# What were the most useless skills you were taught in school?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [June 5, 2026, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648 "2026-06-05T19:11:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 13
### Author:  [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2026, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/241 "2026-06-08T22:45:34Z")
> [@chappachula](#):
>
> But you still have grandparents, and old photo albums, family bibles, old recipes, etc.
Sadly, none of those.
> [@Heracles](#):
>
> On Reddit, I’ve subscribed to a sub called r/Cursive , where people ask the Internet to decipher documents written in cursive. Most often, documents from the early 20th century: great-grandma’s maiden name… or the “cause of death” part of death certificates. Some are trivial and show the asker’s inability to read basic cursive.
I was taught cursive, but honestly, some/most of the old handwriting is not easily readable. And i have not found cursive to be useful.
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### Author:  [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2026, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/242 "2026-06-08T23:05:20Z")
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that’s the way I likes it!
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### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2026, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/243 "2026-06-08T23:11:43Z")
> [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](#):
>
> My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that’s the way I likes it!
You must be driving an inefficient old car. I get more than 1600 furlongs to the amphora!
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### Author:  [@abcdefghij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abcdefghij)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2026, 11:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/244 "2026-06-08T23:36:50Z")
> [@wolfpup](#):
>
> I guess that’s why every nation on the planet now uses the metric system – known as the International System of Units, or SI, with the exception of Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States. And Liberia and Myanmar are in the process of converting to it.
[The United States converted to the metric system in 1875](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention).
We just never told anybody.
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### Author:  [@Civil\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Civil_Guy)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2026, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/245 "2026-06-08T23:38:51Z")
I’m going to go out on a limb a couple meters and claim that the U.S. is sort of taking some steps to converting more to the metric system… well, at least, accommodating it. No, it’s not a quick or formal process, but that seems to be the way we like it. It’s more like we’re just adding more units to measure things. Metric units are fine for some some uses: no one blinks an eye at running a 5k race or grabbing a couple liters of water. We use metric units for medicine and other sciences.
I also think that reading more stuff on the internet will continue to nudge us towards more exposure, more use of the metric system.
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### Author:  [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2026, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/246 "2026-06-08T23:52:05Z")
> [@Civil\_Guy](#):
>
> I’m going to go out on a limb a couple meters and claim that the U.S. is sort of taking some steps to converting more to the metric system… well, at least, accommodating it. No, it’s not a quick or formal process, but that seems to be the way we like it. It’s more like we’re just adding more units to measure things. Metric units are fine for some some uses: no one blinks an eye at running a 5k race or grabbing a couple liters of water. We use metric units for medicine and other sciences.
You know I asked some metric super fans- How, exactly is the metric system better for everyday life?" Sure, a liter of water weighs a kilogram (but how does that related to everyday life?), but a pint’s a pound. Is KPH any better than MPH? No. And rods, furlongs and such are used in daily life- unless you are a dedicated horse race fan.
Now sure in science, the metric system is better.
But in everyday life, there’s no hurry to convert. We now have one & two liter bottles, and that’s great, but a fifth of scotch is still a fifth, not 750ml. It is not the the USA is backward, it is just that we are used to the older system, which works just fine, so no need for fast conversion. And hell in the UK they still measure human weight in “stone” and a horse in “hands”.
We had decimal currency first, IIRC. The UK didnt change until the 1970s.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/247 "2026-06-09T00:56:42Z")
Well, one quick example: A couple of months ago, one of the church ladies was making coffee for the monthly donut social. The instructions on the coffee said how many tablespoons of grounds to use per cup. But she was making 60 cups. How much grounds is that? The vast majority of Americans couldn’t tell you. But they could if we were using metric.
Or suppose you have a motor, and you know how fast it’s spinning, and how much torque it has. How much power is that? Speed in radians per second times torque in newton-meters is power in watts, easy. Meanwhile, speed in RPM times torque in foot-pounds times the right conversion factor is power in horsepower. What’s the right conversion factor?
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### Author:  [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/248 "2026-06-09T00:58:18Z")
> [@Kimstu](#):
>
> After decades of teaching math and related subjects, I have yet to meet a student that I would describe as intrinsically “bad at” math, in the sense of simply not having the ability for it.
For the sake of discussion, please define “math.”
I can do most ordinary arithmetic, i.e. addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in my head, and pretty much all of it with a pencil and paper.
When I got into higher math - algebra and simple geometry - I struggled, and by trigonometry I was completely lost. And this was despite the fact that I consider the math teachers I had in my junior and senior years in high school much better than my freshman and sophomore teachers.
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 2:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/249 "2026-06-09T02:19:56Z")
> [@Kent\_Clark](#):
>
> For the sake of discussion, please define “math.”
I think I’d call it, for purposes of this discussion, “topics taught in school and higher-ed math courses”. That would include both the quantitative computation you’re comfortable with, and the more abstract high school math content that didn’t work out for you at that time.
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### Author:  [@Civil\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Civil_Guy)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/250 "2026-06-09T02:54:43Z")
Another example: laying out pictures on a wall. Different sized pictures, wall intersects with a sloping ceiling. Other issues aside, how to measure up everything for layout? Inches? Sure, as long as any measurement longer than a foot or less than an inch is recorded and converted correctly. Maybe decimal feet, odd as that might sound. Or… meters (or centimeters, but that’s just a decimal point thing). Anyhow, it’s easier in consistent decimal units.
