What I Learned in Boating School Is...

John Minami

I used to love Spongebob when I was a kid. Heck, if I had Nickelodeon on my TV, I would still be watching it. Over the countless episodes (and re-runs) I have seen, there is one that comes to mind when I think about school. In this certain episode, Spongebob, the main character of the show who happens to live in a pineapple under the sea, has failed another test for his boating license (in the show, characters drive boats instead of cars because they live underwater). Mrs. Puffs, his boating instructor, is tired of his constant failure and tells him she'll pass him if he can write a 10-sentence essay about what he learned in boating school. The whole episode revolves around Mrs. Puffs trying to get Spongebob to write the essay, but he is unable to figure out what he learned in boating school. 

I sort of felt like Spongebob throughout my high school years. Sure I had learned a lot in my high school classes, but what had I actually learned? I learned about about how to find the area of a triangle and how America was founded, but honestly, those things didn't matter much to me. And I don't think they mattered much to anyone else. They were just things you had to remember and prove you could remember them in the form of a test, just so you could get a number on a sheet of paper telling you how smart you were. I didn't really consider myself to have "learned" anything in high school, or at least "learned" anything significant.

But when I had gotten to college, everything changed. I was suddenly learning useful things that I could actually use in life. Sure there are still a few things that I believe I will never use again (like the importance of Vietnamese culture in modern day Vietnam), but it's still definitely a lot better than in high school where I felt as if I wasn't learning anything useful.Yesterday, I was sitting in my statistics class when the teacher showed us a very interesting problem. We were supposed to figure out the actual percentage of a person having breast cancer after testing positive for it, considering the amount of people in a population that have breast cancer and the chances of having a false positive on a breast cancer exam. The results were ridiculous: if a woman tests positive for breast cancer, there is still only an 0.8 percent chance of her having breast cancer. We learned to use statiscal magic to prove this, and I believe this is definitely something that could be useful in life.