The computer class that we had to take as part of our curriculum.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t completely useless to everyone and I did learn one or two small tricks (read shortcuts) I didn’t know before in Word 2003 but that’s about it. I could have challenged the final and skipped it completely but I wasn’t sure if i really knew what the final would be like so I stuck it out. I should have just challenged.
The absolutely useless thing was the orientation computer class for new students. It went for the first week and was intended to teach you how to use your laptop (the program required one and the school provided it for all students). Here is how you create folders! Here is how you open a file!
Seriously.
This was almost 7 years ago now and I’m sure the majority of my classmates were aware of these sorts of things. Few were older than I was at the time and I had known this stuff since junior high.
This. I might have learned one or two new things*, but anything I did learn was effectively obsolete by the time I graduated, if not by the end of the semester.
*such as creating a website in ftp by creating some Word documents with links in them.
Physical education, which basically meant jogging for a while. Yeah, THAT was an excellent use of my tuition money. Now, daily jogging is a good idea, but most of us did that anyway, going from one class to the next. And we didn’t learn anything in the class. I wish that the teacher had taught us how to lift weights and use gym equipment. I guess it was just easier to send us around the track, or around the inside of the gym in bad weather. And Intro to Computing, which was meant to be an introduction to using the computer. We had to spend a lot of time (in the 1980s) on learning how a computer is put together. Most computer users do NOT need to know this shit. They need to learn how to, you know, USE the damn computer. We didn’t need to know what a CPU was. There was absolutely nothing that we could do with that knowledge, other than regurgitate it on a test. The people who needed to know that stuff weren’t taking Intro to Computing at all! It was like when I took Driver’s Ed as a high school class, and had to learn what an internal combustion engine was and how it worked. Car mechanics and engineers needed to learn that. The rest of us could have used that time more effectively either learning the rules of the road or in driving simulators or in actual driving practice.
Introductory Biblical Hebrew. It was an entertaining course, but over two semesters we learned on the order of 100 words, and I remember maybe 10 or 15 of them. On the bright side, the Bible Society of Canada will give you a free Tanakh if you can prove you’re studying Hebrew.
Useless to me…Stats 101, when I was a Six Sigma Blackbelt at work. I DID have to learn to make a TI calculator work like Minitab. Introduction to Management, after 25 years of working in corporate America - where the book taught me that some people like to be managers because they get company cars and corner offices (yeah…).
Useless in general…Business Ethics - where the “textbook” was plagiarized (different kind of yeah…) but had been written pre-Enron.
Worse. Had to take PL1, when FORTRAN was the standard in the sciences. Dropped it on the last drop date, and had to take it again.
Came back to campus a few years later and visited with my advisor, who claimed he thought the course number was that of FORTRAN.
And they wonder why they never get any alumni donations from me.
Worst as waste of tuition money and time: Bowling, 1 semester of physical ed sort of course was required. I took that one. All we did was bowl in the campus bowling alley and take two tests which covered about a page worth of facts on the history of bowling. At least, it was an easy A.
I’m cheating and picking two. First was freshmen experience class, as my school called it. You had a choice between a time management class and a class about the environment. I took the environmental class and it was taught by a former hippie who used to (her own words!) “not shave my (her) legs”. She tried to make people feel bad for eating meat and using any type of animal product. She has Gary Tofu, yes that was really the name he used, come in and say meat farms are like the Holocaust. When I brought up the point that plants are sentient beings who can communicate with each other, she lost her shit because we can’t knock the stuff she eats. :rolleyes: I looked her up on ratemyprofessors.com once and she taught she riveting classes as Friendship, and Phliosphy. :dubious:
The second was a U.S. Econonmics. I took it thinking it was a business course, but it turned into a politic science course. It was a school requirment. I had to buy two books. Thankfully, it was an online class. I never used the information during or after the class. You could bullshit half the papers and forum posts. I only opened the books to cheat on the quizzes.
I don’t think any of the classes I took were “useless.” I mean, I learned stuff even in the lamest classes, so to me, that makes them useful. I like learning for learning’s sake and find that the more I know about anything, the better. In my professional life I’ve primarily been an editor, a writer, and a teacher, and everything I’ve learned has come in handy at one time or another.
I’m not done yet and I still have 3-6 more years worth of chances for useless classes but I suspect I already have taken my quota of uselessness. I’m working on an AS in liberal arts just to get my core classes out of the way before I transfer schools.
Intro to Sociology and Intro to Psych were painfully boring but I actually learned stuff that might come in handy later on in life. Intro to Liberal Arts wasn’t horribly boring (although I want to go back in time so I can kill Plato, slowly and painfully) but I don’t think I’ll EVER use the stuff from that class again. It was basically 15 weeks of talking about guys who talked about thinking.
