mine was volley ball… I haven’t played it once since. not even on a beach… and I doubt I would anyway… athletics don’t like me.
everytime I served the ball, it either went up and hit me in the head, or behind me and hit some guy in the face.
and I really shouldn’t throw frisbees either…
oh goodness, that was suppose to say USELESS
I have been up all night, my brain is fried…
volleyball or spelling? 
tsk, tsk, tsk…
My most useless class in high school was the one where the teacher gave the students intellectual challenges and required us to think, thus strengthening our minds, stressing the growth of our critical thinking processes, and preparing us for both college and the real world.
That one was completely useless.
Here’s another vote for gym. Even if they had taught us anything, I doubt that I would have found a use for it. Since they expected us to learn all the rules to the games by osmosis, I learned nothing at all.
Home Ec
I already knew how to cook and sew. My mom taught me all the “womanly” arts when I was young. But back in them days, all the girls were required to take one Home Ec and all the boys were required to take one shop class.
In the period time that my classmates sewed one drawstring bag and one jumper, I made those, plus a suit, and I still had time to spare.
The cooking part was even worse - most of what we had to make was terrible! I refuse to eat anything with curry as a result of that class.
Thankfully, we didn’t have to take it every year…
Shop.
Sex Ed.
Man, they should really call that something else. I didn’t learn anything about sex!
Still clueless…
This is really interesting, and I’ll tell you why.
I have a degree in Math Education and went through my student teaching process before I figured out I had no business being in a high school classroom. In all of my education classes (not the math ones), I was often the only Math Ed person in the room. And time and time again I was told - by the professors - how useless Math was.
On one occasion, the professor said something about, “If you can’t think of a real-life application for, say, quadratic equations, don’t teach them.” I muttered, “If you can’t think of a real-life application for quadtratic equations, you shouldn’t be a math teacher.” He heard this and then began challenging me for real life applications (RLA) for math. I should add here that I think the whole “real-life” thing is part of the bogus copout touchy-feely crap that’s ruining our schools, but maybe that’s beside the point. Anyway, I turned the tables on him and said, "What about Romeo and Juliet, the play you were just talking about. When, in real life, will a student ever really need to know the text of Romeo and Juliet?
“Well,” he said, “It’s not the text per se, but the ideas in it. And the skill of analyzing text, interpreting meaning, making arguments and defending them by writing about it. That’s important.”
I then said, “Well isn’t that important in math as well? Logical thinking skills? Adaptive thinking skills? Problem solving?”
The answer? NO. No, Math, unlike every other subject, is only good for whatever it is directly teaching - there are no side benefits. Even gym had the benefits of teaching sportsmanship and teamwork and so forth. I got this time and time again - every other subject was allowed to include side benefits - research skills, analytical skills, etc - but not math. If the exact same problem you were handing out didn’t have an immediate real-life use, it was worthless.
What was my point here? Oh yeah. So gym isn’t worthless. It’s teaching you teamwork and sportsmanship and following instructions. It’s MATH that’s pointless.
Did anyone else hear Daria’s voice while reading this?
Senior year health. We did the sex thing for the 6th time, then we did “real life” activies such as budgets and shopping lists. By the end of the semester the entire left side of the room played Pokemon throughout class. Great times.
Hmmm, now it all adds up.
:::d&r:::
Intro to Computers … only it wasn’t called that, it had a delightfully wonky name, like “The World of Computing Dynamics” or something. Mid-1980s, and we learned all about punch cards, and also had to memorize endless computer terms, most of which were completely outdated by the time I graduated from high school. And the flow charts – endless flow charts that we drew BY HAND and colored in with markers. The best grades were awarded to the people with the best coloring in skills (I got an A, she said modestly.)
I should also mention that we didn’t even HAVE COMPUTERS in the classroom, we had pictures of computers.
Although, I am using a computer right this very minute so perhaps I have no right to complain.
Most of them.
Spanish (don’t hardly remember any of it)
History (they didn’t do a very good job of it)
Religion (Catholic school for an atheist, very useful)
English (read a book and write a 5 paragraph essay on it. If you don’t misspell anything and don’t screw up the punctuation you get an A. The actuall content of the essay is irrelevant.)
Gym, for sure. None of the activities actually made anyone physically fit, if you ask me. So much time was spent inspecting the gym uniforms and taking attendance and picking teams and such that there was little time spent on the activities. And, for the athletically challenged teenaged Caricci, there was so much intimidation, that all I learned was how to stay out of the way and not be noticed.
Don’t knock it. That’s an incredibly useful skill.
My most useless class was during my sophomore year in high school, called Herpetology and Ornithology, the studies of reptiles/amphibians and birds, respectively. The teacher, besides just being an asshole, expected everyone to share his personal interest in birds and acted resentful towards anyone who didn’t (which was pretty much all of us). I hated every infernal second of sitting through that damn class. One of the most ridiculous assignments we had was to take a book containing some 200 photos of birds and memorize their markings and other distinguishing charactertistics. A week later he showed us some slides from his own collection of bird photos and we had to identify which species each bird was. Many of these photos consisted of about 95% sky or other background with a [sub]very small[/sub] silhouette of a bird! Even if I had bothered to study the damn book there was no way in hell anybody could identify what these birds were! Needless to say, most of us flunked this stupid assignment and our collective bitter hatred towards this teacher intensified as the semester moved on (thank God it was only one semester). The fact that I got a D for this class in no way affected my getting my current job which involves the testing and developing of printers. Not once have I ever wished I paid attention in this class or respected the nasty teacher who taught it. None of the material presented in this class has proven to be the least bit applicable to my life today.
Definitely Phys. Ed. I hated it so much that I flatly refused to take it for my last two years of high school. They worked me a deal where I took an extra load of other classroom stuff instead. Worked for me! 
Legomancer, I agree! Geometry and calculus were difficult, boring and completely useless.
It’s a tie between health and one semester of gym.
In order to free up a semester for electives with actual value, like theater and journalism, I took health in the summer. Hours upon hours of tedium, broken only by a snack break. For some unfathomable reason, the air conditioner was cranked to the maximum every day, meaning that in Texas in June we were wearing jeans and carrying jackets and blankets to class. I could only guess that we were leftover students and had to be refrigerated so we wouldn’t spoil.
Our school district, if not the state, mandated one semester of health and three semesters of physical education. I filled two phys ed semesters playing tennis my freshman year, then had to find a way to finish the last semester without sacrificing any of the classes that would actually benefit me. Luckily, the guidance counselor had a solution. I’m surely one of the few people who can say they’ve taken gym by correspondence course.
Physics. I hated it, the whole class was completely Greek to me, and I haven’t used a lick of it since.
The teacher was not a good instructor. I was learning about vectors both in Physics and Math Analysis at the same time. I understood it completely in MA, but get to Physics and I couldn’t understand what he was talking about.
Also, at the end of the school year, he did a lecture about what a great nation this was and how it was our DUTY to either join the Peace Corps or the Armed Services. No choice, we had to do one or the other. This, to a bunch of kids who had already received their acceptance letters from their colleges.