University learning is so much different
Does anyone else ever have those moments where you look at your calendar filled with due dates, the stack of textbooks on your desk you were supposed to have had read by last Thursday, the utilities bills you have no idea how to pay, and the terrible resume that’s gotten you rejected from five jobs because it was so poorly done and thought: I was not prepared for this?
In high school, we were prepared for things like essays and graphing. The five-paragraph-hamburger-style was all over diagrams that were placed in every English class and we were told to follow that style to a “T.” Then we got to post-secondary, and that same essay style – the one that was so important, that most classes spent weeks learning – will get you at most a C if you’re lucky.
No one ever gave lessons that centred on information we’d need to know. Not once did anyone ever tell me how to get a mortgage, do my taxes, clean a house properly with the correct cleaning products on the correct surfaces, or cook nutritious meals. I never heard any of my teachers even suggest a lesson on skills most people would need for their whole lives, like how much to tip, how to create a savings plan, or even how to budget. Instead, we were taught parabolas and imaginary numbers (why, exactly, I don’t know. They’re imaginary – do they have that much of an impact on our everyday life?).
It wasn’t completely useless though. Some information was transferable to life after high school; even then, it’s only been transferable to my next step in education. What I learned in biology is useful in my nutrition class and what I learned in law is useful in my politics classes; so far, though, I’ve never been in a situation where knowing what the Oakes test is has helped me in any way. So learning it was great for me for my current classes, but what about the kids that didn’t continue their education? Where was the useful information they could take with them to apply to the next stage in their lives? Learning this information may not have helped me a lot, but it didn’t help them at all.
Every step of our education was supposed to help us with the next step in our life – high school especially. Elementary school prepared us for middle school, middle school was for high school, but I didn’t understand how ill-prepared I was for university until I got here. Exams worth 30 per cent – at least, entire class marks based on four things, readings to be done for every week whether you have a midterm to study for as well or not, professors that talk too fast for you to type and then don’t post lecture slides, late penalties upwards of 20 per cent, and a number of other shocking facts that we all had to learn the hard way after we’d paid our $20,000 tuition. In high school, they held our hands and walked us through the material, in university, they took all those aids away.
They told us they’d prepared us. Teachers were proud on graduation day, thinking that everything they’d taught us had been a gem, but in all honesty, we were not at all prepared.