With you there. I cannot draw to save my life. I believe it’s a genetic thing.
I’m not uncreative: I work happily with words and music, and might claim I’m quite a good songwriter. And I appreciate visual art, but I simply can’t produce it myself.
And then of course there was Gym/PE.
All that nasty running round in the cold, plus the standard hazing by the jock alphas.
I have never had the slightest interest in ‘sport’.
Physical education because it was the most violent, where bullies could act out with impunity with the teachers either indifferent or actively encouraging it.
For the more intellectual side, debate. Because I’m a terrible liar and find it difficult to even try, and the whole “argue for something you don’t believe in” aspect was both very unpleasant and largely impossible for me.
I absolutely hated the course I took called, “The Humanities”. Besides having absolutely no interest in the topic, it was boring beyond description.
High school.
“We are here to learn French. Here are your tapes and your workbooks…which only show pictures and follow along with the tapes that only speak in French. From this moment onward I will be speaking only in French.”
The class was a complete and utter failure, and after a full year the “finals” consisted of us preparing “French” dishes and serving them to the Spanish and Italian classes.
That was the first French class…and the last.
I think I misremembered one thing-it was records, not tapes.
I went to a boarding school and they had an annual inter-house boxing match. This I hated and dreaded. I was not small and puny - I just hated fighting and being hurt.
The competition was organised so the winners got three points for their House, draws two and losers one. This meant that we were all expected to fight even if were were expected to lose.
After two years, I refused to do it. There was a big row, but standing up to the PE teacher and then the Headmaster was less painful than boxing, and I was allowed to drop out. The following year, there were quite a few who followed my example.
To rub it in, and much to the annoyance of said PE teacher, I won the Victor Ludorum at the annual swimming competition and got my name engraved on a nice silver cup.
PE. I have terrible hand eye coordination, I was one of the smallest in the class, and I wasn’t popular, so most sports were excruciating.
Second worst was geography. The teacher never taught us, but would sit at his desk marking other students’ homework, and no actual geography was involved. I would have quite liked to have learned about other countries, but instead it was all oxbow lakes and the water cycle, which we had already covered in more depth in science lessons. I dropped it at 14, but I doubt I would have learned anything useful if I’d continued.
Third worst was English. I love reading, but I hated writing essays, and I too struggled with this stuff:
I failed my English GCSE (got a D) and had to retake the exam a few months later.
Science and maths were my favourite subjects, since they were interesting and we didn’t have to write essays or memorise anything. In general I enjoyed any subject where the teacher actually taught us new things, rather than telling us to work through the text book or through booklets.
I also did well in French, and I think that’s because unlike @SanVito’s German lessons, we were taught the grammatical rules rather than being expected to deduce them for ourselves. IMO the immersion method works well for young kids, but usually not for adults.
Yeah, our class was pure deduction. Sucked.
I attended eight years of Catholic grade school, followed by four years of Catholic high school. Instilling guilt and playing religious mind games were the primary tactics used to control us. So does that count as a “lesson”?
Our 6th grade history teacher, Mr. Cheesman, had a small, narrow statue of the Virgin Mary on his desk. He purposely positioned it at the edge of the desk. So that when a student approached his desk, there was a good probability the student would accidently knock over the little statue. He would then chastise the student, and told them the fine was ten cents. The student would have to then insert a dime into a box with the label, “Donations for the Little Sisters of the Poor.” This happened at least twice a class.
Physics I got. Chem however is so damned detailed and convoluted that my holistic mind just rebels at it all. I could hunker down and grok it sufficiently to pass a test, understand, but hats off to those who make a living dealing with all of that.
You know with a name like that he got a lot of grief about it behind his back from the class jerks, esp. given that this was middle school.
We were required to take an art class for high school graduation. I took architectural drawing, figuring it was the closest thing to the math and science classes I liked. I was horrible at it.
I learned that authority figures were either unwilling or unable to protect me but were more than happy to punish me for protecting myself.
Econ. I’m good at math, but I absolutely could not grasp how financial thing A leads to financial thing B. Still can’t. And I work for accountants.
Another person here who was never happy about gym class in high school. However, I must admit that one of my gym teachers who had been riding my ass all year actually acknowledged that I was doing the best I could as opposed to slacking off.
In college I had a class in Aesthetics, which I was taking as part of my Art requirement. The instructor would not tolerate any opinion which differed from his own; I was rapidly approaching failing the class until I figured out that it was better to keep my opinions to myself.
Easily biochemistry. Nothing in the way of puzzles or analytics, just memorizing seemingly endless indistinct molecular diagrams. A few of them had cool memorable shapes, like biotin, but the whole pentose family was pretty much a writeoff for me. I have no idea how I passed that class, could not pick arabinose out of a mugshot lineup with a gun to my head.
Second grade. I have fuzzy memories of hating penmanship. I remember getting a different teacher. Later I learned that we clashed over my poor handwriting and my parents got me transferred to another teacher (the school probably supported it).
Later, I learned that there was a physical reason for my poor handwriting and it was physically impossible for me to write any better. And I was being disciplined for not improving.
That was definitely my experience as well.
Gym is one of those classes where the difference between having a good teacher and a bad one was night and day. I moved around a lot growing up, and I ran into both kinds of gym teachers. The good ones were interested in taking the time to teach us the fundamental skills required to play the game (dribbling, passing, etc., etc.) as well as the rules. The good ones were happy just so long as they saw us putting in the effort. You didn’t have to be a star athletes, you just couldn’t half-ass it.
Did you and I go to the same high school? Our teacher for French 1 tried that approach and it was a complete and utter disaster. The next year there was a new French teacher who went back to real textbooks, French/English dictionaries and no listen-and-repeat except for pronunciation, and managed to teach us two years of French in one.
I recall hearing that biochem is what turns millions of future doctors into humanities majors.
College calculus. I did great in math in high school, getting A’s in Algebra, Geometry, Algebra/Trig, and Analytic Geometry. But for a number of reasons I just completely tanked Calculus in college. One reason was that 1st semester calculus was an 8:30am class M-F, and my second semester calculus was a 7:30 class, and I frequently missed class because I couldn’t get up that early. The TA’s who taught the classes were terrible, just working through problems on the blackboard without any explanation, and I was too shy to raise my hand and ask questions. I got a D first semester and failed second semester. A year later, after a change of majors where calculus was still a requirement, my advisor suggested retaking Calc I before trying to get a passing grade in Calc II. I think I managed to get C’s the second time around but it still never really clicked with me.