This is a collaborative post
Do you ever wonder why we learned things in school that we would never use again? Learning algebra in maths, dissecting a frog or memorising the periodic table. Okay so they were good for some people but most of us also needed to learn life skills. These weren’t available to us when we were younger and from what I have seen of the education system, a lot of it still isn’t available to learn at school. Here is a list of lessons we were never taught at school
How To File A Tax Return
If you are confident enough to start your own business and you make enough money to start paying taxes, then you need to know how to file a tax return. But even though filing the tax return is bad enough, you need to also know what you can write off as a tax deduction and what cannot. Nowadays with more people than ever on Universal Credit, knowing about taxes is more important than ever. Self-employed people need to declare every month, what they make from their business. Then they also need to declare the expenses that they have incurred whilst running their business.
When you start a business, this is an absolute minefield. Whereas if you had learned it at school, you would be confident and know what to do. Sadly it was never in any of our lessons, so the accountants doing our taxes are making money from us!
How To Get A Good Credit Score, One Of The Lessons we were never taught
We were never taught at school that we needed to have a good credit score to take out a mortgage. So many of us never got on the housing ladder until later in life. There are many ways to build up a great credit score to make life easier for yourself. You can take out a loan and make regular payments. This shows the mortgage company that you have a history of paying your bills on time. You can also get a credit card and buy your shopping on it. Then pay it off straight away to avoid interest. This helps to build up your credit and also helps when you run out of money before payday.
Payday loans work the same way as credit cards. If you need money before payday, you can get a payday loan that is paid back fully out of your wages on payday. Although we may have skimmed over the idea of budgeting at school, we never learned how to make money work for us and the different options out there.
How To Fix A Car
Who owns a car but doesn’t know how to change a tyre or check the oil level? Lessons at school like this would have benefitted us greatly. There is nothing scarier as a woman than breaking down in the dark. Then not knowing how to fix the car. Maybe it’s because back in the day, boys did things like this and girls did needlework. These days girls are more welcome in these classes in college. But it is still not taught in school.
How To Cope With Mental Health Problems
When we were at school, if you had mental health problems then you were sent to a mental health hospital. Even today mental health is still a taboo subject and it is not covered in school. Wellbeing sessions and positivity classes would have been great and helped us through many problems through the years.
Finding coping ways would probably have been a great thing to learn at school. And listening to people talk about their own mental health journey would have been a good way to understand mental health as we grew up.
How To Do DIY – Important Lessons we were never taught
When you get your first home, you usually have a lot of DIY to do on it. This is where lessons at school would have been good for us. Okay, so we all made a picture frame when we were younger by banging some nails into some balsa wood. But we never learned how to change a plug or fix a broken window. So when you have your own home you never know how to fix things. Maybe this is why so much of our broken electricals get thrown in the bin because we don’t know how to change a fuse.
How To Be Self-Confident And Get What I Want
When we were at school we were told to behave and do what we are supposed to do. We were never shown how to get what we wanted. And how to be confident in ourselves. We were never shown or encouraged how to have enough confidence to go for what we wanted. Instead, we let people walk over us when we were younger, and as we grew up women were seen as the weaker sex. We were always paid less because we didn’t have enough confidence to speak out.
Luckily nowadays that has changed. Women are encouraged to get what they want and how to be more self-confident. They are lessons we were never taught, but girls have fought for equality and won.
How To Learn From Your Mistakes
We always beat ourselves up when we do something wrong or make a mistake. When we were at school we were punished for our mistakes. So as we grew up, we would get angry with ourselves when we made a mistake. But the truth is that we learn from our mistakes and we need to stop punishing ourselves. So we did something and it didn’t go the way we wanted it to go? Then get back up again and try again. The second or third time around, we do it differently and it works out.
There are many more lessons we were never taught at school, do you know of any? Drop a comment below.