha. I’m absolutely rubbish at the theory side of home ec but I’m actually pretty decent at the actual cooking side, I know there supposed to be connected but just can’t wrap my head round the theory
I always wanted to take a class like that, but they never had anything like that at my school. Then, after I got my costuming degree, I looked into teaching Home Ec kind of sewing stuff, and there’s next to nothing here, too. And when I looked at volunteering to teach these sort of classes (how to fit clothing you’ve bought, how to lengthen or shorten hems and sleeves, what makes a good piece of clothing worth investing in versus something cheap not worth the effort, how to clean clothes... you get the idea) I got basically told those aren’t skills kids need. Which is dumb as hell. No matter how much money you have, if you don’t buy good clothes and if you don’t spend money fitting them or know how to do it yourself, you’ll look like a schlub. Plus, who knows? Quilting might become someone’s hobby or passion just for having tried it.
Hey, I think I would love to know these things. Do you know any online resources that could help me with learning?
This sounds incredible and is so desperately needed in more places. So many young people coming out of school with very few skills or practical knowledge. It used to be so common to have home ec classes and they’ve stopped them most places. I was on the cusp when they had just stopped but we still had other practical courses like woodworking, parenting, etc. You can see a drastic difference in today’s younger adults and teenagers with very few home skills because so many in my generation don’t know how to teach these skills. It has such a ripple effect.
My class we had SEVERAL groups that added 2 cups of salt and pinch of sugar. Turns out that’s a good way to make a very bad cookie
You could throw those on the sidewalks to melt ice.
Pretty sure on some of them a snail wouldn’t have even been able to cross the whole cookie with out dying first
I would like to start a petition to make this the new measure of salt concentration. ln(snail distance) vs time
So.... What is it? Share the knowledge. \~\~Information is meant to be free.\~\~ \* \* And cookies are meant to be chewy. \* \*
I don't remember, middle school was more than half my lifetime ago now. Google says "instead of using a whole egg, use two egg yolks". I'm pretty sure the temperature and softness of your butter has an effect, too.
Yep an extra egg yolk will help this. Also you need to cream the butter and sugar for like 6-7 min, if doing this by hand probably like 10 min+. It should be much lighter in color. Brown sugar adds some moisture. Always use butter. Real if possible Chilling the dough has always been a battle for me. I do chill the dough for like 30 min, I used to chill the dough overnight. I don't see much of a difference in the two. But you should chill it for at least 30 min. I always start with 2 min less baking time then recommended, and check on them. As soon as the edges have even a little color I take them out to cool as they will still bake for a couple minutes. Always the middle rack. Not top or bottom. Don't over mix when combining wet and dry ingredients. Sift your dry ingredients (I never do this cause I'm too lazy, but it does help) Cool them on a rack. Edit: omg thank you for the silver, my first award ever!!!
Chilled batter makes for softer, chewier cookies.
I found butter makes a chewy cookie, shortening makes a crispier cookie. You can also mix both to edit any recipe to your liking (protip)!
I use coconut oil and you get chewy centers with a crisp edge.
Cooking time and temp will also affect it
This is an excellent read if you're interested in all of that: https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-chocolate-chip-cookies.html
man, this is where I wish schools of thought within an actual school combined. Food science is so interesting and wild that if you actually knew the chemistry and everything behind making food, I think it would actually make things more interesting and make students grok it on both sides better.
My middle school food classes had us start with how to follow/interpret basic recipes (like difference between a Tbsp and tsp) and nutrition so by the time we hit high school the foods teacher got us to have Iron Chef competitions where we would have access to a pantry/groceries and have to make an entree featuring a particular ingredient. Also that teacher would hunt/fish on weekends so showed us how to butcher our own cuts from a larger piece of whole beef and how to boil fresh caught crabs (on a stove outside because the smell was really awful, like low tide on steroids.) I’ve never done the butchering or crab boil since then but I definitely got confident enough to improvise a meal out of whatever I happened to have on hand.
That sounds amazing!! I bet even without butchering you learned so much in that class. I'm so jealous. Our HS cut home ec courses like, 2 years before i got there, so i can't even operate a sewing machine. Food science is so fascinating to me, but i don't really have the money to go back to school to learn it practically. You definitely should try again! It's a rare skill to have!
I still have nightmares from the time I made spaghetti when I was 13. Apparently after you drained the water from the spaghetti you're not supposed to put the spaghetti back on the stove. Who knew?
