So many things
Square Dancing in Social Arts class
How an 8085 Microprocessor works (No one, and I mean NO one uses 256 kbytes of memory in 8 bit registers anymore)
How to Speak German using all 28 letter of their alphabet
Man, I could go on all day with this. I think over 80% of everything Ive learned in school was for nothing (both high shool AND college)
The Prime Assets Ratio
The Krebs Cycle
Y=C+I+G[SUB]1[/SUB]+G[SUB]2[/SUB]+X-M
The story of Domenic Savio’s life and times with Don Bosco.
Basketball
The Balfour Declaration
Rangers are bollocks.
I’m sure I don’t have enough pixels for an exhaustive list and I know the useful list would be quite a bit shorter. Jesus I hated most of my schooling.
That protons are indivisible. I think my parents had something similar with atoms.
Calculus - A required class for anyone going into computers in college. Not once have I ever needed to use it… which is a good thing because I don’t remember a thing about it.
Diagraming sentances - We were required to learn how to do this in 7th grade. Everyone wondered why. Teacher said it would help us better to understand English grammar. She was wrong. I learned more about English grammar by taking a year of Latin and 2 years of Spanish than I ever did by diagramming sentances in 7th grade.
Memorizing poems - Ok. I can understand why it would be important to read poetry, but to memorize a poem… why? It was completely pointless and never actually made me better understand the poem in the first place.
On the yearbook committee, we did the page layout using paper grids and a grease pencil to crop the photos. Now the kids use Quark Express or InDesign for that.
As stated before, DOS, BASIC, squaredancing and the Hustle are forever embedded in my memory but are absolutely useless now.
Various locker combinations
French
Haiku (until I found you guys)
Archery
papier-mâché
My Thesis, complete with field study, for my degree? The exponential growth of duckweed. Yeah - that’s come in handy over the years.
Really? I understand poetry much better once I’ve memorised it. I actually just memorised The Journey Of The Magi a couple days ago, just because I like it. Everyone’s different.
I learned to do a variety of square dances, disco, and something called the Alley Cat (which I can still do). It was supposed to make us better socialized.
Wow! Where to begin? Like a great number of other posters, I have never used:
sentence diagramming
Trig
German
BASIC programming
Punchcard everything
slide rules
the Dewey Decimal system (our school uses LoC)
On the other hand, all of my typing skills, and how to use a Selectric, are of great use every day, as our school district and speech league still use non-computerized forms that have to be filled out regularly.
All those damn WordPerfect 5.1 key combinations. “Reveal Codes” my ass.
Three years of compulsory Latin. I would like those bits of my life back.
The school song - really handy.
Yeah, I’ve never actually diagrammed a sentence since freshman year of high school, but I think it really did help me understand how sentences are put together, and what roles the various words and phrases and clauses play in them. I don’t know for sure how useful it was, but I think it at least helps me understand the grammar threads that crop up every now and then in GQ.
I’d like to see somebody use a slide rule someday. (We’ve always had calculators since I’ve been in school.)
Ah yes, the WordPerfect key combos. Barf. Underline, bold, and italics were the only three that I could remember; everything else I kept forgetting. No wonder Microsoft Word ended up dominating the market.
My grade school did a damn fine job of teaching us basic on the Apple 2. We all thought that those computers were so cool because they had floppy drives.
Heck, Diceman, when I was in elementary school, it was a Big Deal to get the computer with the – gasp! – COLOR MONITOR! (This was the early to mid-80s.)
I was never taught diagramming, which is just fine by me.
I wouldn’t necessarily count a language (aside from Latin) as useless. You never know, you might have to pick it up again sometime, and at least you heard the basics once. I took a year of Russian my senior year and while the first semester was pretty much learning to read (phonetically) and write, it was FUN. I may or may not ever have to pick it back up, but I don’t count that as useless. Wrapping my head around a different (but close enough to not be entirely unfamiliar) alphabet was a most interesting challenge.
Oh, diagramming sentences! That’s about all we did in 7th and 8th grade English and I haven’t used it since.
How to derive a square root.
The difference between iambic and trochaic meter (and all the rest of them that I can’t even remember.)
How to edit audiotape with a splicing block and razor blade.
Easy to cook meals in less than 30 minutes.
How to make papier mache.
Grease pencils. I used grease pencils in at least three different subjects that I can remember. I liked grease pencils. Does anyone still need a grease pencil in their work?
Well, aren’t Cardinals little red birds with pointy heads?
Oh. Never mind…
Breakdancing. If I tried to use it now … well, the pun just writes itself, doesn’t it?
How to position art on a paste-up using a T-square, a triangle, two coats of dry rubber cement, and two pieces of tissue paper. Sometimes I do it on personal projects just for fun. And I still have two rubber cement pickups, a burnisher, eraser shield, drafting set, French curves . . . Ah, those were the days.
Hmmm. I was dancing the Hustle last year at the company Christmas party. And I used papier mache last Halloween to make a helmet. Which makes me weird, I guess.
For the record, I never learned how to diagram a sentence. And I don’t want to know what it is either.
You’ve got Laetitia Casta? Can I come over?