Subjects I wish I had taken in school

Since I graduated from high school, I have a recurring dream every now and then: that I have to take my final exam, but something always gets in the way so that I will never make it on time and therefore will not get my diploma. And of course, I wake up before I reach the exam room. So frustrating. Now I must say that ‘frustrating’ is indeed a good word for my high school experience. I was a moody teenager and all the teachers were against me. At least, that's how I saw it back then. By now, I know it was a bit more nuanced, but there are still some things I don't understand when it comes to high school.

And then mainly the subjects. Why did I spend weeks struggling with all thousand German cases, but after my exam I didn't know how to do my tax return? Scrap those unnecessary subjects and do these instead, we benefit much more from that.

1. Filing a tax return
Yes, sorry, but how convenient would this be? We are just expected to do this ourselves, but the site is incomprehensible, I didn't even know where to start and it makes you really nervous because you want to do it right. You don't want the tax authorities on your back. It's incomprehensible that they don't teach us this in school.

2. How do you buy a house?
Everyone around me who has bought a house says unanimously: ‘There is so much involved.’ Various costs you have to incur, and what about those buyer costs, leasehold, and what exactly does an HOA entail? It would have been great if we had a block hour for this subject.

3. How to negotiate your salary
At fourteen, I had my first job as a pizza maker at New York Pizza and earned a generous €2.50 per hour. Yeah, that was money. Okay, I was very young, but I had no idea what the minimum wage for my age was. Or that you could even negotiate about these kinds of things and how that would work.

4. Stay informed about world news
During history class, you are expected to know hundreds of years by heart: when emperor what's-his-face was born and when that same unknown emperor died. But knowing what is going on around the abortion law and why that is just allowed in America, no way. Maybe this is not the case at other schools (thankfully), but my school could have benefited from this in any case.

5. How should you learn?
Seriously, I really needed this subject in my first year of high school. It is just expected that we master all subjects, but I came from Montessori education. In other words, I had only played cards and slept in the library in grade 8. Suddenly, I ended up in a gymnasium class where I had to do homework; I had never done that before. And learning in general: how do you approach that in the smartest way? What is a good tactic? That you don't just memorize words, but also understand and remember them. I would have really benefited from this during my further studies.