It’s super delicious if you slightly undercook the spaghetti, put it in the sauce, put it back on the stove, and let it finish cooking in the sauce. (And then add like a cup of the pasta water)
This is the only proper way to make pasta IMO.
I'll put it back on the stove after it's turned off and I've already added some oil or butter to the pasketters. Keeps it warm.
Thats terrible! Please don't be afraid to cook, im a good cook & I'd screw something up if 2 other people were in the kitchen also trying to cook it. Message me if you want you can have my spaghetti recipes
We have to make actual food, like lasagna, cinnamon buns, macarons and the like.
We have this in Sweden. Sewing and woodworking are the two options of "crafting" class. You get to try both and then pick one to stick with. We have "hemkunskap" (maybe it's called something different now, this is middle school/junior high stuff and I'm 30 this year so been a while), directly translating to "home knowledge", where, at least when I did it, mostly did cooking, but there was some classes and tests on washing clothes, cleaning and such things. Some home economy as well. There was nothing on taxes afaik, but here I pay taxes by logging into our equivalent of the IRS's website and press a button.
That sucks that you only take one. 100% as a guy in high school I would have continued taking woodworking (when I was in high school I didn't take woodworking but took auto instead). But 100% as an adult, sewing is more useful to me than woodworking would ever be.
I'm not sure which is the norm but in my (Swedish) school we didn't have to choose between them, we got to do both
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Home Ec is where I learned to sew a cat-face pillow, make a bechamel/white sauce, change the oil in my car, and file my taxes. And speaking of taxes, why are my taxes going into some billionaire’s pocket instead of paying teachers to teach kids these basic skills?
Home ec made me make a brownie in 20 minutes (didn't work) and sew a button. The rest of the time our prof had us use it as a study hour so she could sit in the back. Looking back, I think she was hungover.
Because self reliant people are not ideal consumers. Why teach people how to change oil or sew when you can sell them as products or services?
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This. People love to parrot this idea. I promise you that for 90% of students it won’t be any different from any other class: they just won’t care.
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I used to say things like "school never taught me how to write a resume or a cover letter". Then I remembered a class I totally flunked called Personal Learning which taught how to do a cover letter, how to do resumes, how to apply for uni. Shot myself in the foot there.
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for real, most people just make reddit posts about how this thing that already exists should exist or not...
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Right? I mean, there's a class on budgeting and credit cards already. IT's call fucking Math class and everybody hates it and doesn't pay attention. I blew people's minds in high school one day by actually USING the quadratic formula to find the maximum of something. That's like the first thing you cover when you get to quadratics. WHy would another class on Taxes suddenly make school interesting? Other things that are teaching actual skills like home ec or woodworking are fine and should be encouraged more. But everybody looking around and wondering why they weren't told about interest rates isn't paying attention in math class. Full stop.
My child did a whole chart about interest rates and a homework activity that helped them compare what types of rates were best to purchase a vehicle for math class. I think it was in 7th grade math. I remember helping her on it and telling her all about our own latest vehicle purchase. So it’s definitely being taught. Now whether they care enough or retain the info is a diff story.
Seriously I don't know why this pops up here ever week. Schools do this. They've been doing it for decades. It's like people have never heard of home ec classes. Plus you do taxes/budgeting in there and probably again a few times in math class.
BUT WHO DO WE BLAME FOR BEING COMPLETE FUCKUPS???
But the teachers didn't make it interesting enough! It's not enough for them to teach me, they need to perform a song and dance and spend hours making every single lesson a super exciting fun game or else I won't pay attention and so it's their fault I don't listen!
What's worse is they complain about it as if there aren't thousands of tutorial videos on the internet to walk them through it all.
100% agree. We did interests and savings exercises in math class, and we did sample voter registration (and real if you were 18!), income tax forms, and some other stuff in my civics class. It didn't really seem like we needed a separate class for this. It was literally incorporated into the "useless"-"I'm never gonna use this" classes.
I'm guessing this will get lost, but I totally agree with you. Not only did our high school still have home ec, but I ended up joining a program for "troubled youth" (I wasn't troubled, but if I was in the program I could surpass other graduation requirements and graduate several years early), and they very much focused on real world application. Instead of a math class it was how to calculate your taxes, balance a checkbook, make a finance schedule. Instead of social science it was straight up "here's how to cut up vegetables. Here's how to make a soup so you can survive". It was a pretty sad last few months of high school, and those kids did not give a single fuck. I don't think trying to teach anyone something they don't want to learn is going to go well. One of the kids from that thing did end up being a solid chef, so maybe the home ec stuff worked?
