<p>Too funny. I can’t imagine kids getting to college and not knowing how to do laundry. I have more trouble with the boys “not doing” it than “not knowing how to do it.” S3 the athlete leaned a lesson this summer when his favorite t-shirt stayed damp in the backpack for a week and mildewed. I laughed my a** off as I can’t even count how many times I’ve said, did you take your sweaty, smelly, stuff out of the backpack and wash it? Hundreds, thousands of times. I have to admit that S1 did call me when he was a college freshman and asked what “brand” of pre-wash I bought that got the t-shirts so white cause his wasn’t “doing it.”</p>
<p>ilovetoquilt-</p>
<p>Great point! Your examples seem to be mostly from business law. The business law class I went back and took (after graduate school) was one of the most useful classes I ever did. I would be wildly enthusiastic about that being a standard part of the high school curriculum!</p>
<p>Although I did google “car accident insurance” and got this site:</p>
<p>[Car</a> Accident: Insurance Claims - Do’s and Don’ts – Lawcore.com](<a href=“http://www.lawcore.com/car-accident/insurance-claims.html]Car”>Car Accident: Insurance Claims - Do's and Don'ts -- Lawcore.com)</p>
<p>It’s pretty helpful.</p>
<p>I’m a huge fan of learning skills WHEN you need them or can put them immediately to use. Also learning how to teach oneself, how to find the information one needs, how to seek out advice from those that can help.</p>
<p>My kids won’t be signing their own lease any time soon yet, so not useful for them to learn in HS. Same with taxes. How can you learn taxes one year…and expect it to be useful 4 years later when you file them for the first time? Not to mention in that time much could change depending upon change in rules, geography, and computer programs.</p>
<p>If they learn a practical skill but can’t put it to practice for a year or more, its unlikely to be retained to be truly useful. </p>
<p>I would however vote for financial literacy and macro economics. In the ideal world fin. literacy could be learned at home but sadly too many parents seem pretty illiterate in that dept to be helpful.</p>
<p>Starbright, if your kids move off campus after freshman year I guarantee you they will be signing a lease of some sort. Before they sign, is a good time for that lesson.<br>
The kids often don’t know/don’t read what they are signing even when they are in college and don’t realize simple stuff like if one kid welches the others pay. Same for taxes. If they want the money that is witheld from their part time or summer jobs, they need to file taxes. Alot of this stuff is not 4 or 5 years away it is right around the corner.</p>
<p>^Ah, good point! For mine it’s four years away on the lease thing but also I think even a year gap would be pointless. We’d discuss when the time came and walk through it. Same with the rest of all that they’ve learned— as it comes up. </p>
<p>But on the taxes, great idea! I’m in a different country so not the same at all (no withholding under a threshold). But it did prompt me to look something up…and I discovered quite accidentally that there is zero downside but HUGE lifetime tax savings if our kids start filing now with no or low income. So next year I know someone is figuring out their taxes with the software we use.</p>
<p>I’m surprised anyone has to be taught how to do laundry. Most of the instructions are located on the machine, and the rest just involves placing your clothes in the right spot and letting it run. It’s really not that different than using a computer, except that a washing machine actually has fewer buttons and things to keep track of.</p>
<p>On the lease subject—my parents had me read their house offer contracts because their English is…not that good. The legalese was definitely painful to read, but I got a kick out of making them (and myself) paranoid when we got to the inspection report. They probably called the agent one too many times because of me.</p>
<p>And as for teaching a life skills course, I don’t think it does anything until those skills are actually used. That’s where the real learning occurs, and teaching certain things like filing taxes probably will be long forgotten before they’re used. I like the idea of a personal finances class though.</p>
<p>When I was in Jr High, we had shop class and Home Economics. Both were required of both girls and boys (but somehow they alternated with PE so both were single-sex classes). We learned to operate power and hand tools, sand and finish wood and we learned how to roast a mastadon, open a bank account, balance a checkbook, compare appliance warrenties. It was fun and I remember it pretty well.
