My Millennial kids will get a card from grandma; absolutely beautiful script from an old fountain pen… and just hand it over to us to translate for them. They’ve given up trying to read it (and I’ll admit, it takes me a while to figure out things like “Oh, that 2 is supposed to be…a capital Q? Whaaaa?”).
One student put up his screen-printed poster at my art school:
Cursive:
The boomers’
secret code writing!
For those who mastered the skill it may have been useful. I stopped writing in script before elementary school was over. My signature is an decipherable scrawl that I can still reproduce consistently, but any scribble would work as well. Cursive writing was a waster of time and effort in my case.
Ok, at least I can read the secret code so it wasn’t a total waste.
There are still people today who think Hanukkah is Jewish Christmas. 
And the one semester of wood shop, mandatory for boys. I came home with a useless broom holder.
I made my parents a pretty ugly lamp. But I did learn some very basic woodworking and electrical skills, that were probably just enough to make me dangerous. We also traded two weeks with the girls and did a week of cooking and a week of sewing. (god knows that they did for a whole semester). I still make omelets like I was taught in 9th grade home ec.
I learned in college how to edit an audio tape by physically cutting the tape and splicing it back together. Not useless at the time, but utterly useless now.
I’ve always pictured like this:
Am I wrong?
Of course we were taught cursive in grade school, but when I got to seventh grade my Earth science teacher (who was also the principal) told me to just print from now on. Thank you! He became a good friend. The only time I wrote in cursive in later classes was when I got bored in class but wanted to look busy, figuring I would never look back at those notes.
When I was in ninth grade (so '73-'74), we watched In Search of Ancient Astronauts in a science class, courtesy of a teacher who was an early adopter of home video-recording technology. I confess to being especially impressed by the Piri Reis map’s supposed depiction of Antarctica centuries before that continent was “officially” discovered.
We had dancing in high school gym class. It seemed horrible at the time, learning dances that tio this day I have never danced: polka, schottische, and more I’ve purged from my memory. And since it was the 70’s, we had DISCO dancing!
BUT I would not say it was useless at all. It taught me how to touch women unoffensively (and being a high school age boy, without getting a boner. 
) and be close in a social setting, such as dancing later in life like at weddings. And how to not be a jerk ass teenager.
I never copped a feel, either.
Historically is was more likely to be a wooden fence top rail rather than the length of steel train rail.
Train rail would be far too heavy and unwieldy for humans to hoist another human up on and walk around town. Wooden fence rails were every where and easy to grab, train rails are firmly anchored down and only in a few town locations.
Sounds logical. And I have also seen, reading on, that you had answered immediately, not ages later, like me.
But in comics (I was looking for a Lucky Luke scene I have in mind, but only found the one I linked to) they use steel train rails. Easier to draw, I guess.
Not even to six ? For me it is so euphonious I almost can’t count to five without, Monty Python-style, then proceeding to six. Uno, dos, tres - cuatro, cinco, seis. It rhymes!
But yes, my foreign language skills (one year of Spanish, three years of French) are horrid. But they certainly weren’t useless - Spanish would be super-useful here in California if I knew it better. Plus I like some French film which I got introduced to in French class. I just suck at language acquisition.
Aside from the racist spiel of one teacher that was passed off as “science” and that I’ve mentioned before, the most useless thing for me was probably a 7th grade art elective, just edging out 8th grade wood shop. Which makes me feel bad, because I support the teaching of arts in schools. But I was an inadvertent transfer midway through the year due to being bounced up to a higher-level English class, which meant the rest of my schedule had to be rearranged. I was sorta left on my own, with no discernible art talent whatsoever, to try and badly imitate what other vastly more artsy kids were doing. I quickly gave up even trying and learned absolutely nothing.
I wouldn’t have minded learning Spanish (or any other language) if I thought I would actually use it. And FTR, I don’t have anything against Spanish in particular, as I would have equally hated learning any other language that was offered (e.g. French, German, or Italian). I just have a mental block when it comes to other languages, unfortunately.
I was going to say the two years of German that I took in high school were worthless, but that knowledge enabled me to quiz out of the foreign language requirement at college, so there’s that. (I have spoken very little German since high school.)
So it was probably the year of woodworking that was the most useless. I was terrible at it and constructed a really bad-looking table. My Dad was an accomplished self-taught wood craftsman, and my lack of skill was a mystery to him.
Yes, I had to make sure that @Folly was joking so I asked, and their wink-eye emoji confirmed that for me.
Make one little joke…
Personally, I’m amused that @F.U.Shakespeare studiously avoided joining in.
That’s because what I know about the real Shakespeare would fit on a 3x5 card. I enjoyed the discussion, just didn’t have anything to add.
(I chose my screen name from the obscene epithet Pete Rose yelled to ‘Ball Four’ author Jim Bouton: “F— you, Shakespeare!”)
I didn’t actually learn it because I thought it was stupid and so failed the test, but in 7th grade when my English teacher was teaching the parts of speech and came to prepositions, decided that rather than teach the functional definition of what a preposition was and how it was used, that the class should simply memorize a list of 50 prepositions.
I took a shop class, I think it was a 3 week elective that had you take a variety of skills based courses. Pretty much the first day my best friend picked up the wrong end of a hot wand, a hair curler type thing for burning designs on wood. Oh Mr E was pissed off shouted at her and basically red flagged us both for idiots ( so not fair) banned us from the tools. Why me? I had to walk her to the office she’s crying with big blisters forming on her palm.
I’ve memorized Jabberwocky, the start of Canterberry Tales in Middle English, several Shakespeare speeches, and a number of other poems, but none of that was ever required in school. I just found it fun.
And someone’s mention of guest speakers dislodged a memory: In middle school, we had an assembly with a black supremacist activist who claimed that Jesus was black. His evidence? A passage from the Gospels that described his hair as being “like wool”. Even at the time, I knew that was nonsense, because despite me being white, I had hair woolier than any of my black classmates. Later, I learned that he wasn’t even quoting the passage accurately, but left off a word: Jesus’s hair was described as being white like wool.
In our elementary school, many parents wanted some kind of “gifted” education program, which the staff resisted because they said it would be biased. At last, they compromised with ordering students who did well in class (including me) to write a report on the history of timekeeping. They did not grade or return these papers, nor were there any talks or experiments on the subject. We used encyclopedias and books. We did this three years in a row. What a waste of time. (See what I did there?)