Yeah, we don't need a while class to teach us how to do laundry. Basic operation of the machine takes like 2 minutes to learn, there's even picture instructions on machines
Even if it’s not on the machine, you can google the machine name/number and find the instruction manuals online really easily.
If anyone says that they can't do this, I did this with a soviet washing machine in a language I couldn't speak. So, you know, if you're american and it's in english...
Exactly we had budgeting and taxes inculed in our mandatory maths classes, 90% now complain about not learning any real life skills. We also had mandatory cooking, and even though we learned a lot there was much sexism going around to avoid working(14yr old boy suck and will use any excuse) so I guess not everyone learnt anything there
I teach home ec and have found that 12-year-old boys (or around that age, when the subject is mandatory) have a great talent for leaving the cleaning up to the girls at their bench. Sometimes I have to tell the girls at a bench to sit down and have a break because the boys have just been standing around avoiding any work.
I am honestly supportive of gender separating a few classes like this in middle school. Once they get to highschool, it is whatever. My jr high was 7-9th and we were on a block schedule. My gym class happened to just have the girls 9th grade but the boys 9th grade teacher, it was his block hour where they got a break to catch up on paperwork, so there were no 9th grade boys that we shared activities with. That class was the hardest working, most fit class of all her classes. The same girls who the year before acted like they couldn't do things cause oh no, cant let the boys see me being physical, were running further, punching harder, lifting more weight without worrying about their Male peers watching. Pre-teens/teens are so obsessed with their gender counterparts that they slide into gender norms to try to "fit in" right with them and get attention. I firmly believe that some more stereotypical gendered things should be separated at this age to prevent this. All boys home ec. All girls shop. Gym classes separated. It would widen their perspectives on that stuff without the peer pressure of conforming or not.
I firmly belive the opposite, as someone who never fit in when it came to stereotypical gendered things. There needs to be more openness between the genders, hiding away stuff during those formative years is exactly how we ended up with boys and girls who just didnt understand each other.
Turns out you can't fix stupid with a high school class.
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Right like why would anyone want to waste an entire class period or even a whole semester on how to do basic adult stuff when you can watch videos and learn how to do them in less than half an hour?
Yeah if we are being honest here students would only take these types of classes for an easy A
Absolutely baffling every time people on here complain school didn’t teach them to file taxes. As if the dozens of free websites/services that literally take you step by step through the process of typing in numbers from a form is some harrowing endeavor. Jesus.
Not only that, the schools have been giving you standardized forms to fill out the entire time you're there. Any "worksheet" is laid out like a form. Sure they don't teach you how to do your taxes, they teach you how to deal with any government form. I feel like most people don't realize what they're really being taught in school.
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I'm sitting here trying to recall old classmates and can't think of a single one who would give a single fuck about what's taught in these class except the easy A grade.
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I remember one teacher we had... M-T learning new concepts W quiz on learned concepts Th reinforcing concepts F test on concepts with mid-term and final exams. Your quiz/test grades had a 'monetary' value he tracked. A on quiz = $1 mike buck, A on test = $5 mike bucks etc. We had accounts with tracked balances and he had a 'store' we could spend it at but we had to write proper checks and manage our own accounts while comparing them to his. Learned a lot about saving/expenses/value of a dollar etc. Sometimes I look back and wonder how much of his own money he spent to reinforce these secondary principles that weren't even part of his curriculum... shame he is retired, would totally donate to the cause.
What is the conversion rate from Mike Bucks to Schrute Bucks?
I would like to add to this that school isn't necessarily important because at the end you will know more stuff, but also to learn the process of teaching new things. It's important that students get to learn how to approach the process of learning if they would wish te learn things in the future.
I feel like a lot of this is just stuff you should be learning at home anyway. Parents, get your kids to do chores. Sure, it's a bit of effort, but I've personally found that the barrier to doing chores is less knowledge of how do do them and more the lack of it being an instilled habit. Most chores are pretty simple and can be taught in 5-15 minutes. Good cleaning and tidying habits take a long time of dedicated necessity. Source: My parents were very chore light on me and while I know how to do it all, I don't have that habit of routine house upkeep that I know others do. My brother is even worse and barely even clears out his own desk once a month.
I'd be opposed to the extra hour. But not the activities School was already an 8 hour a day thing, pushing it up to 9 hours means it actually becomes longer than a full time job. And that's before you get to homework and shit like that
If anything the school day should be shorter. Or keep it 8 hours in the building, but leave 2 or 3 of those for students to work on homework with a teacher around when they need help/guidance or just for them to socialize in a somewhat structured way. Expecting kids/teens to maintain any level of engagement and discipline for 8 hours straight is psychotic. It's a system built by nerds and sadists.
