Top Things I Wish They Had Taught Us In School

 

If you’re here, I’m gonna guess that you’ve recently realised something I woke up to last year – that school isn’t as useful as it’s made out to be.
Everyone needs schooling. That’s a fact. Kids need an education. But thanks to rigorous curriculums and uninspiring teaching methods, it’s easy to come home from school with the feeling that all the life has been drained out of you.
Worse still, I’ve lost count of the amount of times I returned home with the feeling of “well, that was a totally pointless day!”
I’m not saying that what school teaches us is all worthless. But some of it totally is.
Worse still, the stuff that would really and truly add value to our lives as we enter the real world is totally off the curriculum. While we could be learning about emotional intelligence, how to manage our time, how to beat procrastination, how to network, and so on, we’re instead being deluged with useless stories about medieval kings chopping their own wife’s heads off. Gross.
Recently, as I hit a crisis point in my life, I got to thinking about the things I wish they had taught us in school. Here are 10 of them:😊
How To Make Goals?
At school, I was taught how to make a sculpture out of a cardboard box, but I wasn’t taught how to make goals. Call me crazy, but something is not right there..
Mistakes Are Okay
This is something I definitely was not taught at school. Each time I made a mistake, I was told that I was wrong. I wasn’t told what the correct answers was, I was just told that I was wrong and that’s all there was to it.
And the worst thing? They always told me I was wrong in red ink!!
Everyone makes mistakes, but when children are so discouraged from making mistakes at a young age, they shy away from taking risks and making the big calls. This continues in adult life.
But hey. Everyone makes mistakes. All the most successful people in the world are making mistakes all the time. But they know that a mistake, rather than being a sign that you’re just not good enough and never will be, is just nature’s way of telling you to improve.
Learn from your mistakes and grow.
The 80/20 Rule
School taught me a lot about fractions (most of which I forgot after five minutes), but what they never taught us was the 80/20 Rule.
This rule, when applied properly, can change your life.
Essentially, it asserts that 80% of the all the value you will get out of your tasks comes from just 20% of those tasks.
Huh, right?
This means that you’re wasting your time 80% of the time.
So what you need to do is isolate the tasks that are adding the most value to your life and double down on them while eliminating the rest.
Taxes
If death and taxes are the only certainties in life, why do schools not teach either?
Okay, so death is quite a grim subject. But you’re telling me that reading about how a king of England chopped off his wife’s head isn’t?
Taxes are important, and now that many millennials are increasingly self-employed, it seems incredibly short-sighted of a school NOT to cover taxes.
Parkinson’s Law
Do you wish you could do things quicker than you have been doing all your life? This doesn’t have to be wishful thinking – not if you know all about Parkinson’s Law anyway.
Parkinson’s Law asserts that the more time you give yourself to do something, the longer it will take.
Let’s say there is something you REALLY don’t want to do.
“I’ll do it next week,” you say.
The thing is, you won’t do it. It probably won’t get done until next month.
If, however, you say “I’ll have it done within the next hour” you will get it done within 30 minutes.
Basically, the less time you give yourself to do something, the quicker it will get done.
If this sounds like common sense that everyone already knows, then why aren’t YOU getting more done?
Hmm.
How To Balance Work, Study And Personal Life
At school, we’re told that we have to get our history, our foreign language, our science, our math and our stupid sculpture all done by Monday morning.
What we’re not told is how in the heck we’re supposed to balance our study lives with our personal lives so that we don’t get frustrated and resentful.
I feel strongly that school’s should do a better job of showing students how to reduce stress by creating a better balance between homework and fun. Otherwise, one will usually get neglected.
Batching
We all hate boring, routine tasks. When I was working as a video editor, I LOVED editing together the videos, but I absolutely hated converting all the files before I could begin.
Then I hit upon a solution – batching.
Batching means grouping together a few tasks at the same time. Because downloading and converting files requires a lot of patience but very little brain activity, I found that I was able to make phone calls and do the dishes at the same time.
Awesome.
How To Speed Read?
If you think you’re a genius because you can speed read, I’m sorry to crush your lofty delusions, but you aren’t.
It doesn’t take a genius to speed read, but it takes someone to help us understand how to read fast while still processing the information.
If you can speed read, you have a competitive edge in this fast-paced world of ours.
Always Be Proactive
So many people are reactive. But when you’re a reactive person, not much gets done.
You might sit around hoping that someone else will come along and take care of things for you, but if they don’t, you’re just wasting a heap of time.
I don’t think schools are very good at drilling it into students that we have to learn to take more action. Somebody needs to get the ball rolling. Is it going to be you?
How To Manage Your Money?
Perhaps the most vital skill of all that SHOULD be taught at school is how to manage our cash.
It’s almost as though the school system wants us to get in debt, take out loans and rack up credit card bills …