20 Days of Chill - What I learned in School

Welcome back to 20 Days of Chill! "What I learned in School" is today's prompt.

In a Top Ten Thursday we listed the things we are good at. Going through that list produces the following that is in some way related to school:

Writing. Not the alphabet. I mastered that before I even started Kindergarten. I spent some time at the hospital and was bored to tears, so with the help of the nurses and my Grandma who made the effort to send me letters carefully written in capital letters I kind of taught myself to read and write. With writing I'm talking essays. I'd say we learned some basics in high school, but the prompts our German teacher (my first language) gave us in college, taught me that you could have fun with it and include surprising twists in your story. Like the time I made Jean-Jacques Rousseau time travel to a time he could meet with Jean-Paul Sartre and have a heated discussion about destiny vs coincidence. 

Languages, other than my mother tongue (Swiss) German. In Switzerland kids have to learn French and English. If they chose so they may also take Italian and Spanish (which I did) and Latin and Greek (which I didn't, even though my teachers told me Latin was the mother of all languages and if I was going to become a doctor or a lawyer it'll come in handy, blablabla.) I was like nobody speaks Latin, it won't help me anything if I want to order a pizza in Rome.
Side note: I have never been to Rome, but it has certainly helped me to communicate with cleaning ladies at the office or at home!

Teaching. It may sound strange, how does school teach a kid how to teach. I'll tell you how: by giving us good teachers who were role models. Even by giving us not so great teachers so we'd know how not to do it. As a college student I was turning a high school girl who sucked (and failed) at French. Not only did she graduate with a B, she grew up to become a teacher as well, and one of the subjects she teaches, is French!!

Rubik's cube. Wait a minute what has this to do with school? I was so bored in 4th and 5th grade (see: bad teachers) I had instruction sheets underneath my desk that described every step, and I learned them by heart. I can still do it today, so it's safe to say school teaches you sustainable skills.

Cooking. In high school we had cooking class for one year. We did learn the basics, even though it was old-fashioned cuisine, and the class included a lot of cleaning, booo! Still it was probably the most valuable life skill we acquired.

So in my opinion, of all the things you really need to successfully go through life, school is not teaching you all that much. In another post I was writing about the purpose of school. I was mainly talking about recess ;-) 

Kidding aside, I believe the most important skills kids get at school are social ones like communicating, listening to each other, fighting, finding common ground, making peace, stuff like this. Also some self management: planning and structuring your work, techniques how to study more efficiently,... 

So if I didn't learn all that much in school, then where? From people I admire, at work and  by blogging, oh, and on YouTube. I'm only half kidding. There's no subject that isn't covered by countless tutorials, some of which are pretty helpful. I mainly use them for recipes and crafts.

How about you? What did you learn at school? And where did you learn about life?

Of course now I wonder what my classmates aka fellow bloggers learned in school - join me over here!

Tomorrow we will let it snow (or not). Be sure to check back!