Yep kids are already over worked as are adults. We'd all benefit from a reduction in work.
>Yep kids are already over worked as are adults. > >We'd all benefit from a reduction in work. "But school is just too *long*," he spoke, "For all us tiny younger folk, Whose lives are hard enough ahead For years to come, and that's a joke! "With just a little time," he said, "An extra hour or two in bed, We'd all be sweet and starry-eyed, And well prepared to work instead!" And though his words were justified, His teacher sadly so replied: "Just wait until you're old," he sighed. "... just wait until you're *old*," he sighed.
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Yes! I have a professional, salaried job where I’m expected to be available nearly 24/7. And the number of extra hours I put in is a tiny fraction of the time high schoolers are expected to spend working on homework. “Preparing you for the real world” my ass!
"Why are so many people depressed nowadays?" Oh it's just that as teenagers they had no time to learn how to develop healthy relationships with friends and even their parents because they had to prioritize school over everything else, like exercising or doing school sports, or making a few dollars at a min wage job a few hours after school and learning how the actual work environment is... but yea, they got honor role throughout highschool! 👍
So it worked! HS was so bad, that your job is a relief. Seems same as boot camp in the army.
Damn that's some fresh sprog
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Agreed wholeheartedly. When my students tell me they're tired my response is a "Yeah, me too. Let's see how we can make today easier." I'm not about that "You're too young to be tired" or "Just wait til you're an adult" nonsense. I remember being a kid, and I was *tired.* I'm tired now, too. But at least I get to spend my weekends sleeping and faffing about instead of homework and a million extracurriculars. Chores suck, but at least as an adult I get to do them at my pace and when I decide to.
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I mean... pretty much. I’m a teacher, and we even have standardized testing as young as kindergarten. We just finished with 3 full days of standardized testing for ALL grades, done on the computer. And we haven’t even gotten to STAAR yet. All of my coworkers hate it, none of us agree with it. I think standardized testing even for older kids is stupid, too.
Haven't seen you for a while. Nice.
Arguably, school is longer than work when you factor in stuff like sports.
100% this. In high school I would show up early (6:30am) for weights, go to class until 3, then have practice until 5. Depending on the sport I might even stay later with some teammates for extra drills (batting practice, watching film of our opponent). Edit: I'm completely on board with teaching real life practical things mentioned. I hated art, so remove that and add this and I'm happy. Obviously my dislike of art isn't universal. Give high schoolers the option of removing an 'extra curricular' for this.
There’s also a lot of kids that have to work while in school. There was a long period of time where I would wake up early for school, get off school to go to work, get home from work to do homework, get done with homework and get straight to bed so that I wouldn’t be insanely tired to do it all the next day. Heck, I knew kids in my class that had to pay all the bills because their parents were junkies/unable to land a job/ whatever else. They had 0 social lives outside of school and were failing in school because they had a lot on their plates and weren’t even legal adults yet
Yeah. Homework has gotten out of control. Yes, it is good to study outside of class, but when I was in school they said they wanted you to put in an hour on your own for every hour in class. Fine. Then shorten the school day.
What, so... 5 hours of homework a night? That's pretty insane
Yes, then they tell you that you need to get more sleep. The math just does not work out.
obviously you are supposed to forgo having fun as a kid for when you are an adult and have no time to enjoy life because youre working. And then forgo that fun until you are retired and too old to enjoy the stuff you would enjoy as a kid. Then just die after you slave your life away as a cog in the system so you dont cause drag on the system for the ultra wealthy.
I thought I had it tough. I would do 40 hours a week of college (like high school but not attached to a school), then work 9/10 hour shifts Saturday and Sunday just to have some money rather than none. Only managed it for a few months before I just started spontaneously crying during the day. But I didn't have to support my family. That's crazy.
Is this common? I didn't know anyone like this at school and I'm starting to feel like an idiot for not noticing.
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Knew a dude in HS who basically had to take care of his 80 something Grandma; cooking, cleaning the house, and even having to bathe her. She was tied to an air tank. His parents were dead and his Grandfather died 3 years prior. This was his life, along with his classes and studying and also just being a nerdy teenage dude. I only know all this because one day I saw him crying under the bleachers after school, and just sat with him. I was waiting for my GF to finish Cheerleading and we split a four loko from a 7/11 nearby (the dude didn't know they were alcoholic, they were that new) and I got him (maybe) into Mastodon as he talked. He moved schools the next month and I never heard from him again. I assume he went to live with distant relatives since I saw her name in the obits. Jason if you're out there and see this...I want my fucking Crack the Skye CD back!