H took business math in HS and used it lots in college. (OK, he’s a pretty organized guy to start with)
Sometimes kids listen more to lessons at school than when Mom or Dad is talking (insert Charlie Brown parent sounds here…)</p>
<p>If you are old enough to live in an apartment on your own, you are old enough to read a lease. I started renting apartments when I was 19; the leases were straight-forward.</p>
<p>Every insurance company I have ever dealt with provided a booklet to clients entitled “what to do if you are in an accident”. It is straightforward. When my kids visited the insurance company upon passing their driving exams, the agent handed them the booklet and instructed them to read it and then put it in the glove box.</p>
<p>I have been doing my own taxes since I was in college. They used to be straightforward if you were low income. I’m not sure anymore if that is so. I am sure that I would trust few high school teachers to handle such a course well.</p>
<p>The original post on this thread proposed a one-month course to cover all of these things. Who is going to teach it? Can we assume that there is someone already on staff who is competent to handle all of these subjects? Or, does this involve hiring someone? People don’t work for free. Where I live taxpayers are in revolt over school budgets. There are a lot of grandmas out there who will not appreciate paying for someone to teach subjects that people have figured out on their own in the past.</p>
<p>Let’s keep education focused on subjects that we need teachers for.</p>
<p>On the personal finance class: a couple of years ago a state legislator (a friend of mine, as a matter of fact) got a bill passed requiring such a course for graduation throughout this state. It went into effect last year. I happen to think the idea of this course is not a bad thing, especially given the events of the last couple of years in which thousands of Americans proved they have no financial sense. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, even here in College Town, full of educated people, the schools have had trouble finding competent people to teach the course. I can’t even imagine how it must be going in poor school districts.</p>
<p>Good intentions are not enough. We are talking about tax money–and student time–here.</p>
<p>Split opinion on this one. On the one hand, I think my kids are getting all of the pragmatic stuff by being part of our day-to-day life. The older one now has to sign her tax return, so she’s gone through the process of seeing how it gets filled out. They can do their own laundry, fix a running toilet, write a check, address an envelope (bat mitzvah thank-yous pretty much burned that into their brains), comparison shop, come up with a budget, fix a tear in a shirt, wash a car, assemble furniture from IKEA and defrost a freezer. They understand why and how we refinanced our mortgage last year. Their knowledge is of course imperfect and incomplete, which can be amusing such as when they turn on the air conditioning on the first day of hot weather without realizing that they need to change the thermostat, which was set to 69 degrees for heating the house. Yet I have great faith in their being able to rise to the occasion and fill in those gaps. One of my kids was present when I keeled over at a friends’ house; the spouse was out of town. By the time the paramedics arrived, she’d gotten out my insurance card from my wallet and had calmly called another adult relative. She talked to the paramedics, found out where I was being taken, and relayed that to the relative. All this on her own, without the other adults present telling her what to do. The only thing that the other adults convinced her to do was to call my spouse. D’s reaction was “why bother? a grownup can’t do anything from across the country, and it’s after bedtime there.” </p>
<p>On the other hand, sometimes hearing things from adults who aren’t their parents is the only thing that will penetrate a teenager’s brain. Plus, not all kids grow up in homes with parents who teach them to cook, or take them with to the voting booth, or help them set up their first checking account.</p>
<p>“Plus, not all kids grow up in homes with parents who teach them to cook, or take them with to the voting booth, or help them set up their first checking account.”</p>
<p>I think that many such students don’t graduate from high school.</p>
<p>The title of this thread made me smile.</p>
<p>S who has been out of college for a year just learned the hard way how not to operate a blender. Something about the interface between the bottom of the container and the base…leading to 2 cups of margarita mix on the floor…</p>
<p>The most important thing for any kid faced with a task or problem is being able to figure out what they do if they don’t have the exact solution in hand. A few years back, when cell phones were really starting to take off, the LA Times had an article on how many college students were calling home whenever there was a problem. One student dropped their keys down the dorm elevator shaft. He/she called home, 2000 miles away, to ask what to do. I turned to then-in-elementary-school D2 and her friend, and asked them what THEY would do if they were in college and they dropped their keys down the elevator. “Uh, go ask someone in charge there for help?” they hazarded. I told them congratulations, they were smarter than at least one clueless college student.</p>
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<p>Agreed.</p>
<p>Youtube, Wikihow, and many other fine websites have pretty detailed “how to” video clips that our kids will be able to access when they need them.</p>
