Well, you learned what “osmosis” was, so I guess high-school biology wasn’t a waste.
It may be going outside the realm of the question, but I remember a useless college course (early college - not University) called “Technology and Human Values”, taught by a touchy-feely sixties hippie leftover. By the end, I was praying the computers would seize power and outlaw classes like this as counterproductive. Where are Colossus and Gaurdian when you need them?
That would be Health, which I took by correspondence. Featured all kinds of helpful advice such as “don’t smoke, because tobacco causes cancer”. The one and only test was true-false, with questions such as “Tobacco causes cancer.”
I will also add that the writing and math portfolios that I was required to complete for my states high stakes testing system are the most worthless pieces of crap I’ve ever produced. While I was studying mulitvariable calculus and differential equations, the math portfolio asked questions about basic arithmetic and simple geometry (Find the area of a triangle, for example). In addition, the questions kept getting easier over the years so that the Legislature could pretend that scores were going up.
My most useless class was Word Processing. It was 1996 and they still made us use WordPerfect in its DOS version - going to Windows was strictly forbidden (and if the teacher caught you in Windows, you were definitely in trouble). I ended up having to teach myself Word 97 when I went to college the next year to type papers, as my college didn’t have DOS-based word processors that I knew of in 1997.
Definitely “Study Skills”. Because my school would not allow spares in grade 10 (funding is determined by total credits “earned” by the school’s students here), I had to take the course. The whole idea was to teach us how to manage our time for school. Hell, even that sounds dumb, and the course was worse. I wasn’t there half the time and still got credits – all we did while in class was sit in our desks, talk, sleep, or leave. We had a pamphlet handed out to us at the beginning of the class, and that was all the stuff as far as course material went (it was just one page). Our mark was determined by whether or not we had our “School Planner” (something we had to buy during registration) or not at the end of the semester and how much the teacher liked or didn’t like you. The teacher would talk for about 10 seconds each class (if he talked at all, that is) – usually either: “the library’s free” or “the library’s not free” since if we left the class the teacher just presumed we were going to the library. We also had guest speakers. I guess a police officer coming to show and tell us about the different weapons she’s confiscated over the years helped me with “Study Skills”.
Second most useless class was my senior level English. My notes consisted of about 5 pages for the entire year. I don’t remember anything from that class as far as using the English language is concerned; the books we had to read had useless themes/messages too. Unless I go to PRISON, where I might get raped and “feel the shape of [other men] inside [all the holes of my body]”. God, that was a dirty novel we read. Othello? I would have rather read Hamlet and at least know a piece of popular culture.
There was also my junior English (grade 11). We had spelling tests for God’s sake. Half my class probably failed, while others didn’t know how I could get the marks I did when all we had to spell were words like “cemetery”, “separate”, “column”, etc. We also read Dracula. That’s right, Dracula. What’s that? An elementary-level play? Also Of Mice and Men, a 90 page novel for elementary or junior high students. At least we learned some good résumé-writing skills.
There were also the two mandatory religion classes (one of which I had to retake because I skipped so many classes the first time). Even if I were Catholic, what the hell is the point of Church history? Does it make one any better of a Catholic if one knows the extruciatingly boring history of all the “famous” priests, nuns, saints, and monks throughout history?
Hell, there were a lot of useless courses. There were also the two science classes I had to take before I could take chemistry and physics. I don’t remember a damn thing from them except how wrong my teacher constantly was in the latter of the two courses. And as far as junior high goes, I don’t remember a single thing from those three years. Even though I skipped so much I almost got kicked out of school and thus never “gave the courses a chance”, they were nonetheless 100% useless to me. Actually, I do remember that an egg can stand on its end during the vernal equinox. Three years taught me that. And it’s still useless.
Algebra II.
So far, I have never had the need to calculate where or when two trains will meet when one leaves San Francisco @ 8:00am going 75mph and one leaves LA @ 9:30 going 80mph, blah blah blah.
OTOH, I have always carried a list of sines, cosines & tangents in my back pocket, just in case.
I didn’t take this class myself, but there’s one on the roster called “[school] 101.” Basically, it’s an introduction to the school, the ins and outs of it, mainly for freshmen. It’s not a required class, and most students don’t take it, but from what I’ve heard it’s pretty silly. As if our school was really that complicated.