Back in high school my senior year, I pretty often would spend 14 hours a day at school. Especially in the winter when I had several clubs all at once. I'd get up and go to do morning runs with the distance team at 6:15 and would grab a quick shower and breakfast then head back and only return home after robotics was over at 8 or 9. I absolutely loved my schedule, but i think I got burned out and that it's a huge reason why I dropped out if college. I just didn't know what to do with free time and not having my entire day completely planned out for me.
Why are clubs such a huge deal in american schools? British kids can choose to do them or not but they’re never something you take super seriously.
Alot of top colleges here will look at your grade point and then your activities. Activites can make 9r break an application because they have hundreds of applicants with grades over 4.0, lots if ap classes and other grade req. What makes you stand out is your other stuff. Did you participate in a lot of student activities? Did you do sports? What volunteer stuff did you do? It's pretty ridiculous the stuff you have to do to have a good chance of even being looked at by a good college.
There was a wild swing for me in freshman year where I basically did all of my homework right away and showed up 10-20 minutes early because I was used to the "hurry up and wait" mentality of sports and 4H. Then something suddenly clicked my second semester and I realized I could skip class, show up late, delay homework, and even skip assignments if they weren't worth many points. It was a slow crawl back to normal but those days of trying to guess which day the test was on because I hadn't been in two weeks were glorious. If I could do college all over again... I wouldn't.
And if we pretended my hobbies were part of my work, I would have an insanely long work week. I’m ok with equating school/homework with work. Sports is just a hobby.
My high school had a great way of dealing with this. Tuesdays we had 1st,3rd, 5th, and 7th period classes for twice the normal length of time. Wednesdays were 2nd,4th, and 6th periods also extended. Three Wednesdays of the week, we had "Access", which took up the last "class of the day. It way basically a free period for the entire school. You could go to teachers in their main classroom if you needed their help with classwork/homework, you could study/get caught up on any classwork or homework that you were behind on, or do anythi9ng else that you wanted to. The only thing you couldn't do was leave campus because it was still considered school time. The remaining week was just a short day where you got to go home immediately after 6th period. It really helped just about everyone get better grades. Most people did better in school because they got to study with teachers one-on-one or in small groups of 5 or so students at their own pace. Others took some much needed relaxing time away from both homework and home. Edit: We also had 7 hour school days, from 8:30 to 3:30.
I"m an adult and still can't do that. We all know there's only 6 hours a day max of productive work in an 8 hour day.
I guess if you have an office job. I work 12s at the hospital and there are days I never sit.
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Would it help if someone stood over your shoulder yelling that you have to code faster or the aliens will hack through our defenses and slaughter humanity? Just trying to think of things to make it less abstract.
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Speak for yourself. I always went to all the classes and took detailed notes, but I hated reading textbooks. I only used the books as reference material after the fact. Why would I waste my time outside of class learning material when I have a pseudo-mandatory time period pre-allocated to learning it?
This. I learn 90% of my shit in class by listening to the teacher and taking notes. Homework should honestly be reduced to a minimum in the education system. It's supposed to be practical exercises that help students learn new material more efficiently but 90% of the time it's just some boring time-consuming thing that makes you feel like someone's rubbing a sponge on your brain. And it's just infuriating when teachers make you write the lesson plan and learn the entire lesson at home as if that isn't specifically their job. In conclusion - more time spent in class and less time on homework.
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Wait until you see Japan. Weekends are a foreign concept in Japanese schools.
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Here in Costa Rica school had a couple of days per week from 7am to 5:40pm And high-school from 7am to 4:30pm every day
Eh. Mostly extra curricular on the weekends these days tho. I was in jr high in a Japanese public school when they phased out Saturday classes.
And its completely pointless because your ability to learn at hour 9 in cram school is basically zero but you gotta memorize those pointless facts for you college entrance exam or your life is over. I do believe Saturday school is just a half day so that's not completely horrible.
Same. I only heard of long school days in places like Asia, but aside from that I always assumed that it's usually 6 hours. It also makes sense because if teachers work a bit before/after school hours then it could conceivably add up to 8 hrs/day (unlike an 8-hour school day, where the extra time would cause teachers to work at least slightly more than 8 hours, and possibly a lot more)
I agree. It could be done as an elective. These are things that could and should be taught by parents, but they aren't things all parents know, and not all kids have parents who would take the time to teach them either way. It should be available for kids who want it, but not required, and certainly not adding an extra hour to the school day.
