It was tenth grade geometry. We were learning how to find the volume of 3D shapes. And while my teacher was explaining the formula for a cone, my mind drifted to my cousin Dylan.
Dylan became a lineman straight out of high school. He never went to college — school just wasn't his thing. And right now he's doing incredibly well for himself. Good money, real skills, a career he's proud of. He never once needed to find the volume of a cone.
Then I thought about my sister. She's a nurse now. She went to college, yes — but for nursing. And in all of her schooling, and in all of her years on the job, she has never once used high school geometry. Not once.
So I'm sitting there in class wondering: why is this a required course? Why is this what we're being judged on to get into college? Why does the entire system act like this is essential knowledge, when the two most successful people I know have never used it?
School only shows you one."
High school has this unspoken message it sends every single day: the goal is college. Get good grades, take hard classes, score well on tests, get into a good school. That's the path. That's what success looks like.
But Dylan didn't take that path. And he's successful. My sister took a version of that path — but she specialized immediately, and nothing from her general high school education actually helped her become a nurse.
The truth is that success after high school is incredibly varied — trade school, community college, four-year university, entrepreneurship, starting a career right away. And almost all of those paths require the same foundational life skills: how to manage your mental health, how to handle conflict, how to understand money, how to navigate the job market.
None of that is on the curriculum. But it should be. And until it is — that's what this site is for.
Here's what I think high school should look like: start with life skills. Teach every student how to manage money, handle relationships, take care of their mental health, and understand the world they're about to enter. Make that the foundation.
Then, use college admissions and graduation requirements to judge students on those things — not on whether they can solve a proof nobody outside of a math class will ever ask them to solve.
After that, let students specialize. If you want to be an engineer, go deep on math. If you want to be a nurse, go deep on biology and communication. And if you genuinely don't know what you want yet, let the specialized classes be how you figure it out.
I'm not saying school is bad. I'm saying it's incomplete. And the gap it leaves — the gap between graduating and actually knowing how to live — is what this site is trying to fill.
I learned how to build a real website from scratch. I learned how to research topics I knew nothing about and turn them into something actually readable. I learned that I genuinely enjoy making things — which is something I didn't know about myself before this project.
But more than the technical stuff, I learned about the topics themselves. The mental health section hit differently when I was the one writing it. The hard conversations page made me realize how many conversations I'd been avoiding. The taxes page made me realize I had absolutely no idea how any of that worked.
In trying to fill the gap for other people, I accidentally filled it a little for myself too.
I picked these six topics because every single one of them will come up in your actual life — and none of them are on the curriculum.