“When will I ever need to use this?”

It has been said by every student who has walked through the doors of LHS. Sitting in a math class, students wonder when they will ever need to use DeMoivre’s Theorem or when they will need to identify a horizontal or vertical shift of a graph.

Teachers get mad whenever a student asks this question. They probably take more offense to it than anything because each teacher believes that their class is extremely beneficial to every student that walks in their door, but they never give a student a real reason for needing to know what they teach.

In six days, hundreds of students will walk out LHS for the last time and go on to whatever they have planned for the future. Some will have no clue how to fill out a tax report or how to pay a bill. Some will have no idea how to change a tire on their car or how to read a map. But almost all of these students could recite to you the quadratic formula or tell you that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

This makes you wonder. Did LHS prepare us enough for the real world?

I am not saying that the teachers in this school are inadequate and did not teach us enough. All my teachers have taught me things that I will need for the rest of my life when I go on whatever path I choose. But should the school have offered more for us?

Classes like personal finance gives students an idea of some of the challenges they will face after high school, but not all students end up taking personal finance. I took economics which fulfilled my half credit requirement.

I, like many students, have no idea how to fill out a tax report or how to change a tire. I am not quite sure what I am going to do without my parents to call and come save me when my car breaks down. Next year I will be hours away from home and if there is some sort of inconvenience, I am going to have to rely on the internet to solve a problem.

I have taken some pretty important classes and I have learned a lot in my four years here. But I wish that there would have been some class to teach me more practical things. LHS should offer a class that teaches you how to fix a leaky faucet or how to pay your bills. It should cover all important things that you will need to know later in life.

LHS has provided me with an amazing four years. My anatomy class will come in handy if I decide to become some sort of a doctor and my government class will become more beneficial to me if I decide to major in political science instead. But I wish I would have been offered a class to prepare me and my classmates more for the real world.