How to operate a keypunch machine. Typing class back then was rolled into a course called Office Machines, and we learned to operate that, a mimeograph machine, do 10-key input on a calculator, and those giant multi-row register style adding machines. I don’t think any of those were in active use by the time I graduated, but I’ve at least seen the other machines. Haven’t seen a keypunch machine since that class.
This was accidental - not taught, when a friend and I were coding LOGO on Amstrad 265’s way back, and we discovered via some library book:
LOGO “beep” produces a tone of 440 Hz - that is “concert ‘A’”
To get the next semi-tone up, B-flat, you multiply 440 Hz by the 12th root of 2. To get a semi-tone up to B, you multiply that number by the 12th root of 2, to get the value in Hertz. And so on, all the way up and down the scale.
I was not a musician nor a mathematician so this information has not helped me in life at all. But there it is, stuck in my brain
I’m the first person to mention multiplication by use of log tables? Wow.
And so to religious education. The only thing - and I mean the only thing - I can remember is that when I first had to do it, it wasn’t called RE but rather RI - Religious Instruction. Nothing else at all has stuck.
But hey, I got taught about the pink colored countries on a map, y’all!
(OK, so tell me - was it uniquely British maps that had pink for the Empire - excuse me - the Commonwealth?)
j
Most of my maps and globes had Canada in orange, oddly enough.
Interesting - I know we have active posters from NZ and Aus on the board. Maybe they’ll pass through.
j
The first useless thing I thought of was Latin (two years in junior high).
Then I realized it had to be what I learned in med school biochemistry. For a brief but glorious time I knew and could regurgitate virtually everything on this chart in all its interconnected majesty:
Shortly after the final exam, this glurge had begun fading from my memory, and today nothing remains, except vague images of zwitterions.
Actually, I found diagramming of sentences both interesting for its own sake and useful when I later sat in on a course in linguistics and learned what I (if no one else) call “coathanger” diagrams. What was useless was learning the names of all the “tenses” of English and being taught that the simple past was the imperfect and the compound past was the perfect, despite the obvious facts that these are just the reverse. The simple past is actually perfective and the compound generally continuitive. On one test, we were asked to give the conjugation of “be” in the future perfect progressive: I will have been being, you… Utterly useless.
I have solved quadratic equations on rare occasion. I have never extracted a square root by hand, although knowing how to do it came in handy once when I wrote a program to do it. The thing was that in decimal you have to guess the next digit. In binary, you simply always guess it is 1 and test if that is too large. If it is the next bit is 0 and if it isn’t, the next bit is 1.
It makes me sad to learn that someone who thinks this is allowed to teach English.
I haven’t diagrammed a sentence in 50 years, but I have no doubt that I’m better at writing clearly and speaking extemporaneously for having done it.
Someone here a few months ago observed that many people don’t seem to remember that they had to learn things that they now know like the back of their hand.
As one of my teachers said, education is what’s left after you forget everything you learned in school.
And I’m retired now, but I worked in engineering and applied math for 30+ years. I used the quadratic formula many times.
If Shakespeare’s so great, why are his plays full of clichés, well-worn tropes, and over-used quotes?
^^
I hope this post was sarcastic.
… …
I actually used a slide rule on a test once, some time in the twenty-teens. The prof had a rule against web-capable devices during a test, and my usual calculator is a phone app, so…
And I also think that high schools should still teach how to use a slide rule. They’re not useful for their own sake, but they’re an excellent educational aid.
As for most useless, hmm… Probably the typing course I had to take in high school as a prereq to be allowed to take the computer course I actually wanted. I still can’t type the “right” way, but I can hunt and peck at about 70 WPM, as taught by joining an Internet chat room circa 1995.
There was a time that wasn’t useless at all; it’s just printed log tables are obsolete. Unless for some reason you have to plot a spaceship’s course entirely without digital electronics. See http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/astrodeck.php for a glorious blast from a zeerust past.
How common was asphalt, road tar, then? I always imagined they were talking about pine tar, which will probably dissolve in rum. Note that I’m not googling this, preferring to shoot my mouth off about a long-held belief, as a long-ago wooden boatbuilder.
Dan
My knowledge of hexose monophosphate shunts or the urea cycle has never been very helpful somehow. And I had such hopes!
I took shorthand because my parents told me it would help me take notes in college. No one in college ever talked fast enough to need it.
The class wasn’t a total loss. Since a lot of stenography is for letters, the class also did a little punctuation review. The explanation of when to use a semi-colon was simple and easy to remember.
That’s useful. My high school math and physics teacher had us use only log tables for about a month. Not because the tables themselves were useful, but being comfortable with using logarithms is. Also combined with knowing significant digits. No different than practicing addition or multiplication tables, except we didn’t have to memorize them.
Something about George Washington and a cherry tree. Computer programming via punch cards. Pencil and paper drafting.
Health Class.
Most of it wrong.
And no First Aid.
Fortunately, I took JROTC in High School, & we all got Red Cross First aid/CPR certified.
Nice.
JROTC was a big step up from Gym Class.