Like most graduating students, I often find myself wondering about life after high school: the taxes, the bills, the responsibility. No wonder everyone is so excited to graduate! I mean, moving out isn't a big deal at all. I'll find a nice big house, a partner to pay half the bills and a full-time job by the time I'm 21, right? Except, I'm not "most graduating students" in that I am well aware of how unprepared I am for adult life. I blame one person for my lack of knowledge about the rest of my life: the creator of pre-calculus 12.
Yes, I'm aware it was my choice to take this course, as it is not required that you take math in grade twelve, but was it really? As I have been told repeatedly since grade eight, universities do not accept workplace math as a prerequisite. So, being the overachiever that I am, I signed up for the top level math. Well, top level in my mind, I wasn't about to sign up for calculus 12. Yes, I may be more knowledgeable now than I was four months ago when I started the course, but that depends on your definition of "knowledgeable". I can definitely show you how to graph a Sin, Cos or Tan equation, in fact, I aced that test. I can more or less tell you about trigonometric identities, but I only got a 64% on that one. And if you asked me how many different ways you can arrange the letters in the word Ogopogo I would be thrilled to tell you the answer is a whopping 105. But if you asked me how to do my taxes, the result would be a blank stare coming from my eyes while my mouth lazily hangs open, a single drop of drool slowly oozing out.
Because that is the fact about my education. I was expected to learn how to do my taxes in planning 10, an online course, while I was simultaneously planning a future trip on a budget and painstakingly putting every detail of my life into a PowerPoint to be evaluated by a stranger. In order to pass, you read an article and answer a series of questions about said article and voila! You have been taught how to do your taxes.
I am told that the kids who took workplace math did a whole unit on the matter. Well lucky them, they may know a little more about real life but I am more qualified to get into university because I took a higher level math course. I am 90% sure I will never apply pre-calc to my adult life unless I become a math teacher, but at least I'll be more educated than the other students by the end of highschool. Let's just hope one of them becomes an accountant.
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