So, in preface, I went to an IB highschool, which was fun and also kind of a lot of work. On the plus side, the English classes were probably more rigorous than every English class I took at Rice except one: Literature and the Environment, senior year. I distinctly remember thinking, “Wow, I haven’t worked this hard at writing a paper/reading a book for class since high school.” On the downside, 2:1 girl to guy ratio so, you know, so few guys that I never, ever had a date, but enough guys that I could still feel like it was 100% my fault.1. Here are five things that I learned in high school that have actually come up again later in life:
1. Math
Yes, it is one of my life regrets that I took higher level IB math instead of higher level IB French in high school. I would have aced that French exam, or at least failed less embarrassingly than in math. “Oh well,” 18-year-old Patricia thought. “It’s not like I’ll ever really need this again.” WRONG. Not only did 20-year-old-Patricia decide that Math 101 would be a great, easy way to get some D3 credit out of the way (it was), but grad school Patricia finally got a job because she was a double threat of English AND Math tutoring skillz. Also, the research methods class I’m in now is like made of statistics, or is trying to be. Maybe it’s just because no one’s awake that early in the morning, but a lot of us don’t seem up to the questionable challenge. The professor has had to remind us that y=mx+b multiple times so far and a lot of times just tells us how to get the stat pack to spit out numbers and says “… and don’t worry about how this happened.” I assume the rumors I’ve heard about this exam being hard are because all of the English BAs in this library program have forgotten what a square root is.
It looks like this, just fyi.
2. Grammar Rules
My senior year I had an English teacher who was obsessive about grammar. Every time we turned in our 4 essays on whatever book (“journals” as they were called, but that makes it sound fun and reflective when it wasn’t), she would mark all of our grammar mistakes with a highlighter and a system of abbreviations of her own devising. Then we would have to correct all of them and turn them in again, a process that seemed way more laborious while doing it than it takes to describe. My first journal corrections (don’t ask me why I saved these), I had 19 (mostly dangling modifiers). By the end I was only getting one or two (mostly word choice), so clearly I was improving. And, yes, I can see the appeal of being able to write mistake-free, but what’s the point of obeying some of these more obscure grammar rules that my supervisors won’t know about or follow? See above about the tutoring job; I’m pretty sure half the reason I got it was using the words “dangling modifier” in an appropriate way.
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