My most hated lesson in school was learning that knowing something was not sufficient. I read a lot of books from the local library when I was in school, covering all sorts of sciences and histories that were more up-to-date than the textbooks the school had. And I would tell teachers when what they were teaching was outdated. Their reactions varied. Some would have me write up, with cites, the update. Others would stonewall with excuses about how they had to teach from the textbooks every student had access to. The lesson was not only did I need to manage mine own ignorance, but also the ignorance of others. A good lesson, but a bitter pill.
As an uncoordinated, gangly person on the autism spectrum: anything involving gym class. Yep, always chosen last or next-to-last for anything. As a senior in high school, I needed an elective to fill out my schedule for the day; declined the option of yet another year of gym and chose chemistry.
Unfortunately, chemistry was my last class of the day and I tended to sleep through it.
High school: AP English, first quarter. The teacher didn’t teach, but he expected you to understand what the author meant–and the author was Kafka, in super-short fictions that I didn’t understand at all. I did so much better in college, where English was one of my majors. I did struggle a bit in college Chaucer, but only when the teacher insisted that we recite a passage aloud and the Middle English pronunciation had to be perfect.
College: Statistics, which I only passed due to the assistance of a TA who was the world’s second-most patient human being. The most patient human being was my driving instructor.
When I said PE, it was not because I disliked sports. I loved them, even if I wasn’t very good. In elementary school (up to 8th grade) I would come home from school, throw my school bag into the living room and go out to play. Mostly a kind of baseball variant we called boxball, but touch football all winter. Sometimes hopscotch (including girls). My hatred of PE was based on the fact that it was all calisthenics.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by all the Dopers whose greatest fear was math. With one exceptional course (algebraic geometry) I just went to lectures and absorbed them with no study.
In response to all the Dopers whose greatest fear was Math, I have to throw in that math was one of my favorite subjects in high school. I breezed through all of it, even calculus. I have two stories about my math proficiency:
In one class, after a test the teacher had each of us come up to his desk to get their grade and discuss how they had done. When it got to be my turn and I started to stand up he just looked at me and said, “Sit down, {Lurky}. You know that you got 100.”
I was a skinny, nerdy kid, the sort that normally would have been the target of bullying and teasing. I avoided this by becoming an unofficial math tutor to one of the guys on the football team, known as “Tenth-Ton Tony”. Anyone who tried to mess with me knew that they would have to deal with Tony.
Sounds like a plot to a movie. 
I did not like grade school and high school, for the most part. The schools I attended were “rich kid / Catholic / athletic” schools, yet I was poor and certainly not athletic. (I came from a broken home. My mother was able to afford the tuition because she did volunteer work at the school, which greatly reduced the cost.) Classes were uninspiring until senior year. That’s when I took physics. Finally, a class where understanding was more important than rote memorization! Best of all, though, was the teacher. He had been a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and had a master’s degree in engineering. It was evident he loved engineering, and loved to teach it, and he inspired me to also become an engineer. RIP, Alba Hurlbut.
It’s interesting that people seem to have a ‘ceiling’ for how far they can go with math.
I was a science track student in high school (grammar school actually, since this was UK).
Easily absorbed the math up to the level of calculus taught there (though I’d say I was always a better applied mathematician than pure).
When I got to university though, I hit a point where it suddenly wasn’t easy any more.
I can almost pinpoint it: Gauss’s theorem made sense to me but I started to lose it at Stokes’ theorem… ??
Some of this may be down to hormones… at that point I was starting to pay more attention to girls rather than study. And playing in a band… sex and drugs and rock & roll etc…
Upthread I mentioned gym class. At the time I was undiagnosed Level 1 ASD (and I had no clue until I was maybe 63 yrs old). At any rate, any team sports I dreaded and, as I said upthread, I always felt like I was in the Roman Games.
My undiagnosed and then unknown autism may have been a significant contributor to my dislike of team sports in that I may not have been any worse than my classmates, however, my autistic difficulty in interpreting social cues may have caused me to take the usual guys’ “chucking shit” with each other as actual nasty and specific insults and attacks.
Regarding maths and sciences, I actually thought, and still think, that that stuff is really interesting and cool, except that it is beyond me beyond a pop-sci level.
Anecdotally, I’ve had several people tell me something along the lines of “I liked/was good at math until I had this one teacher…”
So I can’t help wondering, when people (like some in this thread) say they hit a ceiling in math, whether it was the subject matter or the way it was taught, or even something more incidental like the personality of the teacher or other things going on in one’s life at the time.
When I was in college I took an advanced Calculus class and despite my previous experience in high school I found myself completely lost. I suspect that it might have had something to do with the fact that the teacher spoke in an almost inaudible monotone.
While in college I also had to take an advanced Physics class. There were only eight of us in the class, and while taking one of the tests I went blank on a formula needed to answer one question. After some thought, however, I was able to derive the formula from several other formulas that I did remember.
Mine was Mrs. Krumuller my third grade teacher. I eagerly raised my hand to take care of a math problem on the blackboard and when I failed to solve it she ripped into me hard like I had just taken a turd in the punchbowl in front of the whole class. I don’t remember all of what she said, but I do remember, “Your mother said you were good at math,” and I was on the verge of tears when she sent me back to my desk. I had no idea why she was so hostile towards me.
