Drafting, back in 1983. The entire class consisted of learning how to rotate a pencil while drawing in order to create a smooth, uniform line. This is a skill that, five years later, was completely obsolete due to computers and laser printers.
I used the mail merge once…
I think the most useless class I ever took was Moral Ed. This was the “you’re not protestant, you’re not catholic, so go here” class. Mind you, I chose it because I knew it would be easy (the actual religious classes had to do things like memorize Bible verse), and it was actually somewhat interesting the first couple of years thanks to the teacher I had, but the last year of high school…This teacher had us do 3 things all year. Yep, that’s YEAR. My school didn’t do semesters, we had 8 classes on rotation for 10 months. We wrote 2 essays of 1500 words (the stock abortion and prostitution essays) and wrote one “test” which involved basically being able to associate certain religious symbols with the religion (hmm…a cross…christianity…a star of David…ummm…Islam? No… :rolleyes:). It was pretty terrible.
Then there was community service. Beacuse of the courses I’d chosen, I had two extra “spares” in the cycle (6 day rotation), and my school refused to give spares because of the “unruliness” of students or something like that. So this course involved twice a week of meeting with a teacher and making plans to help out the school and public community. At least in concept. My time around, they had messed up scheduling and the teacher had another class at that time (makes sense, eh?) so we spent the year sitting in the cafeteria or outside on the hill. But it wasn’t technically a spare, so it was OK. Needless to say, we all made up what service we’d done at the end of the year, and the 400 word essay was a joke.
As for some of those other courses…I hated phys ed, but I like volleyball, so it was a good time waster. I’ve always been terrible at math, but I’m discovering more and more that chemistry IS math, and I regret not being better at it (same goes for physics, since physics is also math and therefore is chemistry). I appreciate the time wasters that HIstory and English were, simply because at least I know a LITTLE about what’s going on and why, and my writing skills are fairly good. Its funny, but reading these boards, I use a lot of stuff that I learned in high school when I choose what threads I can answer too, and when I sit down to write a post.
But Moral ed…:shudder"
So the smilie face domintates over the rolleyes smilile? There’s discrimination going on here!!!
preview, preview, preview
It’s not a class I took, but it deserves to be on the list. “Preparing for College Success” is offered at the local community college. Most of the students are trying to qualify for admission to UW-Madison.
I overheard a student saying it was her FAVORITE class because there are no assignment deadlines. As long as the work is turned in before finals, there is no penalty (at least with HER teacher).
I’ve can’t imagine a more ill-conceived course for its purpose.
Since I took everything (english lit, history, government, math, physics, biology, chemistry and so on) again when I attended college, and it wasn’t until then that any of it made sense, I would have to say that the vast majority of high school classes were useless to me.
The class that I thought might be useful, but wasn’t: Drafting. It was supposed be good for engineering in college. The best skill I actually got out of it was that it improved my printed penmanship. Other than that, technology rendered it completely useless - and, although I didn’t know it at the time, already had by the time I took it.
Classes that could have been useful, but weren’t: Spanish - if I could actually have spoken Spanish after years of getting A’s in the class, I would think better of it.
I have mixed thoughts about English. Some of the skills, in terms of writing and communication, are still useful, and the introduction to literature was probably good. However, I’ll say about 2 years were useful, and 2 years were useless - either repeating previous material, busy work, or reviewing 5th grade grammar and spelling.
Completely useless: Health. They never got past material that was covered in grade school. Biology, although if I had gone into the biological sciences, I might feel differently.
Useless to me now, but fun enough that I don’t regret it: Band.
Useless but really fun - Latin. We read erotic Roman poetry while every other teacher in my (Catholic) school thought we were singing hyms or something.
Useless but bland and inoffensive - Every single high school class other than English and that AP US History class.
Useless and so horrible I got hives - Religion. 'Nuff said.
My math classes. I wish we had a consumer mathematics type class; that would have been more useful. Everything my Alg 2 teacher said about me using the material later in life was BS.
Health and PE would have been more useful if we’d had useful information on nutrition and exercise. Playing a variety of games was nice, but I would have rather learned about moderating eating and exercising habits, the proper ways to work out… basically, the stuff that health and fitness magazines tell you. Instead, I had to choose between golf and bowling, and had a rehash intermediate school health. Bo-ring.
