"When am I ever going to use this?"

Pick an adult you respect, one you consider successful and happy.

If you're in school, maybe pick your math teacher. 

Now: ask them when they last used the method of completing the square to factor a 2nd-degree polynomial in a real-life situation.

We all know what they're going to say. We can justify, or qualify, or contextualize -- but we all know exactly what they're going to say: Never. They have never used the thing that’s going to eat up a month of your math learning time, not even once.

1. Perform a 'gap analysis' -- look at what you do know, look at what your teachers, text and real life think you should know, and document the path from A to B in terms of topics to be worked with.

2. Consider these topics in terms of the 2-by-2 above -- grading each in terms of how hard it is to learn, and how important it is relative to your goals. 

3. Tackle the topics one-by-one based on where they sit in this scheme, alongside your personal priorities, in the most high-impact order and via the most effective approach.

That's it. Super-simple. We don't have to skip anything, but we'll tune things up and down based on the next most useful hour of your time as a math learner --  as informed by the sometimes, somewhat overlapping priorities of teachers, the state, the Test, college admissions, curiousity, future prospects, and, oh yeah, how math actually improves the actual lives of actual people.*

We'll tune as we go, measure for progress, talk about how things are going with eachother, with teachers and parents, and keep at it until we've got momentum and understanding, until you're comfortable and capable. Hooray!

* This is not an attack on learning for learning's sake, or an assertion that we should just let all students have complete freedom to learn (or not) whatever they want. It is a recognition that we coerce young people into listening to teachers for a maximum of 6 hours a day, and our reasons for asking them to spend that time on a particular topic have to be very clear, tuned to reality, and morally-justifiable. Factoring binomials simply does not clear that bar.**

Should a student elect to learn these less-immediately-applicable methods -- and some will! -- we should help them do so. But if they don't, we were going to have a hard time forcing them to do so, anyway, and without a sound practical and moral footing for the coercion, best to tell them that it's their responsibility to choose their passions than force the questionable priorities in most math curricula on them. 

Quite in opposition to any panicked predictions, approaching education from this perspective of authentic, collaborative, goal-driven, practical, and transparent impacts will produce better-prepared, more curious, more engaged humans, not the opposite.

** If it sounds to you like I'm asserting that our current math curriculum is beyond ineffective to the point of actually being immoral, I am, because it is. It hurts kids, something I believe we should be minimizing.