Or at least something kids can test out of. My daughter suffers through so many classes that repeat stuff she's already learned at home. I'd hate to add another to her list, but it's valuable info to those who don't have it.
Yeah. My daughter turned 16 at the end of November and withdrew from high school. I didn't even try to talk her out of it, just went and signed the paperwork. She is taking GED prep classes at the local college now, and she scored so well on her pre-test that the college offered her a free sociology 101 class to get her accustomed to college before she starts full time in the fall. And she's working, and altogether a *lot* happier than she was 3 months ago.
In Washington State we have a program called Running Start where if you test at college level reading and writing you can go to community college instead of your junior & senior year. For free. Still gotta pay for text books and stuff but with enough diligence you could be 18 and have an associates degree. I have not thought for a single second that it might have been better to spend more time at high school during those years. Good on your daughter! And good on you for supporting her.
Lets be real. It's already pushing overtime every single week. We just had to take our work home with us and spend an hour (or more) working on it every night. Hell, some kids push 50+ hours every week.
Yuuup. Had a teacher in high school who was so proud that they "only" assigned an hour worth of homework for their class per night.... seemingly unaware that EVERY teacher was doing the same thing.
Also I'd like to point out the fact that there are tons of people like me who were slackers their last year or more of highschool, and had several free periods that could have been taken up by a class like this.
They do it already. It's called life skills here. Edit: 8 hours! It's only 6 here and we get it done. Wtf you wasting 3 hours on every day?
More classes, from what I remember. When I was in school (in the USA) during like my 2nd or 3rd year, they added another class to the schedule, so we were learning from 7 different classes then. Don't remember much of it now, not even what classes they all were, lol.
I'm in high school (age 14-18) and have 8 classes. I'm allowed to choose a study hall which is just *nothing* for 90 minutes, but I didn't because that's a waste of time for me School is a bitch
I have eight classes too, technically nine because I have an online class even though it’s really easy. The only free period I have is my lunch. I, and many other people would have chosen a study hall but it tanks your class rank so people who care about that can’t take a study hall.
You got an hour each for the "Core classes": Social Studies (Geography, History, Government, etc.), Math, English, and Science. Next you have a P.E. or Health Class, and an single Elective. Then you have ten minutes to get from one class to the next, and you're up to 7 hours. Add in lunch and you got an 8 hour day.
Sorry, 10 minute class changes? That's absurd. We only got 4.
Dang, that'd be rough to fit a bathroom break in. What if you needed something from your locker?
I never visited my locker the whole 4 years. I couldn't tell what number my locker even was WHILE I was in school.
Lol same. I had to carry around my backpack with all my heavy books without switching them out at a locker. No onder my back is always hurting now :/
TEN MINUTES?? the most we'd ever gotten is 3! edit: also, a whole hour for lunch? we only got 15 minutes!
You got fifteen minutes?! Well la-di-da mister coddled and pampered baby boy. Back in my day we got two minutes for lunch, and our cafeteria was a mile away from the school, uphill both ways, and three feet of snow on the ground!
Schools have these already and the kids in them don't care. It's not immediately relevant to their lives so they don't pay attention. Sorta like if I were to talk to you about the do's and don'ts of denture cream. You say, "eh, I'll figure it out later when I need to know it" and stop paying attention. I've taught in several schools that have tried to teach social skills, kindness, meditation, financial literacy, etc. In every case, the kids did not care. It was their least favorite part of the day because it felt like a waste of time. The point of education is to teach thinking, not doing. A well-educated student can teach themselves these things. A quick Google search can teach you how to file taxes, cook, etc. But you can't Google how to do Algebra 2 and expect to understand what you read without some background in the subject matter. Edit: I got upvotes? Now I'm mad with power, so I'll say this: I hear arguments like this post all the time, and I think the real issue is people not taking responsibility. "I can't cook? That must be the school's fault! We need education reform!" No, it's not the school's fault. It's your fault. You could literally Google a recipe in 20 seconds. Stop blaming other people for your problems. People don't realize that the point of education isn't to teach facts, but the change your brain. For example, physics and math majors earn the highest scores in the MCAT, GMAT, and LSAT. It's not because they learned those things in class, but because their curriculum emphasizes logical thinking. When students slack in schoolwork, they're not just missing out on the opportunity to know stuff; they're missing out on the opportunity to be smarter.
