Life Lessons

My nephew, Dylan recently had a project in Language Arts. He is 13 years old and in seventh grade.

Dylan's project was wrapped around poetry. He had to come up with 15 poems, with no less than 3 written by himself. Those 3 had to be on specific poetry themes, such as similes, metaphors, and so on.

For each poem he had to research a brief biography of the author, analyze the poem, and complete a table of contents, with a blibliography. All of this had to be on Power Point.

Don't ask me about Power Point. I don't know what it is. Dylan explained that it's like a slide show.

A slide show of poems? Slide shows are pretty boring anyway (Look! The Grand Canyon!) but I couldn't imagine one made up of poems.

Dylan asked me for help with his project since he was given only 3 weeks to do it. I helped him write 2 poems over the phone and that's about it. I hate poetry.

I told him, quite honestly, that he will NEVER use this. The only way he would use this info is if he became an English Lit teacher.

Here's my mom: "Misty! You should not have told him that!"

But it's completly true and I feel Dylan deserves the truth. He will never have a conversation in which he will need to pluck out the noun and adverb and place them in the correct spot on the "rocket ship" diagram. He will never analyze a poem for the fun of it. If he reads a poem, he should enjoy it for which it was written.


With that said, I believe they should get rid of such classes. A Life Skills course ought to be mandatory in high school. It should be required for graduation.

In the perfect Life Skills 101 course you would learn the following:

How to shop on a budget (includes a field trip to the grocery store)
How to pay your bills on a budget
How to pay your bills when you didn't get the overtime you expected
Balancing your checkbook
How to find a good mechanic
Fixing small things around the house
Changing the oil in you car
and so on and so on...

These are the skills that kids need to be learning. I understand that literature and history are important. But my tax dollars are preparing these kids for a lifetime of welfare because they never learned how to not be lazy.

I read in the paper that at a different school than my nephew's that a 7th grade class was taking a similar life skills course. Some where single, some were "married" and all drew at random for salaries. The lowest salary was $17,000, the highest being $60,000.

$17,000? that's way more than I make in a year! There's your first problem. In such a course, students ought to draw for starter jobs.

Wal-Mart cashier
Janitor
Low-level factory worker
Gohper in an office
Waitress

They ought to draw at random for unexpected occurances

Oops! You got yourself pregnant!
Whoops! You broke your arm--did you pruchase medical insurance?
Uh-oh! Gas prices rose and so did everything else!
Ha ha! Taxes went up! Can you still buy food this month?
Bummer! You got laid off! Do you have a savings account?

Am I the only one this makes sense to? No one told me how to do these things. In Home Economics, I learned the "safe" way to do dishes. (keep knives seperate)

Yeah. Cause that's what girls are good for, right?


In History, I learned that Columbus "accidentally" found America, not how the economy has steadily declined over the last decade.

Whoa. Useful info!

In Computer class I learned how to--wait. I don't think I learned much in that class except how to spend my free time browsing the net. I should've leanred how to defrag and what to look for when buying a crappy PC. They didn't offer that in the cirruculum.

In English class I learned about Romeo and Juliet. What they should've taught me was Spanish so I could understand 50% of the city's population....

Well now, that's a whole 'nother subject, isn't it?!