RE: Wash Your Glasses First

This was an excellent article. It covered what many students think about school. Not only what we think about when we are in school (Jr. & High) but also what we all think about after we graduate and are trying to decide what we are going to do with our lives.

Why do we learn about things that don’t matter to us in the future…atmospheric pressure?

Now I sit back and think first of about how we all know to wash the glasses before the greasy pans. We have been taught it by an angry parent or have learned the hard way. I really have know idea why there is not a class like this in school where we have the chance to learn about the things that really matter in life. Why is it that we have to have certain courses to gradate? When I graduated we had to have Bio. 30, Phys. 30 or Chem. 30 amongst other core courses. I understand the English, Social and some of the Math, but really Sciences!! I barely made it through them and now ask me if I remember all the parts to a cell. Nope.

I do understand that this is to teach students something that they may be able to use when they graduate and decide what they area going to do, but I think that we could change a bit of the Pythagorean theorem so that we dong have to spend a whole unit trying to figure out the Sin/Cos/Tan of things and get on to the car/house insurance bit. Not to mention it would have been helpful to learn a bit more about the credit card debt or how to start up mutuals in order to be able to retire.

It is understandable that you have to teach the curriculum, but I think that as teachers we have the ability to bend it a bit so that the students find it a bit more relatable to their daily lives. That should be our goals as teachers anyway.