I do, in fact, use what they taught me in school.

There's an argument in education that we don't teach children relevant, practical skills. I haven't heard this argument lately, so perhaps it's gone out of vogue, but here are some of the many skills I learned in school that I use weekly at work:

A basic understanding of statistics and normal curves.

I give and score standardized tests as a speech therapist. While I just consult tables, without ever performing statistical calculations, knowing the lay of the land is important. The reason I could take statistics my first year of college was thanks to the years of high school prep--algebra, geometry, precalculus. Math is important, even in a non-mathematical career.

Percentages, fractions, and decimals

A great deal of upper elementary and junior high math was dedicated to these, and for good reason. Can anybody name a math concept more useful to ordinary life than a percentage? I record data as fractions, and probably calculate percentages multiple times a day. (I use Google to calculate percentages--I don't do this by hand, I should specify. But I could if I needed to, because I also recall long division.)

Writing a structured, coherent essay in 40 minutes, incorporating evidence.

For a while I felt that my high school English and history classes, while engaging and interesting, hadn't contributed much to my long-term academic and career path. Later reflection has made me realize that they made me a brutally efficient writer. I have never been tempted to use AI for my enormous amount of report-writing — by the time I had fed the AI all the relevant data and edited the output, I probably could have just written the whole thing myself. Sure, there's the occasional paragraph I get stuck on, but I would argue there's a lot of value in getting stuck this way. It's not about writer's block: that shows up in creative writing rather than in structured tasks. If I'm getting stuck, it's because I'm missing some key piece of evidence I need to form an argument, or really need to think through some implications. Getting stuck when writing a report is a valuable problem-solving tool, not a human hiccup to be solved by AI.

Data Tracking

Thanks, science fair! All those years of poster boards and construction paper matting have given me the ability to draw up a quick data table, think about variables and confounders, and track trends via percentages. I try to get multiple trials and disregard outliers.

Brute-forcing your way through a complicated task with bad instructions.

Not technically on the curriculum, but also a valuable life skill. I had a few teachers whose vague instructions I just learned to roll with. They can't give you a bad grade if they didn't include a detailed rubric! I think I'm a more independent worker for that experience.

Using really bad software.

Another item not on the curriculum, but learning to fight SchoolChamp 4.3 is a life skill. Always draft your reports in a word processor before copy/pasting into SchoolChamp. Thankfully, I've been fighting software since AppleWorks kept crashing on the school MacBooks back in 2010.

What do you recall learning in school, on or off curriculum, that you bring to use in your job?