ummm…
…never mind.
Well, I hate to say this, but in the long run my Anatomy & Zoology class wasn’t useful. I really should have taken chemistry, which I have several times since then regretted not knowing more about.
We dissected a cat, which was interesting, but it involved memorizing numerous muscles and veins, and then spewing the names back out on tests. Maybe if I’d gone to med school that would have come in handy, but since I didn’t, it’s been useless (and I didn’t retain much).
3/4 (or more) of all my classes were useless. But let me explain.
The flow rate of information in high school is very, very low. Everything I was taught could have been taught in 1/4 the time. (And that’s just for the stuff I’m bad at. What I’m good at would take even less time.) People are frequently startled by the change in rate when they get to college.
They spend a week explaining how to convert percentages to decimals for Jebus’s sake.
Keep in mind that high school’s main purpose is baby sitting teenagers until they’re old enough to go out on their own. If the high school curriculum was squeezed down to even just two years, what we would we do with them?
Practically everything I was taught, no matter how slowly, is quite worthwhile. They should have given me more, not less.
(I’ve taught a lot of new college freshman over the years. I know pretty well the max. rate at which they can handle stuff. It’s a lot higher than what they got in high school.)
My school has a stupid rule that you have to take five classes to be a full-time student. If you’re not you can’t do extracurriculars and it hurts your college chances. So along with my four APs this semester I have to take creative writing in order to fulfill this inane requirement. It’s undoubtedly the most useless class I’ve ever been in. It’s filled with loud, dumb people and only by the grace of luck did my best friend manage to land in there too. Basically we spend the whole class talking about how stupid it is.
Always keep in mind that one of the problems with high school is the well-documented fact that teenagers are the smartest humans in the world. Your average teenager has far more intelligence than anyone else in human history, past or present. So trying to teach anything to people who already are the pinnacle of human knowledge and achievement is kind of pointless.
Pretty much everything was useless, except typing, which I took to get out of gym, my senior year (I’m not knocking gym above any others). Why was typing so important? Because I’m using it right now and have used it many, many times since high school.
I agree that teenagers were not taught at the degree that they can handle, but I also agree that teaching teenagers is almost impossible, because they aren’t listening*. College tends to get the attention of most, but it is the :eek: of the real world that is most instructive.
- This includes me and my peers at the time.
Plane geometry! Just what you are supposed to learn by “proving” Euclid’s 88 theorems is beyond me… I guess its like learning Latin is supposed to be good for you somehow…
I went to a Catholic school, so I was required to take four years of religion. Old Testament, New Testament/Personal Morality, and whatever I took senior year weren’t that bad. But junior year I had to take Church History in the fall, and Social Morality in the spring. Church History was just completely useless, no two ways about it. Social Morality could’ve been worthwhile, but the entire class was about the fact that there are problems in the world. I was not happy with these.
I had two that were just awful, both in 11th grade.
The first was Gym. It’s not that I’m not phystical or anything, all we ever did was play ping pong or volleyball. It was a total waste of time. When I took gym in my freshman year we actaully DID something.
My second worthless class, for me, was German 3. I’m horrible in learning other languages but I could find no other class to take. I ended up failing it, the only class I ever got an ‘F’ in.
And all that stuff in English class about irony was pretty useless, too.
As for my most useless class, it is hard to beat P.E. - the teachers didn’t care at all whether or not you did anything as long as you dressed out. Except for tennis and archery(can you imagine that today?) I stood around talking.
My Algebra class was a close contender. The drunken teacher only addressed the subject matter about once a week. The rest of the time he spent explaining why girls weren’t smart enough to do math, what life was like in Butte, Montana, and how he coulda been a astronaut if hadn’t had these bad peepers. When I tried to get out of the class, the counselor said, “We know he doesn’t do much teaching, but he really does know his math.”
In my case, it was Art.
Nothing wrong with an appreciation of art (I still do poetry and pottery), but this class was horrid. Maybe because it was the first year that it was offered, but it didn’t seem like the teacher knew anything at all about art! As a test once, I traced a picture and turned it in on an assignment. Never mind that the type, subject matter, even the quality were HUGELY different from anything that I had turned in before…
I got an A.
That class did wonders for my GPA.
Gym. Definitely gym. Basically I spend 38 minutes of my day to go out in the cold wearing a t-shirt and shorts and throw a ball around until I get hurt. It’s the only class I’ve purposefully skipped or snuck out of.