It was always harder for me, although in early graders it was mostly a matter of having to actually pay attention in class, which wasn’t my strong suit. I would get the occasional C or D; when I got to Algebra I was thrilled if I got a C or D. The thing was I never knew if I was getting it or not (although “not” was always the most likely outcome) until it was graded. I remember one test where I thought I probably at least got 70 per cent or so, buy when I got it back there was a 22 on the top. All other classes from elementary through grad school I got through with a minimum of effort. I don’t think there was a teacher that could have pounded it into me in a classroom setting. It took daily tutoring to gain even a minimal understanding.
french. - an 80 yr old PARISIAN trying to teach Canadian kids french…hated her - hated french
French in Canada is a 400 year old variation of Parisian version.
I was passed out of pity
Swimming! We had it in junior high. There were so many things I hated about it:
-It was always cold, the water, locker room and pool area.
-Undressing with everyone.
-You were issued a swimsuit as you came into the locker room. Heaven help you if they ran out of your size. I remember the teacher tying the straps together in the back so they’d stay up. Yea, I know, the boys didn’t even get to wear swimsuits.
-Having to wear a swimming cap. My hair was down to my waist. I couldn’t even fit it all under the cap.
-There were 3 mounted hair dryers (they were like hand dryers mounted higher up on the wall) for 25 girls.
-Getting dried, dressed, hair somewhat dried, makeup reapplied in the 10 minutes before the bell rang to go to the next class.
I’ll second those who say Art, but with the important proviso that Art was never actually a lesson.
Instead, there was just this assumption that kids a) could draw and b) liked drawing. So every project, every trip, every event, every book review came with the insturction that you should draw a picture of Autumn/the Romans/the Three Little Pigs/the intricate girder work of the Forth Bridge to go along wtih the actual work/learning bit involved in writing about it.
I hated it. I hated it because I couldn’t draw and would therefore produce something that was shit. And the reason I couldn’t draw (but I could calculate the third angle of a triangle, spell “necessary”, tell you how the Romans heated their homes etc) is because unlike those things, no one ever taught me. Not one lesson in how to draw a human figure, or a convincing house, or how to apply pens/pencil to get different shading effects etc. Just an instruction to draw, and disappointment when it turned out to be exactly the same level of bad it always was.
I was 14 before I walked into an Art lesson and a new teacher explained what perspective was, and how it worked, and how to get started and I produced the first ever picture I was even remotely happy with. It was like magic. But until then, just an endless timewasting cavalcade of rubbish.
Most math classes start with basics and then build on them. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be using them, and getting practice using them, for the rest of the book.
Differential Equations (the class), on the other hand, is a collection of unrelated dirty tricks designed to integrate equations that can’t be directly integrated. I got through it, but never enjoyed it. Oddly, I was okay with Numerical Methods.
The class I struggled with was Physics 8D: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. I had trouble getting the math for the QM to mesh with the ideas. And I only had to take it because I had taken Thermodynamics too soon.
Physics 8B had a section on Thermo and the physics department wouldn’t give credit for 8B to anyone who had already taken Thermo. So to meet the requirement for 3 quarters of science grade physics, I pretty much had to take 8D.
To date, I have never designed anything smaller than an atom or anything that travels a significant fraction of the speed of light.
I’m old enough to have suffered (as mandated by English law*), not Religious Education, but rather Religious Instruction. I don’t remember a time in my life when I was the least bit religious. I remember these lessons, and then they went away, and I can’t remember why. Maybe they wanted someone like me out of the class.
Aside from that, as others have also hated, the things you just have to memorize: History. Dropped the subject as fast as possible. Possibly amusing aside: I married a history teacher.
Matrices. Just the word makes my mind go blank.
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* - Aside: English law is correct (applies to England and Wales). There are laws that apply throughout Britain, but there is no such thing as British law
MCE 445 - Modern Control Theory. I still have nightmares. I did very well in the Prereq class, Linear Controls, so I thought I was hot shit. Oh no, MCT bore about as much resemblance to Linear Controls as arithmetic does to differential equations. That was my hardest grade C ever, and I’m more proud of it than my A in Rocket Propulsion! The professor brought me in her office halfway through the semester and gently suggested that perhaps I drop the course. I chose to stick it out, and was glad I did.
I liked French, but as one who went to school in Canada, I have to agree—they got teachers who spoke Parisian French to teach us.
My lessons got me through France without a problem. Quebec? Forget it. They don’t understand me and I don’t understand them. Now, being in Canada, which place do you think I’ll visit more often, Quebec or France?
I was nearly completed the classwork for my PhD program and was running out of interesting classes in the eletrical engineering department. I figured that maybe I could take a quantum mechanics class in the Physics department - I had done OK in the undergraduate Intro to Quantum Mechanics, so I sogned up for graduate level Intro to Quantum Mechanics. The first class was a review of the math we were expected to have mastery of as a prerequisite. The words “tensor analysis” came out of his mouth and kicked my butt directly to the registrar’s office to drop that course.
That would have been my choice for this thread except I ended up doing OK in it. I had been struggling all semester, but the prof said if we did better in the final exam than we did during the semester than he would use the grade from the final exam as our grade for the course. Somehow I aced the final and ended up with an “A”.