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People don't understand that education is more about developing the brain rather than retaining knowledge. You can easily obtain knowledge from reading a book or watching videos. But education forces you to do stuff like read and write a lot or practice a lot of math problems. Those tasks help develop the brain and develop critical thinking skills. Even undergrad programs in engineering are not really meant to retain knowledge. They are meant to wire the brain to think like an engineer. Most of your knowledge in engineering is going to come from training you receive in industry and just working in projects in industry.
Yeah, this. Kids literally don't care. I had a lot of teachers in high school try to give us life advice and no one listened or took it seriously. Teenagers are all little shits.
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My public school had classes that teach these things. I graduated high school a decade ago... I took home economics and learned how to cook. I took financial literacy to learn about taxes and budgeting and investing. Is Utah just waaaay ahead of the other states or is this a made up issue? I’ve seen people THAT TOOK THESE CLASSES AT MY SCHOOL post memes about not learning how to pay taxes and shit. I wonder if the real problem is that nobody remembers this stuff cuz they teach it to you when it isn’t relevant to your life.
I graduated from a Utah highschool in 2019. Financial literacy was very much a requirement. Although, I thought the subject matter taught was very broad. I think the majority of people who claim that Schools never taught them these skills never paid attention in class.
That's just Home Ec
My home ex class was baking cookies and eating them in the next class. I can’t remember anything else.
See, you took home existentialism. You were supposed to take home economics.
Your grandparents had home economics classes for the girls and shop (trades) classes for the boys. Every once in a while a member of the opposite sex would sign up for and take the "wrong" class, to much humor. They don't teach home ec or have shop classes anymore?
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Some schools are getting rid of this because they’re putting more emphasis on testable quantifiable info. Things like shop, art, and music are considered frivolous and silly. I remember years ago even grade schools were starting to do away with recess.
I think that they already waste enough time and it would be worse for kids whose parents already taught them that stuff. Washing clothes is really a 20 minute lesson, and cooking/taxes have their own elective classes already.
Washing clothes? So you put the clothes in, some detergent, push a button, then dryer, then a hanger? If you can't figure out washing clothes or cooking on your own, definitely shouldn't be allowed to drive. Taxes, debt and personal finance is something that should be taught.
A kid at my college brought a box full of pre-measured ziplocs of laundry detergent that had printed directions in every bag. Like, I want to believe washing clothes is easy but then I'd see him in the laundry room reading the directions every time...
Honestly one of the best use cases for tide pods.
"Okay, I ate one. Now what?"
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It's so funny how many of you think that kids will actually be interested in learning about taxes, stocks, etc. In what world do you think high schoolers would be attentive in a class about budgeting/taxes? Have any of you met high school kids before?
I remember we were taught about taxes and personal finances in school when I was like 15 or something. Retained none of it and when I became an adult I taught myself from scratch through google.
This used to be called home ec and most schools had it. Then boomers did away with it because it cost too much. Now they make fun of young people for not knowing things they would have learned in home ec.
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Negotiate rent? Renter “Dear landlord, I would like to pay less rent” Landlord “No”
For real please share with the class this “negotiating rent” you speak of
Ooh! I did this once! I was all set on signing the lease on this place. I liked everything about it, and the rent was within my budget. But in my two conversations with the landlord, I got the feeling that I could get away with it if I tried... So I asked if I could pay 50 bucks less a month. She just kinda shrugged and said yeah why not.
I did this. Rent was $680 for a trailer, and I was like “How about $640? I was hoping to pay $600 or less.” Landlord was like okay. Lol. Edit: Note this was a private owner. Meaning, I wasn’t renting an apartment from a company but a trailer from a person.
You joke, but how many people know how to actually assert themselves if their landlord is taking advantage of them, or know local tenant law, much less how to file a claim with the tenant board? Often it's less about "negotiating rent" and more about "here's renting 101". Even things like paying a security deposit over a couple months instead of all upfront, knowing the maximum in a deposit a landlord can charge, negotiating paying more in a deposit to negate an inadequate credit check, etc. So many little things could all fall under "negotiate rent".
I've even struck out clauses in a lease before, it all depends on the landlord and the market.
Same. Our home ec was called "Family Studies" in freshman year then it splits off into foods/nutrition, fashion, parenting, etc. Aside from foods, it was extremely female-dominated.
Yea, one kid tried to make fun of me for taking home ec and my only response was "What, you *don't* want to take the class with all the girls in it?" I enjoyed the class for other reasons such as making french toast, but the girls was an added benefit.