Home Ec.
I took it senior year, after I decided not to take French (I already had my language credits with Spanish). This would have been the 1990-1991 school year, and the “teacher” was the school secretary, and the principal’s daughter.
I still can’t sew a hem in anything like a reasonable amount of time, I already knew how to cook, and I think that’s about all we did.
I spent most of that class messing with the minds of the teacher and the two freshman girls I kept getting paired with. Maybe that’s why I can’t sew.
The most useless class I’ve taken lately was a sociology class last semester. Would’ve been a perfectly fine class if the teacher ever bothered to do anything but make us copy pages of notes. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even do that, but he’d stick us in groups and send us to the library to work on some inane project. With my tremendously wonderful luck, I always ended up with somebody on their third time as a senior, so I had to do all the work anyway. Personal pride sucks.
I did find the subject material fascinating, but I really couldn’t even teach myself because the textbook read like my 5th grade social studies book with some big words sprinkled in. Grr.
jessica
good afternoon, friends,
i am not sure it was the most useless, but in my senior year of high school, it was mandatory to take american government. the grade we recieved depended on how closely we agreed with the teacher’s political position.
this was in 1971, and i passed the course with a d- my test grades were 100%, but my understanding of the course content, along with my membership in the sds and an arrest at a peace rally during the spring quarter pulled my grade down.
For me, Phys Ed wins. Three days a week, every single year. It was required. It was utterly useless. It was just a standard length class, so a good deal of time was used up changing into and out of our sneakers and gym suits, taking attendence, doing a few jumping jacks and stretches, and choosing teams. In what time remained, we supposedly played whatever sport was in season: soccer, volleyball, basketball, or baseball. I never did more then go thru the motions. I never exerted myself.
The only kids who did exert themselves were the ones who wanted to; the ones who enjoyed sports. For the rest of us, the whole thing was a total waste of time.
Tied for 2nd place would be most of the rest of my classes. I spent a lot of time sitting in classes where I was supposedly learning things that I now know nothing about. I think high school’s main purposes are to keep teenagers occupied, out of the way, and out of the labor market. A secondary purpose is to instill standard, dull, conventional ideas and attitudes.
Back in the mid seveties, my best friend and I decided to stream ourselves into the ‘business studies’ classes rather than the sciences or humanities. We were all meant to be trained as dutiful little secretaries by doing typing, grooming/secretarial practice and SHORTHAND!
Now my friend and I did a whole year of shorthand without EVER being able to transcribe one lousy word, and I still can’t sit like a ‘lady’, (but I must admit, the typing has come in handy).
Needless to say, we realized the error of our ways and the following year popped back into the more academic classes.
Ah, Mrs. Blom, if you ever read this, thankyou for showing me what I DIDN’T want to grow up to be!
Oh, boy, this is tough. Hmm. I’m in my sophomore year, and have taken a course load of about one-third useless classes.
Physical education. Very little ‘education’ went on there. Just a bunch of people playing basketball as me and my friend sat in the bleachers, reading, talking, goofing off and generally trying to stave off about forty minutes of boredom dressed in a pair of sweatpants and an old shirt. When I tried to break the monotony by joining a game, I embarrassed myself with my ineptness at any sport on the face of this Earth. Luckily, that class was only a semester. But I have to take another physical semester to get a full credit, required to graduate. Joy.
Either gym or physics.
Volleyball in particular. I still can barely hit the ball, and serving it leaves black and blue marks on my arm! It’s disgusting. I feel like calling child abuse on my teachers. And ugh, getting hit with the ball makes me want to cry. 
I seriously hate that class.
And Physics- the only use it’s had is teaching me I should never have taken physics. What is it with physics teachers? Are they all naturally bad?
I knew it! 
My high school gym class was pretty useless, but swim class was even worse – it was really unpleasant to have to put on an ill-fitting standard-issue bathing suit and get into a cold, funny-smelling pool to swim laps first thing in the morning. Especially since I already knew how to swim.
I actually waited until senior year to take this class, hoping the pool would be shut down by the Board of Health or something, but it never happened…
The required MS Word class was also fairly pointless, since everything we covered I could either already do or didn’t need to (does anyone ever use the mail merge function?). But since it didn’t involve cold water, dressing, or undressing, it was slightly more bearable than swim.