A student takes eight different classes a year, with each class teaching a different subject. The students are taught a wide variety of information that will help them do well on all of their projects and tests in school. However, that knowledge doesn’t often come in handy in their daily lives.

There are many students who rarely are able to apply what is being taught to in their academic classes outside of it. “I only use it [the information taught in school] a little sometimes,” sophomore Grace Garcia said.

What a student needs to know in order to be productive in their regular, out-of-school life is very different than what they need to know in order to function in the academic world. 

Outside of school, students have no use of knowing the anatomy of bacteria or all of the animal kingdoms. “I never use anything I learned in my science class or my history classes,” sophomore Sefat Fatema said. “Those things just don’t apply to my life.”

Even though students have a hard time finding a use for the stuff taught in a lot of their classes, there are a few things that students do actually use everyday. 

Basic skills, such as social skills and leadership, and basic knowledge, such as reading and writing, are things that are needed often in everybody’s life. “Things I actually use are my reading, writing, and simple math skills,” Fatema said. “Simple math skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and basic algebra.”

While basic knowledge is useful to have, it’s also good for students to know how to do life skills that will come in handy in the future. “I think it’s important that schools properly teach students how to do things that they’re going to do in their adult lives a lot more frequently,” sophomore Jasmine Carlos said. “Things like taxes and how to manage money.”