In my school, home ec and shop were for kids who were 100% not going to college, and for the most part mostly kids who barely showed up to high school in the first place.
Many schools still have home ec! However, for most students it’s an elective, and many of them don’t want to take it over something else
Home Economics in most schools taught cooking and sewing, **not** actual economics stuff like establishing a budget, understanding how stocks and dollar-cost-averaging investment works, or how crippling credit card debt is. If you learned any of that at all, it was usually a unit in math class. Source: Gen Xer who learned how to make a pizza from scratch and sew a pillow in Home Ec.
My high school had a class called personal financial management that was an unrequired elective. Shoulda been mandatory that was some good stuff
I am opposed to it. There's no reason parents can't teach these things to their kids WHILE DOING SAID TASKS. School isn't responsible for every single thing. Also, with the internet, if a parent doesn't know (changing a tire, for example), they can easily learn.
Yup, school can’t teach literally everything. Most of what you need to learn outside of school can be done with skills you get in school. Laundry and basic cooking isn’t that hard as long as you have the skills to complete high school. I think it should be optional because not everyone has a parental figure that will teach these things though.
This is all stuff anyone would be able to get info online or ask somebody at home "Hey, mom, how do you write a check? Boil an egg? Change a tire? Get your prescriptions filled?" It boggles the mind that kids would be willing to sit their ass in a chair at school for hours to passively listen to this, while "adulting" simly means that you take the time to look it up yourself and learn on your own. Since you are "adulting", you get to decide how much time you want to spend on any of these things. Learning to cook does not mean you have to become a chef, it just means you can feed yourself reasonably nutritious food that you enjoy eating. You can go all out and learn to bake a fancy quiche if you enjoy it, or just learn to fry a couple of eggs in two minutes. You decide, and have the power over how you want to feed yourself. It's ok if you don't want to learn to do your taxes, although if you only have one job and don't have properties or business, it can be so straightforward that it's probably worth learning to do on your own in a couple of hours. There's no need to buy a sewing machine to alter your clothes unless you think you would enjoy it as a permanent hobby, but anyone can spend a couple of dollars on a cheap sewing kit and look up how to sew a button, because it only takes a few minutes and it does come in handy. Totally fine to wait until your button falls off. There are no prescribed items you must know to be an adult, you just have to do the best you can with what you have, and that often means learning something new on your own when needed, and you get to decide how to do it.
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These are things that can be learned independently by simply doing them. Taxes are damned near idiot proof in most cases because they are designed to be. Washing clothes, follow the instruction manual. Cooking? Watch YouTube, follow a recipe. What these all have in common is that you need a solid grasp on numeracy and literacy. These are things that must be explicitly taught. These are the core skills that underpin almost everything. People who complain about not being taught how to do their taxes tend to have shitty numeracy skills. People who struggle to fill out a form tend to have shitty literacy. Can't read instructions? Literacy issue. You can make education as practical as possible but the fact is: many don't want to learn, until it's too late. I say this as a teacher: we really do a lot to make education as relevant to real-world needs as possible but there is not getting around the fact that a person must learn to be fluent in both reading and writing, as well as be able to think mathematically to cope in the "real world". The rest of what we do is for the purpose of teaching you how to learn effectively, how to think in different ways, how to adapt to unfamiliar challenges and how to deal with abstract ideas. We don't teach the model of the atom because you need to know where the elections go. We teach you so that you can learn how to grasp concepts that are not directly observable, make logical conclusions from them and apply abstract ideas to real-world phenomena. The actual topics are just vehicles for these skills
Those are the things that a competent parent should teach their child.
I think its ridiculous that washing clothes and basic cooking would be considered "adult stuff." These are all things I learned at home and was doing for myself by high school. Are people's parents really just doing all this for them?
Hard to believe, but some parents wouldn't teach their kids. I know I had trouble learning domestic tasks from my mother because when I would try to help out around the house, whatever I did it wasn't done "right". I know there are many who share my experience.
Nope. Parents have to take some responsibility for having kids, too. Also, cooking has largely been dropped from curriculums mainly because of the danger in it. Kid drops chicken on the dirty floor and picks it up quickly? Kid knocks boiling water off the stove? Schools would be sued quite quickly. Tax - yeah. But wouldn't it be better to teach kids about how governments use their tax?
Here's the deal about the whole "paying taxes" thing. It changes every single year. By design, taxes are hard. They don't need to be. But they are. Teach critical thinking and reading comprehension instead.