Will “Family Living” Be Any More Helpful Than The Quadratic Formula?
At 17 and 18 years old, seniors in high school should be learning how to cook, do laundry, take care of themselves, manage a budget, and how to handle the various social situations they will encounter in college. Instead, here at Verona High School, we are learning how to get married and have a baby.
In the 1400s, the average age at which people got married was 17. However, women were also sold off by their fathers to be married in exchange for cattle, land, and peace treaties. Women would have sometimes over 9 children, and their only job was to stay home to take care of the house and kids. Today, the average age to get married is 26. But more people than ever before will never marry or have children; in the US, over 20 percent of people over 40 have never been married. And 3.4 percent of the adult population identify as a sexuality other than heterosexual.
In our class of 160 students, statistically, 5 students do not identify as heterosexual, and 32 students will not marry for the next 22 years, if ever. And yet we are being taught that being married to a person of the opposite sex and having a child is what we are supposed to do, and what we will do.
In my class, we had more girls than boys, so I was paired with another girl. When assigning partners, my teacher said each student’s name, then declared them “married”. When he got to my project partner and me; since we were both girls, he declared us “roommates”. Because apparently everyone is heterosexual, and people of the same gender never live together except as roommates. I was so outraged by this I that demanded my teacher deem us married like everyone else, no matter my, nor my partner’s sexuality. Even then, they would not acknowledge a same sex couple as “married”.
The project began with us declaring what college we “went” to, what our major was, and what career we will have. However, my partner and I both require graduate school for our future careers, and the project would allow no more than four years of college.
This would be fine, but the purpose of this project is to teach us things we can to apply to our lives after high school. So if I am not allowed to use my actual planned course, then what’s the point? I am not learning anything that I will use in my life if it is not my life I am learning about, but rather some cookie-cutter life planned out for me by my high school phys ed teacher. My partner and I had to discuss this problem with my teacher at length before he finally allowed us to get our imaginary graduate degrees.
Yet another problem arose when we were only allowed to live within the tristate area. Because apparently no one ever leaves the black hole that is the tri-state area; once in, you never escape.
As one of the last parts of the project, we had to have an imaginary baby. Which, as if it isn’t creepy enough, incorrectly assumes that everyone will want to have a child.
So, what this project is really teaching us is that everyone is heterosexual, will go to college for four years, get married directly out of college, stay in the tristate area, and wants to have a child right after getting married.
With a few minor exceptions, I found this project to be completely useless. My life will not follow this direction, I will create my own path as I go, as will everyone else. No two people will have the same life, and most plans for the future do not work out as we expect them to. Most likely, I will not be married right out of college, nor will I have a child right after getting married. Most of this is ten years down the road at least, yet we learn about it now. I will just add this project to my mental file of “things I will never use again that I was forced to learn in school”, along with the quadratic formula, and the exact date of every battle in WWII.
Luke Catania • Mar 24, 2015 at 4:43 pm
To the author:
Claire, I don’t know if you remember me, but I graduated from Verona High School as a member of the Class of 2014 (last June). While the article is greatly written, as someone who actually did this project my senior year, I need to address that there are some inaccuracies with what you say. However, know that I am coming from my own personal experience from my class alone. I do not how other classes may have done this project. First off, when it came to people being “married,” you are right, somewhat. When it came time for us to pick our partners, there was a day of class set aside for speed dating. I’m not going to go into the specifics because they are self-explanatory, but at the end of the day, each of us would write down a Top 5 list of who you would be okay with being partnered up, as well as a list of people you did not want to be partners with. The next day, the teacher (for me it was Mrs. Hemsley) would tell us who our partner was. Then there would be a “ceremony,” where Mr. Cesa would come in and declare all of us married. I know from previous years there would’ve been roommates, but that is only because our school, and I think the nation, hadn’t fully incorporated sexual/gender equality, or at least wasn’t aware of it. However, after historical rulings from the Supreme Court, and the changing of our nation’s attitudes on issues such as gay marriage, I do not think it is accurate to say the school assumes everyone is heterosexual. Secondly, when it came to graduate schooling and where to live, and the calculations of such expenses, there was absolutely the possibility of attending graduate school (there was even a section on the worksheet that asked this) as well as the possibility to live anywhere. Even though my partner and I decided to live in Livingston because we found an affordable house there that was close to my job, I remember a group actually decided to fly out and live in California. Thirdly, I do not agree with when you say the project assumes everyone has to have a child. For my project, every team had to pick out of a hat and they were given a hypothetical scenario. Mine was that I had two twin daughters. Some people had multiple children. Some had only one. Some had none at all. The purpose of the project was not to force the future onto the participants, but to prepare the participants if the situation they picked occurred. Nevertheless, what concerns me is that this article was written in February of 2015 and claims things that did not occur when I was a senior in high school. Again, I am just going off my experience in Family Living with my teacher. You could’ve had a different experience/different teacher. If what you state is true, then good job on a well written article. I just wanted to counter this attitude that VHS does not care about students as a whole, because it certainly does.
Luke Catania
VHS Class of 2014