Lessons from School

With our older daughter Haley taking Business at the University of Windsor and our younger daughter Syd going to Grade 10, one tends to reflect on lessons we learned in our youth.

It's always interesting to note how similar and yet how different they can be.   Discipline is one of those lessons you learn to stay ahead of the game.   Both treated homework differently - one never had homework while the other one always seemed to have homework, even when she was taught the same teacher!  I found myself always doing homework first and then taking off for the rest of the afternoon/early evening doing what I wanted to do.

Going to University is a big step and I had the best of both worlds.   I lived in Residence during the week and went home on the weekends.   The bonus with this plan was all the good home cooked meals!  I also worked on the weekends as a bar-tender.  This gave me a good balance in taking on more responsibilities, earning some money and enjoying some leisure time.

Whenever Residence was too distracting, you always had three choices:  stay in your room and fight off the temptations to join the others, leave and go to the library or join the others.  The best lesson learned was sticking to finishing the homework first and ahead of time to participate in other things we wanted to do.  This made it easy when selecting one of the three choices and enjoyed choosing each one of them when appropriate for me.

Many students pulled all-nighters to study.  I tried that once only to learn you end up with information overload and end up very tired the next day making it challenging to focus on writing the.   Others were experts at it, however, for me it was a better pace to schedule studying over a period of time.

Attending classes was also a challenge for some.   I preferred the morning classes and always took one class from 4-7 which helped start the "weekend" earlier.   Pub night was Thursday night and  most semesters we had no classes on Friday.   Home on the weekend to work and back at it again on Monday morning.   The real tough part for some were those Friday morning accounting labs!  Happy to say I made it to almost every one of them.

One regret of all those years of school was never participating in any extra-curricular activities or joining a club.   It was go to class, do homework, work and find leisure time.   Today, I have interacted with many College and University students and find most are involved in some club or group or building their own company.   

I am embracing and looking forward to what our future generation brings.   Those that know me already see how proud I am of both my daughters.   Looking forward to going back to University in September even if thru my daughter's eyes.