You are sitting at your desk. The time of the year has come for you to pay your taxes and you are freaking out. Where do you even start? There are so many things to do and so little time to do it. Everything is so confusing and you are getting more and more overwhelmed by the minute. You have tried to avoid this day for months and there is no more time left.
You begin to wish you had taken Learn and Earn in high school. All your friends that did probably aren’t having this problem right now…
The class popularly known for being practical and useful in the real world truly lives up to its name. Learn and Earn should be a required class for all students at Liberty, especially seniors.
In school, we learn all of the “hard subjects” such as literature, calculus or United States history, but we are often deprived of the skills we are going to need years after high school ends. These “soft skills,” like balancing a checkbook, knowing how to best prepare for an interview, being aware of our human rights as employees and many more things are often not covered. Though these skills seem like common knowledge to all adults, it is appalling to see the overwhelming amount of students who do not know how to do these simple life tasks or do not even understand the importance of knowing them.
In twelfth grade, all seniors are required to complete an exit interview, which is said to be done in order to give seniors experience with these soft skills before graduating. If the school recognizes that this is important, why not require everyone to have an entire semester of experience and exposure to these things?
As students, we often live in a bubble where everything is done for us. Though some might get a job, others go through high school without any experience of how to deal with the real world. Learn and Earn allows students to be exposed to skills that will be helpful in the reality of the world, and not just live in the shelter of their own homes.
Though Learn and Earn is not a walk in the park, you will be glad you took it later in life. Graduating and going out into the world can be intimidating to many seniors, and being able to have knowledge of the basic skills of life can set anyone up for success.