There were quite a few subjects that I already knew well by the time we covered them in school, but that didn’t make them useless, so much as redundant.
Useless would be art class in elementary and middle school. I was no better at painting, sculpting, or drawing than when I started, and I could have used that time learning other stuff.
Oddly enough, art history in high school has been remarkably useful, especially when traveling.
As for the English stuff… I feel like I learned more about English while taking Spanish than anywhere else. I found myself thinking “Preterite tense? What’s that in English?” and then figuring it out. Same with a whole bunch of verb tenses and some verbs like “to be”.
While we’re on the subject of English, most of the reading related stuff felt kind of like a waste. I’m one of those very good readers who learned how as a toddler, so most of it was pretty repetitive. I mean learning the phonics part in 1st grade was kind of a revelation- “there are rules to this!” but most of it was reading stuff I didn’t want to read, and then being forced to recall it and stuff like that.
This is why kids should be forced to take a second language – any second language – even today. It’s impossible to understand the nature of language itself until you step outside of your own.
My useless class was manual typesetting - moveable lead type, as in Gutenberg, in about 1980. It was required for boys as part of a shop series. A reasonably fun class, actually, but in my mind, criminally irresponsible to waste time that way.
I wondered if science lab technicians still run DNA markers down gels by hand. I learned how to do that in high school and college but chose not to be a lab tech after college. I’ve certainly never done that since then.
My university major required a Computer Aided Design class. The class started with us creating programs for drafting, in Fortran! Then after that, we used an actual CAD program (can’t remember it’s name), that was obsolete by a decade, just as Fortran was at that time. I dropped the class twice and finally finished it junior year. Absolutely worthless in regards to contemporary CAD programs actually being used in real world offices.
I very deliberately taught my middle school math students “useless” skills like using a hand saw, a screwdriver, and mechanical drawing. Then when I introduced their modern, evolved versions, they more quickly understood and appreciated their value.
That was going to be my answer, 1974 Jr High. The wild part was printing our own “business” cards.
Imagine kids today being required to reach in between two metal plates that are opening and closing like a motorized clam to pull the card and place the next one.
When I was a college computer instructor, I sat on a review board with high school teachers on what should be included in their curriculum for computer programming (soon to be obsolete itself, thanks to AI?). These high school teachers showed us their current lesson plans. They were spending several days teaching about hexadecimal numbers, including converting from decimal to hexadecimal numbers and back, by hand. My jaw dropped. I chided them on that, saying that I had never found a need to do that in my previous 25 years in corporate computer engineering before I went into to teaching. And if someone really needed to do that, there are calculators…
My quote to them: “It sounds like a big waste of time, designed to keep students quiet and busy, and is easy to grade.” That could describe lots of high school lesson plans.
I was in high school when hand-held scientific calculators were just getting cheap enough that most people could afford them. They were still teaching the old ways of doing things. Slide rules have already been discussed here, but there were also books containing tables of trig functions and logarithms. We were taught how to look up things like sin(67°), and how to interpolate if the value we were looking up fell between two entries in one of the tables. By the time I got to college, no one was using slide rules or books of math tables any more, at least not in class.
Seems like we’ve all had teachers we’ve hated, and for good reason, reading your stories! On the other hand, I hope we’ve all had teachers who treated us well, even inspired us. I know I had a few.
I had a rather odd experience with one of them, 20 years later, though it’s kind of funny in hindsight but was rather disturbing at the time. She was my 12th grade English Lit teacher. I got on famously with her and in my yearbook she wrote that she would “never forget” me.
I went to our 20th year reunion. She was our class advisor and attended the party. I approached her, just to say hello and thank her for being so encouraging to me at the time.
Then it happened. She looked me up and down, looked at my badge with my senior picture, and said “I don’t remember you at all!” Then she abruptly turned her back on me!
I was stunned. In fact, I left the party right after that. But I later found some other students had gotten a similar reaction. I suppose her memory was slipping, and I forgave her for that. Sadly, she died just few years later, only in her 50s.
That might be the winner for me. Did i learn anything about physics from that? Was it meaningful exercise? Team building?
Probably just a waste of time.
(I did learn to use a slide rule, diagram sentences, and write in cursive, too. Cursive is pretty high on my “useless” list. I found diagramming sentences have me insight into how English works, and I’ve had occasion to use a slide rule.)
I can’t tell you how many young actuaries I’ve had to teach how to interpolate. I think most math classes dropped that when they stopped using log and trig tables. But interpolation is really useful.
Heh. I learned blacksmithing in middle school. Nothing like pounding the crap out of a red-hot piece of steel. I can’t imagine kids today doing the same. Someone would say that it’s too dangerous for kids.
But I liked it. In metal shop class, among other skills, we could opt to learn blacksmithing or oxy-acetylene welding. Most of the class wanted to learn welding; only two of us wanted to learn blacksmithing. With only two of us who opted for the latter, we had plenty of time with the forge and the anvils, while the wannabe-welders were lined up to take their turn.
While I liked it, as I said, it has to be the most useless skill I ever learned in school. I haven’t operated a forge since then, and I’ve neither seen the need to nor had the opportunity to.