Five paragraph essays. The boiling point of liquid oxygen. Piecewise functions. Do any of these apply to our futures? Some topics included in the various curricula of today’s high school classes seem to appeal very little to our ability to be successful once we have our diplomas.

Yes, if you want to be a chemist, you should probably have some background knowledge on electrons and whatnot before applying to college. And yes, if you want to be a mathematician, you should most likely know algebra and all that good stuff. Also, if you want to be that annoying person at the party who corrects other people’s grammar, definitely know what a predicate nominative is.

But will any of this matter once our lives are on track? After senior year, I doubt I will ever need the equation y=mx+b to achieve anything worthwhile. So why am I, along with my peers, stressing for hours each night over something that is only applicable to my grades and nothing bigger?

We should be learning constructive material that applies to what we want to do as a career, and not the trivial little facts included in the syllabus. And if you don’t know what you want to do for a living, you could find out with trial and error, as opposed to wasting years and years on details that will more likely than not have little to no use in the future.

Now, I’m not saying that we are at a total loss. The first few years of schooling were definitely useful. Addition and subtraction, the foundation of reading, and basic world history are definitely essential to one’s success. But how to graph an inequality, how to identify an adverb, and Thomas Jefferson’s third child’s name? Get real. We have no use for these miniscule components that are shoved up our noses each day, yet we still stress out about them despite their insignificance, which, in my opinion, is a real shame.