I’m amazed that the Hustle is going unused! I’ve been to several parties where someone says “what the heck is the Hustle anyway?” upon hearing the song, and I am fully prepared to demonstrate.
Things that I learned that I never use:
How to make a ditto
Computer punch cards
Formatting margins, columns, and other exciting elements of business correspondence on a typewriter. In typing class, we had electric typewriters that had some basic features that would do this automatically, but we were not allowed to use these shortcuts because, in the opinion of our teacher, one never knew if one would get a job in an office that used manual typewriters. If that ever happens to me, like if I fall into a time portal into Ye Olden Days and have to get a job, I’ll be able to step up to the plate.
I’m laughing at this, but at the same time, I guess I do use it in the sense that I feel like I have a good understanding of what is supposed to happen, so if something funky happens in a WP program, I know what I need to do to correct it. I have worked with people who do not seem to grasp this.
I wish I could add pascal to the list, but I do a lot of Delphi programming, which is basically pascal.
(grade school)
trumpet
Dewey Decimal System
How to get through Apple II Oregon Trail in under 10 minutes
50 memorized prepositions (I’m not quite sure what a preposition is anymore)
the difference between ‘then’ and ‘than’
Gotta hijack and disagree on this one. I still take photography classes and until digital can reproduce the quality of film, I’ll smell those chemicals every day.
As for other things I learned that don’t matter much in every day life… formatting an electric typewriter, ‘literary analysis papers’, hand-layout for our weekly high school newspaper.
I had to memorize Jabberwocky for whatever reason, and that was probably a waste of everyone’s time.
I still remember all the verbs of be. (“Is, are, was, were, am, will be. Has, had, have, do, did, done, been, become, may, might, must…”)
I dissected a frog for some reason.
Actually, at my university, we still have to learn how to make page dummies, count headlines, and crop photos with grease pencils and proportional wheels, although the newspaper and magazine use InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. The Layout & Design class still teaches the basics, even if they aren’t basic to anything anymore.
My grandfather’s told me stories about setting type at the U of Iowa paper back in the 40’s, when type was actually set, leading was made of lead, and at the end of the day he was up to his elbows in ink. Fun times, I’m sure.
As for me, I don’t think moving the turtle around the screen with text commands (LOGO) is going to be useful for much. Nor will programming AUTOEXEC.BAT files.
I’ve given up on most of the math I learned in school. My lack of math skills make me a perfect journalist, though.
I’m amazed at how many people on this board seem to have some knowledge of how newspapers and periodicals used to be manually laid out. Among the fragments of knowledge I may never use again are the details of how to assemble, disassemble, and clean the old wax roller layout machines, as well as how to install and change font strips in the old Compugraphic-series typesetting machines. After working in a small-town newspaper for all four years of high school, I could probably STILL disassemble, then reassemble anything Compugraphic ever built…
BASIC programming
Most algebra (yeah, fractions are handy, but polynomials?) No, wait, I take it back – it came in handy for passing the mandatory algebra classes in college that had nothing to do with anything I ever intended to do for a living. And they helped me not look like a schmo when my daughter needed help with HER algebra homework…
Every trick I ever learned for how to use a soda machine, pay phone, or newspaper dispensing machine without paying (we kept rippin’ 'em off, and they kept improving the machines).
35mm photography isn’t quite obsolete, yet. It’s still an excellent way to teach the basics of photography, although in recent years, photo altering technology has caught up with the ability to play tricks in the darkroom. It may well BE obsolete within ten or twenty years, though.
I’m still wondering about why I memorized the capitals of every state in the Union… or, for that matter, any number of facts that I can easily look up in a book or on Google, these days. Sure, you need to know a certain amount of geography, so’s not to be ignorant… but all fifty capitals? Hell, show me ten people on the street who could do that…
Y’know, I think shorthand has the potential to be useful again now that PDAs are commonplace. Some enterprising soul should make a Palm OS app that can recognize shorthand and turn it into printed text–it would make entering text a hell of a lot faster.
(Of course, by “some enterprising soul,” I mean “someone other than me, who actually knows the first thing about shorthand and/or programming.”)
Black Lung is caused by inhaling coal dust, and Siliconosis is caused by working in Silica mines (had to correct a teacher on that, but he was teaching it to us)
Hi Opal!
Quadratic equations.
Geometry. I loved the course, but I never use it.
How to write a Research Paper. I learned in 9th grade English, 9th grade Woods Class (I’m not sure why, but I think it was some kind of sarcastic statement by the teacher. I did a 100 word research paper, with a thesis statement, body, and closing statement. It was about Sandpaper, something I have used since school. I got an “A”.) I also learned in my Senior year of High School in English Class, and in my Junior Year of High School in Social Studies, While going to college, I learned how to write a research paper in my freshman year of English, and then in my “British Literature” course. By the sixth time I stopped handing in outlines and my index cards because it was just stupid. I never wrote a research paper without “Learning” how to do it for the first time, every time.
Accounting, filling out all of those columns and such- required course.
COBOL Programming. :eek:
The capital of Venezuela, and all other countries south of Mexico, on any continent.
Knowing which word is the “subject” of a sentence.
I too, never used any algebra, but on occasion I like to play with math problems just to keep my mind young (I bought an old mathbbok from this teacher outlet place). I kinda regret the fact that I dont use algebra, it was kinda fun, not that I was any good at it.
Come to think of it, the last time I used a card catalog, was in 8th grade.
By the way, could someone please tell me why i had to cut open a frog? I learned nothing but “The inside of dead frogs smells like rotten tuna fish”. I don’t think I ever really used any of the stuff that science class taught, sound waves, light waves, all that stuff.
I guess from a PRACTICAL standpoint it is true that most of the computer languages I learned (BASIC, Assembly, Logo, others) are no longer helpful, but from a learning standpoint they were tremendously useful. There is no better way to learn how to logically attack a practical problem than by writing a computer program to do it for you. The process of thinking about how all the details needed to solve a problem have to be fit together in a sequential and logical manner is a very useful skill to learn.
I learned to make apple cider in middle school. Useless. I also learned to make a clock in woodworking. Useless.
After many years (decades?) of reading the Dope, and dozens of months of reading these boards, I finally had to register just so that I could post that I think a great many of you people posting on this thread might very well be me! Frankly, I’m still pretty resentful about having to memorize the periodic table of the elements. (I couldn’t convince my high school chemistry/physics teacher that knowing how to access and use that information was far more important than rote memorization… She didn’t buy my argument.) I found manual newspaper layout far more useful, but that’s not saying much. Ditto dissecting frogs. And in my day-to-day real life, I’ve never yet had occasion to use the first concept taught in trigonometry or calculus. And BASIC? Phlllpbt! Not to mention that half of everything I learned about African, Asian, and European countries and capitols in the 1980s is hopelessly outdated now.
I was fortunate enough to change school systems between the sixth and seventh grades, and thus missed sentence diagramming altogether. Haven’t missed it a bit. I still wish that I had similarly missed dissecting frogs and collecting insects. (Lucky me – the seniors’ biology collection was due about a month before the honors freshmen’s bug collections. Twenty bucks later, and I didn’t have to capture, kill, and mount more than a handful of my own critters! Made the money back on the following class, too.)
