The whole Pilgrim/Puritan freedom of religion nonsense. It was a marginal business enterprise. Freedom of religion just meant they were free to steal land from the Indians and lynch the occasional Quaker.
Freedom of religion is an oxymoron.
Sex ed was only about heterosexual sex ed. Gay sex wasn’t even mentioned. Totally useless for me.
And why did I take a year of Russian in high school? Where was I ever supposed to use it?
Which is how the Mormons ended up in Utah - driven out by the uptight church brigade. “Freedom for me, but not for thee.” Same with Catholics, but at least they didn’t get driven out of town on a rail.*
Oddly, I think we did cover it. Not in great detail, but more than you’d expect. I guess back then Wisconsin was pretty progressive.
* what does that even mean?
…What does the saying, “Run him out of town on a rail” mean? In colonial times, people who were thought too loyal to Britain, or too outspoken against independence, or crown tax collectors, were sometimes tarred, feathered, and tied to a wooden fence rail and carried out of town. [wikipedia]
How to read and write Hebrew in Rashi script. (It would have been useful if I’d become a Talmud scholar…)
I should have known. Is there nothing the Internet can’t do? I always figured it had something to do with trains.
I thank you for not saying LMGTFY. 
Didn’t tar and feathering cause severe burns? They sure loved to torture people in imaginative ways back then.
Very severe burns, and apparently it took forever for the tar to wear off. Resistant to turpentine, I suppose.
Me, too! We had to go to the prof one by one and recite it to him.
I can sing the quadratic formula.
First thing I thought of!
7th grade, open concept middle school meant it had no walls, no windows and being in the subtropics dependent on air conditioning. Class rooms were partitioned by bookcases and chalkboards. Noisy? Chaotic? Yes!
I’m at the back of the class and could never follow what the English teacher was teaching about diagramming sentences. I love reading/writing but breaking it all down ihnfi!
Otoh, I loved 7th grade math, it was quieter there because at that time the 6th grade went to lunch.
Cursive is beautiful, but my scrawling has never come close to the textbook examples.
I never saw the point of learning Roman numbers. So, I can tell the time on a clock with Roman numbers, but I could do that with any symbol, just count. And I can read the copywrite date on some books, which should be using Arabic numbers anyway.
That one might not be valuable per se, but you’ve definitely used it a lot. Between clocks, copyrights on movies, sequel titles, and chapter numbers in various forms it’s still used everywhere.
State capitals.
Periodic table.
A big problem is that a lot of what’s taught in math classes is preparatory to learning more advanced concepts which a lot of people never get around to. So you get a lot of “yeah, no shit” stuff like absolute values that seem pointless until you get to things like polar coordinates where absolute distance from the origin becomes pivotal.
Similarly, calculating the slope of a line seems meaningless until you get to calculus when the derivative of an equation is exactly equivalent to finding the slope of a line at that point of the plotted curve.
And math is too often taught as rote procedures where you aren’t told why those procedures work. For example the quadratic formula is ultimately a diagram of a procedure called completing the square, which is very elegant and extremely useful, although the rote formula is faster for cranking out the values you’re looking for.
I use an Excel spreadsheet as my register because I have a significant amount of money reserved for periodic expenses, and monthly expenses that I can presume have to be met every month. So my spreadsheet is organized more like an accounting ledger, with the important result is how much discretionary funds I have versus my gross balance.
OTOH, a course on European history between 1492 and 1607 with an eye to why exactly English-speaking peoples came to settle in North America would be a sorely needed addition to American history.
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none, I can read the writing on the wall.
Oh, so unused I’d completely forgotten it:
DOS 5.0
The point, of course, is to be able to tell the year the movie was made.
Mine has got to be manual typesetting, with the little bits of lead type that had to be sorted into a wooden typesetter’s case with all the positions memorized (there was a test). This was public school shop class in, I’m sorry to say, about 1982. What an embarrassment and a waste.
It was actually fun for me, but I don’t think anybody pretended it had any practical application by then, or even 30 years prior.