Just before one of our linguistics classes at UC Davis, my favorite prof was busily writing what looked like some strange math formulas on the boards. He turned around when he was finished and it was time to begin the class. He then said, “Relax. I know many of you have math phobia. That’s why you’re majoring in linguistics, after all.” Then he went on with the lecture after his little joke.
Of course the stuff he’d put on the board wasn’t math, but sure looked like it!
Oh! I just remembered two things a drama teacher at Monterey Peninsula College wanted us to learn for some odd reason:
English is a Romance language.
Jesus of Nazareth was born before Siddhartha Gautama.
In Middle School we were taught to square dance, I have never used that skill ever past that one class.
In High School in our one week sex education class they for some reason had an entire class about dental dams for oral sex. They demonstrated by using a banana slid into a dental dam. Not only have I never seen a dental dam ever outside of that class, I have also never heard ANYONE talk about dental dams past that class, and I would never USE a dental dam because I’m not in a position where I would be eating the ass of a complete stranger.
In College we watched City Slickers and had to answer a 10 question worksheet about the themes of the movie in some mandatory for my major English class. I have no idea what the rationale behind it, but I also got absolutely nothing out of it. We also watched an episode of the Simpsons which was significantly more entertaining.
How to fill out a deposit slip and balance a checkbook. By the time I was old enough to have a checking account, deposit slips and balance sheets were obsolete and I’ve never once had to do either.
Oh, that reminds me of shot-put. I was always quite good at almost any sport, but I wasn’t built for things that required muscles and tallness (and long levers). So when it came to shot-put, I swear I had the best technique down of all my classmates, but never could push further than 8 meters or so, while the guys who were 20 cm taller than me somehow hurled the ball just running forward and got 11 meters. That was frustrating.
The OP’s question raises a logical paradox, similar to the “smallest uninteresting number” paradox in mathematics (which I understand is partly, but not wholly, tongue-in-cheek). The “single most useless thing one has learned in school” is a suitable topic for threads like this, or cocktail party conversation, and was therefore useful to learn.
Reading this thread reminds of so many useless things I had forgotten/repressed that are coming back that I cannot make my mind up about which one is the most useless of them all. Except religion, that sure was not only dumb but untrue as well. Spain in the 60s & 70s… At least it was usefull for showing that religion itself can be dangerous. As Spain has gone in the course of two generation from one of the most religious countries in Europe to one of the most atheistic ones (I believe the Czech Republic beats us), I guess the lesson was well taught. @Asuka So I googled what a dental dam is. If nothing else, they taught you how to make somebody scratch their head across an ocean. That is your superpower, just so you know it.
Sex ed was completely useless. It was one week per year in middle school health class, outsourced to a “charity” run by some local fundamentalist churches. It was all about how your virginity was a precious gift that you would give your eventual spouse on your wedding night. Also, condoms are completely useless because they’re flown over from Chinese sweatshops in unheated cargo planes, where they freeze and crack. And there was a story designed to hammer in the idea that if you take your clothes off in front of someone else, maybe they’ll make fun of your body so much you’ll kill yourself, so better to just stay chastely covered at all times.
Cursive was a useless makework project. I think they taught us to write three separate times; normal writing (“printing”), a special transitional form of printing where there are little tails on the letters, and then finally cursive itself. And then, as soon as we learned cursive, they quit caring if we used it or not. The only thing we achieved was increasing the number of writing workbooks sold by textbook companies. In retrospect, I think the teachers were as bored of it as we were.
In my 8th grade general science class, the teacher required us to learn (memorize) the process by which blood coagulates. It’s a multi-step process involving about a dozen technical nouns and verbs that all begin with “thrombo-”. Strangely, for no obvious reason, I read it once and had it instantly memorized. I don’t know how that happened. And yes, it was on the test.
In most English classes, we read various essays or short stories, then discuss them in classes, just kicking around ideas, then the teacher assigns us to write some kind of essay about it. In my 9th grade class, the teacher was a nasty kid-hating b----, uh, obnoxious person who hated the boys even more than she hated the girls, except for a teacher’s pet or two. Anyway, we spent most of the class reading stupid stories and essays, and all we had to do with them was memorize the titles and authors of them all.
Note what a young kid @Derleth is on this Board (he says he was Class of 2002 - kids these days!). You might need to 'splain to him what a slipstick was.
Fun fact: I found a standard-size slipstick with all the scales at a thrift store once, in excellent condition. I bought it immediately, of course, and I still have it. I used to bring it with me to my calculus and statistics classes on exam days, and set it out on the desk while I took the exam.
The year was 1981…yay computers are a thing now. The school was college…yay there’s a pre-requisite class to learn how to use computers. The class was Computer 101…yay, let’s learn the basics! Wrong…unless you want to become a programmer. They thought everyone needed to know that stuff…a bunch of 1’s and 0’s on a black DOS screen. My eyes glazed over. I failed the class. So did everyone else but maybe one or two smarty pants.
I had a French class in high school. That lasted two weeks before I switched out to some other electives, and I’ve never had occasion to use even the tiny atoms of French language that I learned during those two weeks.
I actually just used this a couple of years ago. I was writing code for a kinematic simulation, keeping track of how far an object with a particular initial position/velocity/acceleration moved over time. The catch was that the sim didn’t step forward through constant intervals of time, it stepped forward through constant intervals of space. So for the usual equation of motion:
X2 = 0.5·a1·t2 + V1·t + X1
I knew everything except t. So I had to solve that whole equation explicitly for t, and how about that, the old formula for finding roots of the quadratic came in awfully handy.
I took a lot of French in high school and college. All 14 tenses, that kind of thing. Even a conversational course where we read and discussed current magazine articles. All pretty much useless when I finally got to France and attempted to make conversation with real French people.
Algebra, as noted above.
College physics (which I failed).
Lots and lots of Virginia history, growing up in Virginia. Seems like we had it in one form or another every year in grade school. Virginia history, Alexandria history, you name it. Who cares?
I do think Latin was worth studying however. It sort of teaches you how to solve problems and gives you a basis for Romance languages in general.
I think there’s a big difference between wrong (or even harmful) things like many are posting here, and useless.
Both are bad, but and some things might be both, but I would argue that truly useless is much more rare. Almost any learning, if you really learn it, has some use, if you think of the purpose as learning how to learn (learning how to learn about things that don’t interest you, or that are difficult for you, or that you think you already know, or that are useless). Learning skills, even if they are skills that you think you will never use again, is good practice for learning other skills. Real learning isn’t really about information. That’s important, but it’s a different thing.
Even the false or incorrect information, if it teaches you how to call bullshit on it, and how to critique it and rebut it, or teaches you better understanding of the people who believe it, is still useful.