<p>Has anyone seen the “how to fold a t-shirt” video clip on youtube? It is a big hit!</p>
<p>I’m not saying we should not teach our kids life skills but increasingly, there are other ways to learn stuff.</p>
<p>Why not preserve that last month of high school for good old fashioned chilling out, hanging out and loafing?</p>
<p>Midmo: I’m going to guess you live in Missouri, as we do. The new personal finance class required by the state is the new “driver’s ed” spot for football and basketball coaches in our district. Our son takes it second semester this year (his junior year). We will see if the assistant football coach can explain compound interest and the importance of insurance.</p>
<p>Like bluebayou’s school of reference, our high school student body is anything but checked out during the last month. But I generally find this to be true in schools (like his, ours) that have been intense from the beginning. I hear much more complaints about senioritis in non-intense schools, but that’s just my impression. One reason that our h.s. is definitely not checked out is that competition for honors designation at graduation is a point of personal pride on the part of the individual students, and these are announced at the grad ceremony.</p>
<p>I.m.o. the vast majority of skills being discussed for teens to learn belongs to the realm of parenting. There are two exceptions though: driver’s ed and personal finance.</p>
<p>The former used to be taken care of when h.s’s “in the olden days” offered both driver’s training and driver’s education. You learned The Vehicle Code and more in the driver’s ed class, which all students were required to take, in the publics; you learned safety, prudence, and some emergency techniques, including some first-aid. </p>
<p>Some public high schools in my area offer “Consumer Math.” That is sometimes a substitute offered to Special Ed students who are struggling with mainstream Algebra or Geometry, despite many attempts, good study habits, and supplemental summer courses. (Usually the summer courses are insufficiently instructed.) But in itself Consumer Math offers that practical financial education mentioned here, as well as learning the computation & concepts involved.</p>
<p>If I have a feeling about the “necessity” or “essential life skills” feature of this all, I guess I think it should be required as a college graduation requirement (from a 4-yr and a 2-yr), since indeed they’re about to go out into the world and should be smart consumers, able to survive and be responsible. It’s become more common now to stay in some sort of dorms or U housing until graduation, so leases outside of that are less routine than they used to be after the first year of college, at least it seems.</p>
<p>Also, I think that there are various reasons why the subjects of road safety (including first aid) and finances lend themselves well to class formats with peers, whereas things like laundry do not. As part of a phys ed requirement in college, D2 took a CPR course and got a certificate. (Definitely a life skill!) The class taught her comprehensively about nutrition as well, and other aspects of overall health, I think.</p>
<p>“If I have a feeling about the “necessity” or “essential life skills” feature of this all, I guess I think it should be required as a college graduation requirement (from a 4-yr and a 2-yr), since indeed they’re about to go out into the world and should be smart consumers, able to survive and be responsible. It’s become more common now to stay in some sort of dorms or U housing until graduation, so leases outside of that are less routine than they used to be after the first year of college, at least it seems.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that colleges should teach life skills. That’s a parenting function and also is something that any student smart enough to go to college can pick up from the Internet.</p>
<p>I would have been insulted if such a Mickey Mouse course had been offered at my college, and I would have felt my sons were wasting their time if such a course had been offered at their colleges.</p>
<p>^Well, I guess reasonable minds can differ on whether it should be required or not. I understand your point, but my D was not “insulted” that the class was “offered,” as you say, and she did not consider it “Mickey Mouse.”</p>
<p>I don’t have strong feelings about requirements in this case, and I said earlier that I agree that most of these belong in the parenting dept. Realistically, though, as both parent and educator, it’s my experience that some skills are more eagerly learned in class formats than other skills. (The larger point I was making, not successfully.;))</p>
<p>I’m surprised (well not really, this is CC after all) at the judgmental tone in some of these posts. So glad that <em>your</em> kids learned everything they need to know from their parents and that <em>you</em> feel it should be a parents’ job to teach them. Glad that works for you. Maybe it doesn’t work for others though, and really, it’s not your place to tell other people how their kids should learn certain things.</p>
<p>Another good example would be sex education. Do you think that children might best learn some of this stuff from their parents? If so, would you really presume to tell someone else that their child shouldn’t learn it elsewhere? </p>
<p>Whether or not my particular child may need certain skills or knowledge, I would always support having them offered in a classroom. It can be the parents’ option whether to take advantage of the class for their child. I would never presume to know what is appropriate for another family.</p>