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### Author:  [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/251 "2026-06-09T03:09:28Z")
I think most of the skills I learned had value, even if I don’t use them now. Value came from learning how to learn.
The classes I regret are the ones that I didn’t take advantage of. I took German for two years and only went through the motions, and consequently only learned a minimal amout, and worse, I didn’t learn how to learn languages.
Only after I went to Japan and had to learn Japanese did I find a way to learn languages.
And, my English teachers didn’t believe in diagramming sentences so I didn’t have to do that.
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### Author:  [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/252 "2026-06-09T10:54:44Z")
> [@DrDeth](#):
>
> And hell in the UK they still measure human weight in “stone” and a horse in “hands”.
Stones have just about hung on in everyday speech, but if you go to hospital, they will weigh you in kilos and measure your height in centimetres.
Horses have a whole different language. Racing is in furlongs, sales are in guineas and, yes, they are measured in hands. All part of the mystique, I suppose.
When I was a truck driver, the office needed the dimensions of each box I collected in centimetres. Sometimes, the young guy in the warehouse, who had gone all the way through his education in metric units, would write them up in inches.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 12:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/253 "2026-06-09T12:05:55Z")
> [@Civil\_Guy](#):
>
> Other issues aside, how to measure up everything for layout? Inches? Sure, as long as any measurement longer than a foot or less than an inch is recorded and converted correctly. Maybe decimal feet, odd as that might sound.
Oh, right, that’s another one I encountered recently. Students working on a math project that involved measurements. If they used the American side of the tape measure, it was marked, as usual, in feet and inches. A lot of students were taking measurements like 5 feet 7 inches, and entering that into their calculators as 5.7 .
@Kent_Clark , part of what you experienced might have been down to brain development. At least when we were in school, geometry class was mostly proofs. But there’s a threshold of brain development that happens some time in adolescence that, before you hit that threshold, proofs just won’t click, and after that, they will. If you took geometry before you hit that threshold, you’d conclude that you weren’t any good at it, when the truth is just that you weren’t quite ready yet.
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### Author:  [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/254 "2026-06-09T12:13:22Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> The instructions on the coffee said how many tablespoons of grounds to use per cup. But she was making 60 cups. How much grounds is that? The vast majority of Americans couldn’t tell you. But they could if we were using metric.
However many tablespoons per cup the instructions said, times 60, obviously. If they couldn’t figure that out, they just didn’t know how to multiply.
What’s that got to do with metric?
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 12:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/255 "2026-06-09T12:15:31Z")
> [@MrAtoz](#):
>
> However many tablespoons per cup the instructions said, times 60, obviously. If they couldn’t figure that out, they just didn’t know how to multiply.
Multiplication tells you how many tablespoons you need, but if you need double- or triple-digit numbers of tablespoons, you’d want to convert to more manageable units.
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### Author:  [@MrAtoz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrAtoz)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/256 "2026-06-09T12:18:58Z")
Which your phone will do for you in a matter of seconds.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for converting to metric. I just don’t feel like this is a particularly good example of the need for it.
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### Author:  [@ricepad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ricepad)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/257 "2026-06-09T15:38:25Z")
Now that this thread has been 'jacked to be metric vs imperial, I’ll share this story. I worked for a government agency for close to 35 years where probably half the employees were engineers of some sort (so 10,000 to 15,000 nerds and geeks). The agency was very resistant to converting to metric, with the managerial level engineers talking about how much time and money they’d have to devote to re-training all the engineers to work in metric. That resistance eventually went away, as the newer engineers started moving upward through the organization and the oldest of the Old Guard found out that engineers of more recent generations learned their engineering in metric, and had to learn imperial on the job at said agency. Eventually it got to the point that it was just a handful of the top level managers sadly whimpering _they_ didn’t want to have to learn metric to keep up.
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### Author:  [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/258 "2026-06-09T15:45:43Z")
I can’t imagine being an engineer in a non-metric country not wanting to change to metric. They should be the ones to know the advantages, or else they’re idiots.
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### Author:  [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/259 "2026-06-09T15:48:55Z")
> [@Kimstu](#):
>
> > [@Kent\_Clark](#):
> >
> > For the sake of discussion, please define “math.”
>
> I think I’d call it, for purposes of this discussion, “topics taught in school and higher-ed math courses”. That would include both the quantitative computation you’re comfortable with, and the more abstract high school math content that didn’t work out for you at that time.
I respectfully disagree and consider that a demeaning description of math from someone who apparently despises it. I’m not a mathematician and in fact math was one of my weak points, but I can appreciate it as a methodology for grounding abstract concepts and turning them to practical use. I’ve always been especially impressed by calculus as a way of reducing the infinite and the infinitesimal to practical calculation. The sheer human ingenuity is well worth the effort of understanding and appreciating.
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### Author:  [@ricepad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ricepad)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2026, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-were-the-most-useless-skills-you-were-taught-in-school/1030648/260 "2026-06-09T15:49:39Z")
B. They’re idiots. More accurately, they were resistant to change. Most of them got their PEs in the 50s or 60s, I would guess, when converting to metric was a new thing, and they were probably resistant to it even then.
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