Anyway, I gotta say PE, otherwise. I’m sure it enriches the lives of some people out there, but right now, it’s not doing my brain any good while I try to figure out how I’m gonna fit one credit (a year) of PE into my already busy schedule. If it weren’t for the PE requirement, I could fit everything in, but nooo. 
I’m probably gonna end up taking it for summer school, or something.
Highschool physics! WTF was I thinking when I signed up for that class? The only thing it did for me was lower my GPA just enough to graduate second in my class instead of first.
Thanks for reminding me!
Physical Education was my most useless class. I had to take it for three years(7, 8, and 9 grades, my school is a secondary school). The first year was coed, and after that they separated girls and boys. The first year I was assigned the women’s teacher, so I had her for 3 years. She came to class with skirt and nice shoes. Her favorite phrase: “Girl, bend those knees!”.
Basically, you “learned” about volleyball and basketball the first semester. Second semester was athletics and softball. It was the same curriculum for three years. By the last year, you were also required to do some written assignments and a research paper. There were practical tests and written tests. I passed the class by memorizing all the rules and acing the theoric part, and by the simpathy of my grading classmates (classmates graded each other’s practical tests).
The part I most loved was during the second semester of my first year physical education. The teacher was gone for the semester, and instead a new teacher came. He was more focused in making you interested in sports than in you doing the sports, and that helped me. Also, I liked the softball part that year because it was coed, and the guys were the only ones who hitted the balls hard enough to send them up the air, making it easy for me to catch them and make an out. The other years, since it was all-female, the ball mostly ran through the ground, so trying to make an out that way was impossible.
It was useless because it did not make me interested in any of those sports, at least not more than I already was. It wasn’t until I stop taking that class, and actually started going to a gym with my mom, that I started doing cardiovascular exercise and improving my health.
Math and religion.
Fortunately, after freshman year was done, I had finished all my required math classes for the rest of my high school career. ( I still don’t know how I did that.) I don’t get math. It is a foreign language to me.
Religion, OTOH, I just sat there in a coma every semester going
" uh…" like Beavis or Butthead.
All my other classes I liked - except the required reading books which I hated nearly every one of them - but every one of them that I hated has paid off in some form of Trival Pursuit or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Feh.
Oh, and I rocked in gym.
Social studies. I vaguely remember that these classes where about other countries, but of course you can’t get into the real issues, so it was bland stuff like the biggest export of Peru, etc.
In 6th grade, I was teased so badly by a few of the boys in the class that I managed to develop a daily nosebleed, which got me sent to the nurse every day. No one could figure out why my nose was bleeding so much. :rolleyes:
In high school, the teacher was a joke that gave out busy work, like get the current population of Brazil from the Almanac in the library. I hated the teacher so much I wouldn’t take Psychology, even though that was going to be my major in college.
But I use math all the time, even outside of work. But I’m a nerd that way.
Adult Living.
They taught us how to write checks, cook, clean, and sew.
I havent done any of them since 
Actually, in the alleged real world, word problems are exactly the sort of math you tend to encounter.
When I was teaching math, I told my students one day, “You know, you people are always griping about want more real world stuff and when are you gonna use this and so forth. You know what real world math is? Word problems! And you hate them! If you were smart, you’d shut up about all this real world foolishness and we could do the fun stuff instead of the word problems.”
No wonder I’m not a teacher.
I have to say that I agree completely with this statement. I often wind up training other people and find that what all too many people lack the word-problem-like skill of being able to move from a set of resources or information available to them towards a goal.
Metaphorically speaking, many people may know that 2+3 = 5, but give them a box of 2’s and 3’s and tell them that their job is to make a bunch of 5’s and they have to think really hard about it before they understand that they only need to apply what they already know to reach that goal. And asking them to generalize that knowledge and start building 10’s for you is just way too hard.
I see this kind of “I can’t see how to get from here to there if it required more than 1 or two steps” behavior in everything from operating a word processor (I want large bold italics. I see the bold button, the italic button, …), operating a cash register, to preparing and using patterns for woodworking and sewing.
Math is more than arithmetic and other “rules”. It’s a way of thought and word problems are the real heart of that way of thought.
In defense of math, I recently had to set up a prediction model and I was going crazy trying to figure out how to do it using some sort of regression function.