On a similar vein, I wish my English classes had concentrated on fewer books and emphasized critical thinking. Ideally, they would have chosen two or three books instead of the five or six, and had us think about the books. That kind of skill should be developed by the time you get to college, and I felt like mine wasn’t develped enough.
The most useful stuff? Being editor of the school paper. Playing in the orchestra all 4 years. Running the commencement program committee, the literary magazine committee (2 years), and a couple other publications-related projects.
:eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
This explains a lot. What a bunch of :wallyes.
Four years of religioun (all girl Catholic high school), health class and gym class.
And in our gym class, we had a gymnastics unit where we were actually graded on how well we did the uneven parallel bars and the balance beam, plus cartwheels and flips.
The cheerleaders all got As in that unit, while the rest of us were just completely humiliated.
Sheri
I took this class at the international school at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem called Modern Israeli Society or some such. It was entirely useless. The entire thing was incredibly obvious stuff about how not every Israeli citizen considers the Israeli government to have authority over them, and how Jews and Arabs don’t like each other. Um, duh. (I, and most of my classmates, had already been living in Israel for six months when the class started, all of this was patently clear by this time.) We actually had to switch classrooms mid-semester, so many people dropped the course. I had to go through with it, unfortunately, for my major. My professor had a really bizarre South African/New Yorker accent that was hard to listen to even if he had had anything of interest to say. The high point of the course was when he announced that he thought the class would have to end early as it looked like he would be called up to the army reserves. We were all terribly disappointed when he managed to postpone it.
For me, it’s a tie:
Gym - (apparently a popular choice) - this was horrible, horrible torture, and all I took away from it was the fact that some people are vindictive, cruel, competitive bastards.
French - Okay, sure this is supposed to be a bilingual country. But I grew up in the middle of the prairies, just where the heck was I supposed to find actual French-speaking people? And of course, I forgot it all.
Sex Ed - (charmingly called Lifestyles in my school) - taught by a strange, bald, toady little man who somehow managed to make sex sound both boring and repulsive. For some odd reason, he also taught a section on problem-solving skills, which was supposed to make us all well-rounded and forward-thinking, apparently through the in-suffering-lieth-virtue school of learning.
This question made made me think! Damn it, don’t do that again! Do you have any idea how painful it is?
I think it’s interesting that when I look back, the subjects that I find/found the most useless were ones that were taught by poor teachers, NOT necessarily the ones I use the least now. Does that make sense?
I had a teacher for geometry who snuck out of the classroom several times each period to have a nip in the bathroom. She was constantly losing our papers, forgetting where we were in our lessons, and other things that made it impossible to learn in her class. She couldn’t explain herself, couldn’t answer questions, and in addition to her failure as a teacher, wasn’t a very nice person.
My chemistry teacher managed to get us through the first FOUR chapters of a beginning chemistry book in an entire YEAR. I don’t know if he thought we were too dumb to handle it, or what.
I guess I give value to my classes based on what I LEARNED in those classes, rather than what I still use in practical life now. My biology teacher was magnificent…gave us EVERYTHING he had as far as teaching goes. If we learned something quickly, he moved on to something more advanced. If we needed help with something, he searched for a better way to explain. I enjoyed the class and learned tons, so I consider it to have been a valuable experience, even though I rarely use any biological knowledge now as a writer.
Ditto for my English teacher who let me write whatever I wanted about what I read and turn it in for a grade. (Always an A!) She figured out that kids need different rules and assignments and tossed out her lesson plan where I was concerned, letting me write pages and pages of teenaged crapola every day and avoiding harsh criticism, which is just what I needed at the time.
L
Well, I’m still in high school, but my most useless class so far has to have been Career Studies. If you sleep through half the class and get 95%, it’s useless.
At least I got some exercise out of Gym.
I think it does. Back in the 5th grade, I hated my social studies class (which was really more of a history/current events class). I thought it was utterly useless. The teacher never really illustrated why such knowledge would be valuable to us, and my young mind failed to surmise a situation wherein it might be useful.
After spending some time studying history on my own, I’ve now come to realize its value – and if I should ever wind up teaching this subject, I would handle it very differently from the way my sixth-grade teacher did.
