Why Your Kid Thinks School Subjects Are Useless (And What They’re Actually Learning)
We were stopped at the red light on Main Street, on the way to my 10-year-old’s Tuesday soccer practice, when he crumpled his history homework into a ball and tossed it onto the floor next to his muddy cleats and a half-eaten bag of Goldfish. “Why do I have to memorize the dates of all these Babylonian kings?” he groaned. “I’m never gonna be a historian. This is totally useless.”
I opened my mouth to say the usual thing—just get it done for the grade, quit complaining—when I stopped. I remembered the weekend three weeks earlier, when we’d built the raised tomato bed he’d begged for all spring. He’d measured the backyard spot himself, calculated how much lumber we’d need with the area formula he’d learned in math that month, and walked with me to the hardware store to pick everything out. When we got home and cut the first two planks, they didn’t fit. The math had checked out on paper, but he’d forgotten to account for the overlap of the corner brackets we were using. He stood there holding the too-short plank, frowning, instead of asking me to fix it. He went back, re-measured the gap, adjusted his total, subtracted the extra half inch each corner would take, and re-cut the list. By the end of the day, we had a level, solid bed that’s still holding his tomato plants right now.
No one talks about that part when they complain about school. We all fixate on the content: the dates, the formulas, the verb conjugations that you’ll forget a week after the final. I work three days a week as an intervention aide at the local elementary school, and I hear the same complaint from parents and kids all the time: when am I ever gonna use this? What I see every day, though, is that the content is just the workout. The point isn’t the Babylonian kings. The point is that while you’re sorting their reigns into chronological order, matching them to clay tablet sources, and connecting a change in rainfall to a shift in power, you’re teaching your brain how to think.
It’s easy to miss that, because we’re all focused on grades and test scores. Last month I watched a group of third graders complain about long division, insisting they’d just use a calculator for everything when they grew up. What they don’t see is that long division isn’t about getting the right answer to a problem on a page. It’s about learning to break a big, messy problem into small, manageable steps. It’s about checking your work as you go, and starting over if you end up with a number that doesn’t make sense. That’s the same skill you use to fix a leaky faucet, plan a birthday party on a budget, or sort out why your favorite video game won’t load. You don’t have to remember how to do long division when you’re 40 to have benefited from practicing it.
I’ve stopped giving the canned lectures when my son complains. I used to say it builds discipline or you need it for high school, but that’s too far away to matter to a 10-year-old. Now I do two small, concrete things that work better than any speech. First, I ask him to tell me what he’s actually doing to finish the assignment, not just what he has to memorize. When he complained about diagramming sentences last week, I said “What’s the process you have to follow to get that right?” He said “Well, you find the main verb first, then the subject, then you sort out all the adjectives and prepositions that are just extra.” I said “Wait, isn’t that exactly what you did yesterday when you figured out why your Minecraft server kept crashing? You found the main problem first, then sorted out which extra mods were messing it up.” He didn’t say anything, but he packed his homework back into his folder and got back to it. That’s the connection we need to make, not some vague promise about the future.
The second thing I do is stop joking about how useless certain subjects were when I was a kid. I used to say “I never used algebra after high school, why do they even teach it?” and I realize now that just reinforces the idea that school is just a bunch of arbitrary hoops. Now I say “I don’t solve for x every day, but the problem solving I learned doing algebra helps me adjust our grocery budget when the price of milk goes up, or figure out how much paint I need for the living room.” It’s a tiny shift in language, but it makes a difference in how he sees the work he’s doing.
Some assignments really are bad, I’ll admit. Sometimes it’s just a busy worksheet that doesn’t make anyone think harder, and that’s okay. We don’t have to defend every single thing schools do. But most of the time, when your kid is staring at something that feels useless, it’s not the content that matters. It’s the work their brain is putting in. Even if they forget the specific fact a month later, the thinking skill sticks.
Last night, my son looked up from that Mesopotamia homework and said “Wait a second. These guys messed up their irrigation because salt built up in the soil and their crops died, so everyone moved. That’s the same thing that guy was talking about with the Colorado River, right? Too much irrigation, bad for the soil.” He still complained about having to memorize the dates for the quiz on Friday. He still thinks most of homework is a pain. But he connected two things that didn’t look like they belonged together. He practiced spotting a pattern, linking an old problem to a new one, that’s the whole point. We just don’t talk about it enough. It’s not about the subject. It’s about the brain you build while you study it. Some days that’s enough.
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