7 Life Lessons We Learned in Grade School

Before we go straight to the 7 life lessons, may I first ask you to close your eyes, just for a minute and reminisce what your grade school years were like? Am I seeing a smile on your face right now? If so, that's great! Looks like you had a great time! :)

Most people will agree that grade school was one of the happiest moments of our lives. If we haven't gone through kindergarten or nursery school, grade school would be the first time we went out from the comforts of our home and started meeting school kids like us, started interacting with them, started making friends or worst, having our first enemy/ies (I hope not, but it happens). This would also be the first time that we've met our beloved teachers, the unsung heroes who shared their knowledge and contributed a lot to where we are today. More importantly, grade school was the start of our learning journey. Here we learned the basics of things which eventually scaled up to further sharpen our intellect and creativity.

Apart from the technical learnings, we may have missed noticing that grade school also taught us important life lessons. What I'm going to share with you today are just some of the lessons I can think of while writing this blog. Most of these depict a normal grade school Filipino setting so if you are a Filipino, I'm sure you can relate to these. Alright, let's jump right into it.


1. Raise your hand.

This is one of the basic things we all learned from our grade school teachers. No matter how intelligent you are or no matter how much you know the answer to their question and eagerly excited to burst it out, you should raise your hand first and wait for your name to be called before you start speaking.

As we grow older, we will realize that this habit taught us the values of respect and patience. We have to listen when people talk and be patient enough to wait for our turn to speak. This also relates to one of the habits I learned from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Habit number 5 - "Seek first to understand, then to be understood." 

In our world today where most people have a lot of opinions about things, we should hear what they have to say and respect their views even if it contradicts to our own views. At the end of the day, everyone is entitled to their own opinions and we all have the freedom to say what we want to say.


2. Take your seat.

As kids, we tend to be super active. Our attention span is very thin so we easily get distracted. We don't want to just sit in our chair, so most of the time, we find ourselves running around the classroom and playing with our classmates. But our teachers will always tell us to take our seat, especially if the class is about to start.

This is one of the basic disciplines we learned from our teachers. We should behave properly and focus our attention on what they are teaching us. As we grow older, we realize in a deeper context that taking our seat also means keeping our focus and having the values of humility and contentment. If we want to be successful in life, we have to focus on the valuable things and improve ourselves at least 1% every day. If we want to feel contented, we should stay grounded and appreciate what we have. An entitled mindset will lead us nowhere, and it can be a burden to our lives.


3. Honesty is the best policy.

I'm pretty sure that this is a common lesson we all learned from grade school. Like our parents, our teachers also emphasized to us the importance of being honest. How? By simply not telling lies and being true to ourselves.

As a kid, telling the truth has sometimes been hard for us because of the element of fear. We fear that our parents or teachers will get mad at us if we admit that we did something wrong. We feared that they might punish us so we tend to tell a lie instead. And we know that lying is a bad thing.

As we grow older, we will realize that being honest is a crucial value to our relationships, whether at school, at work or even in our personal lives. Sooner we will realize that being honest also relates to having integrity - doing the right thing even if no one is watching. The value of integrity is a crucial aspect of our success as an employee and as a mature individual.


4. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

Isn't it funny how we were taught to always wash our hands before eating and after going to the restroom? Yes, it became tiring and boring at some point but in the long run, we should be thankful that at a young age, our parents and teachers taught us the importance of cleanliness and personal hygiene - taking a bath every day, brushing our teeth, wearing clean clothes, etc. I'm pretty sure that in one way or another, this habit made us feel good about ourselves and boosted our confidence.

Our teachers also taught us to maintain cleanliness in our classroom, avoid littering, and even assigned us to clean our classroom at some point, the same things our parents taught us to do at home. As we grow older, we realize the value of being organized and always keeping things neat and tidy. We will learn that cleanliness is a key to a healthy lifestyle, away from sickness and disease.


5. Do your homework.

A basic rule in school is if we don't want our teachers to get mad, we should do our homework. Doing our homework has been a vital part of our school years. At some point, we felt tired and bored, at the same time threatened about the consequences of us not doing our homework. More importantly, we learned that doing our homework serves a great purpose - as a practical application of what we've learned or an advanced activity for our upcoming lessons.

As adults, we will realize that doing our homework taught us to be consistent in taking action, put into practice what we've learned, to be resourceful and use our creativity. It also taught us to always plan ahead, set our goals, be prepared and be alert at all times.


6. Time is gold.

Like "Cleanliness is next to Godliness", we often see this phrase in our classrooms. This phrase taught us to value time. As students, we were taught the basic discipline of punctuality - to always be on time and avoid being late. We also follow a schedule every day at school where there is a time for learning and also a time for eating and playing. Isn't it that most us consider "recess" as our favorite subject?

As we grow older, we will realize how precious time really is. We will often feel that there's a scarcity of it, that there's a lot of things that need to be done but we don't have much time. We will beat deadlines to be able to deliver what our boss asked us to do. We will be a slave of time and we will soon feel stressed and tired. If we don't value time as early as we're in grade school, we will definitely have a hard time managing our time well sooner or later in our lives.

If you're currently struggling with time management, don't feel bad. That's normal and there's a cure for that. I will be writing a blog about it soon. Please watch out for it. :)


7. The golden rule.

One of the most precious things we learned in school is the golden rule: "Do unto others what you want others to do unto you" or in simple terms "treat others the same way you want to be treated". This phrase has been very popular, not just in the classroom setting but also in real life.

As we grow older, we realize how important the golden rule is. It is a gateway for us to build lasting relationships, to gain respect and trust from other people. We learned to be kind and to treat every person with respect. This is also a crucial factor in the success of our professional and personal lives.

Successful people invest in themselves and share what they have to others. People working in charitable institutions devote most of their time to help the people in need. I, myself is also a firm believer in the power of giving. As Winston Churchill once said, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give."

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