Useful Education

The mindset of many teenagers is that our education is useless to us. When will we ever use a skill such as diagramming sentences, knowing the stages of photosynthesis, or finding the solution to an inequality? Most likely never.  However, there are certain in-school activities that we feel are irrelevant and unnecessary, such as writing these thINKs, as well as journaling when we read. What we do not realize, is that these skills are, in fact, used in the real world, and it is essential for us to learn. We must be able to make connections between two different things, and we must be able to ask appropriate, reasonable questions to fully understand something. A good example of a situation in which one would need these abilities is if one was a detective or a criminal investigator.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, sixteen-year-old Harriet Vanger disappeared without a trace. It was as if she had simply evaporated from the face of the Earth. This unsolved case has never stopped haunting Harriet’s great uncle, Henrik Vanger, as well as the investigator of the case, Gustaf Morell. Forty years later, Vanger, the aged former CEO of the prestigious Vanger Enterprises, hired journalist Mikael Blomkvist to do all he could to find the truth of the fate of his great niece.

Blomkvist was given all police records on the case, and as he was reading the reports, he was jotting down questions he wanted answers to, as well as small details that he noticed within the pages of the unsolved mystery. “By late evening, when he closed the binder, he had filled several pages of his own notebook – with reminders and questions to which he hoped to find answers in subsequent binders.” (pg. 147) – This is putting our reading journals into the real world. “A note sent at 11:20 a.m. stated that P-014 (police car? patrol? pilot of a boat?) had been sent to the site.” (pg. 148) – Just like the criteria for this very assignment, he is asking questions about what he is reading.

We ask ourselves, why do we have to do these reading journals? Well, this is why. Although it is in a different situation and context, it is still the same concept. Maybe the next time we want to complain about pointless work, we should ask ourselves whether it really is pointless or not.

--Marie