In the end, I ended up solving the problem through simple 8th grade algebra. Who knew 8th-grade algebra would prove more useful than doctoral-level statistics?
Too bad no one ever teaches it that way…
Well it wasn’t a course and it’s going to show my age, but the most useless thing I had in school (for me) was the slide-rule (a.k.a. the slipstick) not only did we have to learn to use the silly thing, but we were forced to buy one too! I gave it to my younger brother when I finished grade 11, and I have’nt seen one since. We’re talking 1957 here. Apart from that I enjoyed school a lot and soaked up most subjects without studying a tack. The ones that were hard for me were languages, Latin, French & later on German were all difficult, especially as I never did learn to study.
Later I moved to another country and ended up being tri-lingual
(English/Dutch/Papiamentoe) but although I did not like languages in school, even at the time I realized that all knowledge is, in itself, valuable. I can still recite the first few lines of “Caesars Gallic Wars” in latin, and that lead me to investigate the history of the Roman Empire. the Ottoman Empire etc etc on my own which lead me strangely enough to reading & enjoying Science Fiction for the next 40-50 years. (the history section of the library was next to the Si-Fi section)
Apros to nothing, in some of the very early Si-Fi books the hero’s in spaceships were using 
slide-rules
Retief
9th grade Physical Science. Partially because I knew most of it already, but mostly because:
“OK, y’all, I’m gonna go set up the pitchin’ machine, so y’all hush and study sumthin’.”
[he peeks his head in 15 minutes later:]
“Hey! I told y’all to hush! And when I tell ya to hush, ya hush! Now I gotta work on the pitchin’ machine, so y’all… uh… study sumthin.”
This happened, maybe two or three times a week.
When we had to write essays in the class, he insisted that we also turn in a handwritten first draft - even if we composed the essay on the computer. So we just transcribed the essay by hand, inserting little messages for him in the text, knowing he’d never actually read them.
[sub]OK, OK, P.E. was more useless, but that one’s been taken![/sub]
The most useless class of all…that is NOT an option class has to be CALM. Honestly. I don’t see why this is mandatory to graduate from high school. It is the most boring, most useless stuff I have ever heard. I learn more from my parents than this bullsh-t class. What makes matters worse is, is that my teacher is so enthusiastic it makes me want to puke. I can’t believe no one else has mentioned it yet…are most of you older that you didn’t have to take it when you were in high school or something?
May I make a distinction between real world word problems and lame word problems? Thank you. Ninth grade algebra is likely to be as much I’ll ever need. I still maintain that quadratics and exponentials are a waste of my time, other than as requirements to finish school.
A tie, of sorts:
Driver’s Ed. - People only took it to get the insurance discount when they passed. I had the class with a girl who was trying to pass it for the third time. She already had her license, just like 80% of the people in the class. We had so many people in the class that you only got to drive about four times the whole semester, instead of once a week like you were supposed to. The rest of the time you were drafted into P.E. class or became a teacher’s aide until it was your turn to drive in the rotation. I became a teacher’s aide for the English teacher who was the yearbook sponsor. So I became a de facto shadow member of the yearbook staff. I drove all of three times that semester, but I got to sort through lots of pictures. Wow.
P.E. - The coaches were too busy to mess with us most of the time, they were getting ready for afterschool practice in football, baseball, basketball, etc. depending on the time of year. So we played 21 most of the year. When we weren’t trying to avoid getting the shit kicked out of ourselves by the older kids. Or watching the seniors in the class trying to sneak off to hook up with their 8th grade cheerleader girlfriends who were having practice nearby. Watching one guy being worked on by EMTs because he started having seizures on the gym floor. Trying to avoid getting shoved into the toliet that stayed clogged for a month at a time. Keeping up with the standings in the “Who can go the longest without washing his gym clothes contest.” Finding a proxy to take your place on your team the two weeks we played baseball. Who can get the most penalty push-ups for high sticking playing floor hockey. (Which was called off early because of the amount of injuries) Trying to light cigarettes with eyeglasses on the days we were outside. Watching the crowd that gathers to ogle the class skank sitting high up on the bleachers in a short skirt. The daily crotch-punching contest before warm-up exercises. The wedgie/fistfight chain reactions. Yes, sportsmanship, teamwork, and fairplay were deeply instilled in me during my time in P.E. class.