Not everything that kids need to know about life can be picked up by reading a textbook. There are some skills that are only possible to learn by getting your hands dirty. That’s what Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Kentucky argued recently when they added a new course to their curriculum — Adulting 101.
The three-day class aims to teach kids valuable life skills through experiential education.
They go over things like checking the oil in a car, changing a tire, and hanging up a picture on the wall. Even simple stuff like how to prepare meals in a microwave is covered.
“I know I have a spare tire in my car, but I would have known nothing to do with it,” senior Lilly Farmer told WLKY.
While school is great at preparing kids for rigorous academic exams, many times, the basics of what it means to be an adult are never included in the curriculum.
Adulting 101 plans on changing all that, setting the seniors of the high school up with the knowledge necessary to succeed in the real world outside the four walls of the classroom. As adults ourselves, we often forget what it’s like to not know about basic life rules like separating darks and lights when doing laundry or washing things you don’t want to shrink on the cold setting.
“I learned a lot about how to do my laundry. I mean, I kind of knew some aspects of it, but I never sorted by clothes or anything like that,” said Farmer.
Many kids are so used to their parents taking care of household tasks and chores that they never learned the simple steps required to complete them on their own.
That’s what adulting is in a nutshell — doing lots of mundane chores over and over, not because we want to, but because we have to.
It’s part of life and growing up, however, you still need someone to teach you how to complete these sorts of tasks. Otherwise, how would you ever know?
College Access Resource teacher Sara Wilson-Abell recognized the need.
She saw that a lot of her students were lacking in the skills required to become functioning independent adults and decided to organize the class.
“The term ‘adulting’ has been a big thing lately. So I kind of just took that idea and ran with it,” said Wilson-Abell.
She didn’t do it alone though. Wilson-Abell also enlisted some other adults to help.
For example, former Fern Creek High School student Gerron Hurt who after graduating, went on to win the American cooking show MasterChef. He gave the kids simple tips during their “microwave dorm room cook-off challenge” that was designed to prepare them for college dorm life.
Pro tip: when you have to live in a small space without a full kitchen, a microwave and a bag of pizza rolls suddenly become an important form of sustenance.
While some adults might expect kids to just know how to do some of these tasks already, the kids themselves felt otherwise.
They all felt like they got a lot of value from the hands-on class.
“They’re like, ‘Oh they should know how to change a tire, they should just know how to do this stuff.’ But we actually, in reality, have never been taught this, so we don’t know how to do any of it,” said Farmer.
All in all, we think it’s a pretty solid idea. We’re all for anything that helps our future generations to succeed in life. As you probably know, it’s not easy out there, and these high school seniors should count their lucky stars that some of their teachers went out of their way to show them the ropes.
Watch the full video of the Adulting 101 news story from WLKY below.
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