Yeah. Our health classes were very poorly taught, all wrong and emphasized all the wrong things.
IMO you have to make a distinction between what you haven’t used vs. what you couldn’t. If I had become someone with an interest in ballistics maybe quadratic equations are the bomb…things like trajectories would be involved, since they’re parabolas. But what else?
I ran into a math teacher. She said arches are super strong. And eyeglasses.
My nomination: the old food pyramid.
Could be he invented all those cliches, and the rest of us adopted them; life imitating art, sort of thing.
And I am totally against the idea that reading Shakespeare will generate an appreciation; these are plays and are at their best in an onstage performance, although a concert reading, if you can’t manage a staged production, is a giant step in the right direction.
A highlight of my young life came when our English teacher shepherded a busload of high-school seniors to Stratford Ct for a performance of Richard III. I was already in the drama club, but this was eye-opening, my first Shakespeare.
If you’d like a good read, check out Michael Gruber’s “Book of Air and Shadows” about the discovery of an unknown Shakespeare play, a terrific book by my favorite author.
Perfect username, Folly. I agree with Jaycat.
Dan
During a college chemistry final around 1980 (right after calculators had become ubiquitous) the professor called out, “Does anyone need a log table?”
A minute later he followed up with, “Does anyone know what a log table is?”
I heard Shakespeare used a lot of irony and sarcasm in his prose.
I would like to say that S. wrote plays, and not prose, but someone will pop up and explain that the plain (not verse) dialog, the regular speech, counts as prose. Nice quick comeback - you should see a play by S., far more exciting than just hearing about it.
Really, Folly; great stuff.
Dan
@Dandan, you’ve been thoroughly wooshed…
Yeah? Not the sharpest brick in the hod, me. Please 'splain.
Dan
Cursive, absolutely.
I have spent my career in education and I don’t like to think about how many instructional hours I’ve seen given over to teaching cursive.
A highlight of my young life was seeing Al Pacino in the role of Richard III.
Pretty amusing, the idea that Shakespeare employed “over-used quotes.” 
In 1968 (when I was in 11th grade), Hewlett-Packard introduced the first of what we now call programmable electronic calculators (as distinct from computers), the HP 9100.
It was about the size of an IBM electric typewriter and about as heavy. I think they called it a “desktop calculator”. It had a few dozen words of memory, each of which could store one number or a dozen-or-so (8? 16?) program steps.
Of course, they placed a bunch of them in high schools. We got one. It lived in the room of one of the math teachers, who left the room open during lunch hour for students who wanted to play with it.
That was my very first-ever introduction to computers, since it was programmable. It came with some basic instructional materials, including sample problems to be programmed. (Things like, write a program to calculate the area of a regular polygon, given the number of sides and length of one side.)
I, and a few others, got all into it. That was what got me started on a career path into computer programming – thus, possibly one of the singlemost NON-useless things I learned in high school.
Article about it in HP museum. (Sorry, it doesn’t have a preview.) Photo from the article:
In the early eighties, the husband of our teacher did consulting for Hewlett-Packard. She had him put a computer in our grade school class. I became quite popular, since I had owned a powerful Atari 400 for a year, and learned how to program simple games in BASiC. Nothing fancy - Master Mind, Tic Tac Toe, Awful Yes/No Verbal Adventure Games, a childish copy of “Hammurabi” - a very early resource allocation game extremely similar to Civilization except for everything. I occasionally wish I had kept up with programming when all the languages changed. But I glommed on to other things, do not know that much about modern technology.
For some reason in 4th grade, we had a few days studying wood production. This would be an unusual profession for a suburban Chicago child to go on to pursue. The teacher made a sing-song rhyme about the process and I’ll never forget it: logging, felling, lopping, bucking.
We had to do that in a high school literature class. About two years later, we studied Canterbury Tales in a college literature class. I blew the class away with my recitation, like actual applause, but didn’t let anyone know I’d memorized it earlier. I can’t do the entire thing anymore but can recite enough to impress.
Was anyone else taught the whole “If you have a multiple choice test on a scantron, with choices A, B, C, and D, go for C because there’s a 30% chance it’s C” stuff?
In Middle and High School for either SAT or national multiple choice tests I went through so many classes that seemingly taught me skills only applicable to very specific multiple choice tests, such as the above “When in Doubt, always choose C because Statistically C in the SATs has the best odds out of the 4 of being the answer” or “When given multiple answers choose the answer that’s the longest, the test makers won’t spend so much time writing up a wrong answer”.
It was basically a bunch of skills to cheat at standardized tests and not actually learn anything.
And how many of us had to memorize the Gettysburg Address (in Old English, middle, new, or otherwise)?
And how many of us still remember it?
And how many of us (at our own initiative), memorized Jabberwocky? And still can recite it?
The comparative answers to the above questions may tell us something.
I hate to explain jokes, but here it goes:
What @Folly was parodying in his initial post were reactions of young/inexperienced people to groundbreaking pieces of literature/art by claiming they are cliched, without recognizing that the allegedly worn-out tropes originated with these artists. So Shakespeare coined hundreds of idioms, metaphors and similes that went into colloquial English speech, just like a groundbreaking work of another genre, Orson Welles’ film “Citizen Cane” invented many of movie techniques that have been copied thousands of time and is also often criticized by people who are not aware of it.
I never had to do this myself in school, but…
As a college instructor, I got invited to participate in a discussion with high school and middle school teachers about their computer literacy lesson plans that they had been using, and were looking to set as statewide standards for computer literacy.
They were fine until I noticed they had ONE WEEK dedicated to have students learn about hexadecimal, with one day converting to and from decimal. Ok, whatever, they have calculators that can do that. However, I made them take out the two days each of having the students add and multiply hexadecimal numbers. (That would be like adding and multiplying Roman numerals.) I think I swore at them: “WTF what a waste of time” They sheepishly admitted they were doing this as a way to keep students busy by having them fill out worksheets. I think I insulted them when I said “So, this is just something that’s easy to grade?”
They agreed to remove the entire section.
Physics 4D. Background - -
I was getting an engineering BS. That required three quarters of science-level physics. That’s generally Physics 4A, B, and C. That also required a quarter of Thermodynamics.
Unfortunately, Thermo had been available as a summer class and I had taken it before I tried to take Physics 4C, which was about 1/3 thermo. The Physics Department refused to give credit for 4C to anyone who had already taken Thermo, so I had to take Physics 4D to get all three quarters.
Physics 4D is relativity and quantum mechanics. Every night as I was grinding out the homework, I fantasized about offering to sign a vow to never design anything moving near the speed of light or smaller than an atom if they would just grant me a waiver for that one quarter.
Even without the vow I never designed anything smaller than an atom or moving within a significant fraction of the speed of light.
Dang. I’m not the only one.
Memorizing the interior organs of an earthworm. Why? I have no idea except that we had to pass a test on them. There was no attempt to put them in any sort of context, let alone relate them to organs in the human body. Nor were they ever referenced in class (or my life) again.
Having to understand the I. C. I. 1931 Standard Observer and Coordinate System for Colorimetry was very challenging and time-consuming and has proven absolutely worthless to me.