I was in ROTC too for a while because I wanted to be a fighter pilot. That didn’t work out but I wouldn’t call it useless for me at least. I learned how to shine shoes and iron really, really well plus I learned the ranks of the various military branches, how to salute, and how to take orders. The physical fitness tests weren’t especially difficult but they were good for keeping a college freshman in shape. We had some good parties as well. The class material was easy compared to regular classes but it was only good for one credit a semester. I got something out of it even if I didn’t stay with it.
Well if you go by that standard then I guess the computer class (but not the orientation one) doesn’t apply since I learned a couple shortcuts. But I’ve learned more about using word, PowerPoint and excel while on the job than I ever did in that class. (I’ve learned how to use mail merge, pivot tables, all sorts of handy equations and many other things). The more advanced computer class was not required for accounting students when I really think it should have been, I heard plenty of complaining from my fellows in other majors about the excel stuff they needed to learn and I’ve had to use excel for reports and to process data pulled from elsewhere so often it would have been helpful.
And I enjoy learning for learnings sake too, I switched jobs recently but while taking a class in my old work (I was in logistics, now I have an accounting job!) so it isn’t very useful to me anymore unless I switch back but it was still interesting.
All but one English (writing) class. The one that that good was taught by an ex-newspaper editor. She taught me how to write in a straightforward manner. She valued clarity over verbosity, and actually got me to agree with her by the end. It was the only class which actually influenced my writing style and ability.
All of the others I left writing in the same exact style and level of skill as when I entered. I didn’t learn a thing, but at least it helped pad my GPA with all those A’s.
Re: the OP, I don’t think I’m likely to balance an equation again (although I could do it), but my Chemistry teacher taught me Dimensional Analysis, although she called it the far less daunting, “conversion factors”. When I got into nursing, I bought the $50, inch and a half thick Dimensional Analysis textbook required for self-study and realized, “WTF? Mrs. Kogan taught us this entire book in one hour.” I’ve done really well on all the medicine math tests, and I was able to figure out dosing faster and more accurately than a half dozen actual ER nurses, thanks to Mrs. Kogan’s Chemistry class.
I literally don’t remember anything about that class, other than what the room looked like. I completely forgot I even took it until I looked at my transcript after I graduated. I couldn’t even tell you what the professor looked like.
Philosophy has already been mentioned, so I’ll go with an actual useful course made completely useless by the professor’s lack of teaching skills…
Business Finance.
Prof was a Harvard grad who spent most of the class teaching various financial models. However, his method of teaching involved spending 90% of the time showing how people did the formulas incorrectly, then using the last few minutes showing how it was to be done.
A typical class would involve some long-assed equation that he would write out on the blackboard, solving it as he goes, and usually about 45 minutes in would arrive at some nonsensical result like “0” or “-400 billion” or somesuch. Then, nasally, he would say…
“And back here is where most people get this wrong - they would do this when they should have done that. Had they done the problem correctly, it would have been much shorter and… blah, blah, blah. Here’s the correct way to do this.”
Now understand, you just spent 45 minutes diligently copying his work, dismissing learning for the mere task of copying (this stuff was NOT in the $45 book we had to buy) so you can try to understand it later. 45 minutes of hand-aching work, only to be told that for the past 30 minutes you just spent your time copying a purposely-incorrect formula.
90% of the class failed it, so I got a “C”. When the teacher review sheets came, we fell onto them with a savage glee. Two years later he was gone. Fired? Who knows - probably not. But goddamned, this guy was a suck-ass teacher, easily the worst I ever had.
Into to Computer Applications. First day was, “Press the button on the front of the machine to turn it on.” Swear to God. Took us a good week to finally open Word.
Which is a complete waste of time for everybody but a REAL novice, but still not a problem, right? No, he made people take a screenshot of everything to prove they did it right. So if you took a screenshot of your text, then another one of the Font selection window, you’d get marked off because you didn’t show him which menu you clicked on to get there. I couldn’t stand it. It was hours and hours of nothing but busy work. You’d end up with 35 page packets of nothing but screenshots. Then when people started complaining about the amount of time they wasted doing a bunch of pointlessly tedious work he completely misses the point, “Guys, this isn’t easy! You’re learning the computer! It takes time!” :smack:
This reminds me of a math course I took with a foreign professor who would go on and on about how “students from (her home country) are smarter than you. They do this work in third grade”. :mad: Yet somehow she left her land of milk and honey to teacher dumb American college kids. She would often do the problem the long way and then say “THIS WRONG!” and X it out. Then in two seconds she would do it the right way and explain nothing. If we had a question or dare ask her to do it the long way, she’d say “THIS SIMPLE!” I got like a B- in the class. However, it would totally make my day if she happened to call on a student named Tobey because she pronouced it TUBE-EE.
I never had any classes that I considered useless. No matter the subject, I took them seriously and tried to learn something from them all. I think I did.