Watch how these ‘adulting’ classes work.
Video credit: FOX 4 Now
A lot has been said about how the so-called millennial generation struggles with the challenges of daily living and that’s how the term “adulting” came up around a decade ago. But hard as these life skills may be, there’s no denying that they’re necessary.
While skills like cooking, changing a tire, or paying taxes are ideally learned at home, the fact that young adults are struggling with those skills means that reality is quite different. Which is why Bullit Central High School in Kentucky has started teaching these necessary life skills apart from academic subjects like biology and algebra.
The school held an “adulting conference” late last year for its senior class, according to the school’s Facebook page. Their main goal was to equip these young adults with the necessary life skills to get through the adult world.
According to WAVE, there were 11 guided workshops that taught skills such as cooking in a dorm room and how to file taxes.
The school encouraged its seniors to pick three workshops that they found interesting or helpful so that they could “gain more knowledge and skills pertaining to their lives once they leave us here at BCHS.”
Christy Hardin, who is director of the BCHS Family Resource & Youth Services Center, came up with the even after noticing that a lot of students weren’t equipped with these “real life” skills before heading to college.
She said, “I think that the idea occurred to me originally, I saw a Facebook post that parents passed around saying they needed a class in high school on taxes, and cooking. Our kids can get that, but they have to choose it. And (Adulting Day) was a day they could pick and choose pieces they didn’t feel like they had gotten so far.”
The BCHS initiative follows the trend of an increasing number of millennials signing up for cooking classes and similar workshops because they were never taught these skills growing up.
Elena Toumaras, 29, told CBS New York after signing up for a cooking class, “I was so used to, when living at home, my mom always cooking. Doing simple things now that I’m on my own, I’m struggling with it.”
The “Adulting Day” workshop got a lot of praise online from students and adults who wished that something like this was offered back when they were growing up.
Rob Shaub wrote on Facebook, “So it’s like Home Ec and Shop and Music and PE, What a Great Idea. Thank you for bringing this into schools again.”
“Yup. It would have been nice if my school taught us about budgeting, mortgages, insurance, filing taxes, etc. instead of needless topics like Chemistry’s balanced equations and Math’s geometry,” Raven Bard said. “Seriously, I’ve not used half the things I had to learn in school in regular everyday adulting. What a waste.”
But while the feedback has been positive, others were of the opinion that it’s not the school’s responsibility to impart these skills.
“I went to high school in a similar time period as you,” Lori Reynolds said. “A whole semester of cooking, a whole semester of useful math skills (banking, loans, interest rates, etc), changing tires and oil, etc…now they squeeze all these minimal daily living skills into one day, and have to have organizations come in for the day to teach it? That’s just pitiful. What a sad state the schools are in today.”
“Yeah, it SHOULD be left to the parents,” Nathan agreed. “It would be nice if they actually taught their kids something useful. Teachers already have a hard enough time with these kids who haven’t learned discipline from their parents.”
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