By Jade Myers/campus editor

Public schools need to actually prepare students for college life, not just standardized testing.

There is no hand holding in college classes, just like there is none at a job.

High school teachers should be lecturing by junior year at least, not giving their students notes or worksheets and not giving them homework even, except for maybe project-based homework.

That way students have to learn how to take proper notes and prepare for a test, like how to not wait until the night before to study for a test.

College is also usually the first time that students don’t get little worksheets and review sheets to help them learn the material.

Students in their first semester sit through a lecture and after usually think, “Oh, the teacher didn’t assign homework, so I don’t have to do anything for class.”

Wrong.

In college, it is the students’ job to spend time learning the material. But they don’t know how to because in high school they were given everything.

This sets them up for failure in an environment that is already new. Paying for classes, the amount of people in classes and time management is new to most of them.

There are enough new things they are learning to deal with in college. Good note taking and study techniques should not be a new thing for them, especially after 13-plus years of going to school.

The other problem is the classes they take in high school.

They need to take the basics like history, government, math, science and English. But in the last year or two, they could take life skill classes instead of useless electives.

Students should be learning about how credit and loans work. Most teenagers don’t know that you need credit to get the bigger things in life like a car or a house.

Classes about how to do taxes, how to live on a monthly budget and all the other life skills you need to know after high school should be required before the next step of college.