<MontyPythonParaphrase>
Gym class? You had it easy. We would have killed to take a gym class.
</MontyPythonParaphrase>
At my high school we didn’t get gym until our Junior year, because for the first two years we had…
…wait for it…
Military Drill! Marching around the school yard with wooden replicas of rifles on our shoulders.
And, no, it wasn’t a military school.
My mind still boggles at the sheer idiocy of that requirement.
Aw, but military drill would be amusing. And better than playing ping-pong, which is more or less what I did for the time I was in gym class.
jessica
I liked most of my classes during high school, and for the most part, I’m happy I took all of them, even the ones that I don’t have a real application for right now. But I have to say that the Economics course we were required to take as seniors was utterly ridiculous. I was actually looking forward to it, too. (Not having taken college econ yet, I thought it might be interesting 
) There was some basic discussion of economics, supply and demand and so on, but for the most part, we learned how to open a savings account, take out a loan, write checks, budget your salary, and so on. It was not at all what I was hoping for. I mean, we learned how to write checks in sixth grade, we definitely did not need to learn it again! And while, if I was joining the workforce right out of high school, I might need to buy a car, by the time I get out of college I’m not going to remembe anything from that course. So, I must be the rare case where the course designed for real-world application was most useless to me. Maybe that’s why I live in my own little world:D
Keyboarding class where we sat in front of cheap word processors and copied text out of a book for 40 minutes. The less typos you made, the higher your grade.
There was also this test taking class that was supposed to help you prepare for the SATs. The math was incredibly easy… they taught us stuff like 0.06 being equivalent to 6% and how we had to move the decimal places over by two. And the english portion had us read the Reader’s Digest.
Well, I’m still a lowly sophomore, but here’s my take on it - Math, while very important, is something that I am going to find pretty useless later in my life. I know at this point that I am not going to do anything with my life that requires that I know quadratics, geometry, calculus, or other higher forms of math. There may be VERY occasional times when they would come in handy, but I’m not going to be solving lame word problems for a living. It doesn’t matter though; disuse will make me forget everything above basic algebra anyway. Regardless, it is very important that all this personally useless math is taught, if only for the people that DO need the background. It just irks me that I need to learn it as well.
Actually, there are a few things that bug me about my classes. My school is a grade 7-12 secondary to high school. It’s unusual; we are grouped in three divisions, one being the lowest and three the highest. Division one is basically grades seven and eight, two is ninth and tenth, and so on. Progress is based on merit of work shown in a portfolio, and people on average “gateway” to the next division every two years. They can progress faster or slower if need be. Our classes are broken up into two domains, MST (for Math, Science, and supposedly technology) and AH (for Arts & Humanities). In the lower two divisions (middle school, and lower highschool) these two domains are our classes - each is two hours long and integrates everything - you know, writing, English, art, history, etc. all rolled into one. In Division Three - surprise! - students can actually choose specific classes WITHIN these domains. Before I gripe, let me say that for Division One, this integration is EXCELLENT. Absolutely wondeful. It really lets things come together more effectively for the students. But, now my gripe…
In Division Two, this is simply not the best way to do things. Especially in AH, this system makes the classes too broad. We tend to go from focus to focus, with various assessments ranging from Reading to Oral Presentation to Writing to Artistic Expression (which I HATE as an assessed skill) and more. The result is that we try to do too much, and end up getting spread out across too much material over a year. We do some history, and some very interesting history - but not enough of it. We do writing, but only ABOUT things. We never look at writing itself as a form of expression, and only explain whatever technique is necessary to, for example, write an essay, when absolutely necessary.
It also leads to inefficiency - we are REPEATEDLY, year after year, required to waste valuable class time going over how to give an effective oral presentation. The idea is apparently to let us prepare for Div. 3, when we will actually be given some academic choice and independence. This is the wrong idea, however, and means that we end up being led by the hand through our work, just as in Division One. Div. One should be the preparation level - at that point, we will have what we need to move into Div. 2 and fulfill our requirements, while focusing on more specific, interest-oriented, significant classes. That’s what’s useless in my schooling. Time wasted on things that don’t matter to me, just so I can get to important things. Course requirements are fine - no choice or academic freedom in a highschool environment is limiting and frustrating.
I’ve been inspired to start talking and asking people at my school about this. Thanks people :).