And about as useful.
I learned shorthand in high school in 1975-77 and that skill has gotten me good jobs over the last 45 years. I still use it. It also comes in real handy when you don’t necessarily want the person next to you to know what you’re writing. 
I’ve been using it recently to help a friend whose mother died last year. Mom was a secretary and left many notes written in shorthand. Most were very mundane but some contained valuable info such as bank account info, PINs, etc.
Logarithms for me. We didn’t have slide rules, and I still have the book of tables somewhere, much battered. It also has useful conversions in the back pages which came in handy before computers became ubiquitous.
Algebra does pop up now and then. Simple stuff like calculating a volume or area mostly, but not being an engineer, the ability to solve quadratic equations is no use to me.
I was never subjected to some of the things mentioned, like diagramming sentences, and I was never taught Latin. Someone mentioned logarithm tables, and that, along with learning to use a slide rule, is useless today but the education system can’t be blamed as it was useful at the time.
I went to a “normal” (i.e.- secular) high school, but the elementary school I attended was Catholic, and there I remember being taught completely useless stuff about the Catholic religion, such as the symbolic meaning of the various vestments that Catholic priests wore. Fortunately the religion-oriented crap was a very minor part of the curriculum.
The school, incidentally, was a single building but divided in half, including a fence dividing its two playgrounds – one half for boys, the other for girls, because heaven forfend that boys and girls should learn and play together and regard each other as fellow humans! When I finally went to high school, it was astonishing to see girls all around me in the very same classroom!
All of that aside, I can’t think of anything other than now-obsolete tech that I learned in the classroom that I would consider useless. Algebra is genuinely useful even today, and though I can’t think of when I’ve ever used calculus IRL, the concepts behind it are truly beautiful and well worth understanding from a purely intellectual perspective. The greatest waste of time in high school for me was gym and sports, in which I had no interest whatsoever, though as I recall I was pretty good at basketball.
In college I was focused on a STEM curriculum, but due to the requirement for some liberal arts courses, I took a course in Shakespeare. Waste of time? Absolutely not – I had a terrific and enthusiastic professor who instilled in me a lifelong appreciation and love for the great Bard of Avon.
Does ‘cursive’ get the same pass from you, or was it useless at the time?
The value of cursive was, at least, teaching children to write their own names. Lacking which, you’d have a whole generation signing legal documents with “X”, which have to be witnessed by someone who can actually sign their name. If the trend persisted, the witness would authenticate the “X” with another “X”!
- Cursive
- Balancing a checkbook
- The quadratic formula
- Pretty much all math beyond basic algebra, for that matter
- How to use a card catalog
- Coding in BASIC
- Drafting by hand
I first took a computer class at school in 1984, and I’m sure at one time at school or later at college, I learned how to convert between decimal, binary and hexadecimal. Sure, a calculator can do this (although the ones most of us had in school still couldn’t), but it’s an easy basic skill that teaches you the very basics of computing, so not useless IMHO. And it’s trivially easy and can be learned in one lesson.
As for diagramming sentences: I first learned this in 4th grade, and it was a revelation for me, like my eyes had been opened to what language and grammar is really about. And it’s virtually impossible to learn a foreign language properly without that skill, so this was extremely useful for me when later learning English, French and Latin.
So, it seems like most of the things mentioned in this thread as “useless” are, in fact, extremely fucking useful. I mean, just to take a random example,
Who knew it was useless? So many people have been wasting so much time and effort for a thousand years. For sure, no one anywhere ever needed to do any non-basic mathematics…
Or things whose utility is (obviously!?) there but hard to quantify: Shakespeare, Latin, Chinese history…
Yep, still common in research; I’m sure it’s not normal in big labs running the same protocol in large numbers, but if you’re doing small batches and just running a couple of samples it’s still a reasonably fast and reliable way to check DNA quality.
I must have been in one of the last classes to use the log table books in the UK, they were already having to ban students from bringing in scientific calculators and checking ours didn’t have that function before we could take them into exams.
There were a whole bunch of stats tests we learned to calculate by hand as well- typically taking a whole class to calculate- which could be done in minutes with readily available computer programs within a few years. It didn’t even help me grasp the theory behind it either, it just left vague sense of dread at the name and a memory of adding up great columns of numbers.
The most useless class I had was in my first year of uni , where we were supposed to be taught to use a computer.The whole course was pitched to introduce students who had never used a computer before to basic concepts, which I suppose were useful in the abstract, but every single student in the class had already been using computers for years at that point. First class was ‘how to send an email’. Unfortunately, it was compulsory attendance, and the fact that the class was 9am every Monday morning just added the icing on the cake. You dragged me out of bed for this?
So many people saying cursive. I don’t understand that. Before I retired a year and a half ago, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t read or write something in cursive. Now quadratic equations on the other hand I have never used since algebra class.
Yeah. I’m reading most of these and thinking the same things. The little bit of Latin I had really taught me word roots that helped my vocabulary immensely, especially when it came time for anatomy class.
Even the bouncing balls on a parachute… yes it was an exercise in how to coordinate …
Some stuff I learned wasn’t valuable for the specific facts or skills but for how learning those things helped make learning other things if not possible at least easier.
Diagramming sentences is useless, because doing such does not teach you how to construct a sentence. Yet we all can. Why and how?
I can construct a sentence (obviously), and I had to teach how to do that at the community college level at a college in the Toronto area.
I dropped all the crap I supposedly learned at elementary and high school (“Underline the subject with a single line, underline the verb with a curvy line, underline the object with a double line,” much like diagramming sentences), and went back to Chomsky’s Theory of Transformational Grammar, which I learned in linguistics class at university. Which is, at its most basic: Subject-Verb-Object: “The boy kicked the ball.” Boy is the subject noun, kicked is the verb, and ball is the object. We can discuss articles and adjectives and adverbs later (as in, “The boy kicked the soccer ball”) and we can even add in a prepositional phrase: “into the goal.”
So, “the tall boy kicked the soccer ball into the goal,” translates as,
(Art) (Adj) N V (Art) (Adj) N (Prep (Art O)).
And that’s pretty much your Basic Formula for constructing grammatically-correct English sentences. There are variances of course, but it is Chomsky’s Theory of Transformational Grammar in the end. Who knew that English had a dative case?
Nominal: “I gave my pen to Bill.”
Dative: “I gave Bill my pen.”
Paging @Sunspace. He was one of my students at college. He can tell you what I taught, and how well I taught it.
in Eighth grade we had to learnand sing from old Gregorian chant music books:..
“Drone Drone Drone…drooooone” hock
Are you saying the high-school class did teach you how to parse a sentence and identify the subject, the verb, the objects, and so on? Sounds useful.
Huh, isn’t “Bill” dative in both examples? Shows what I know…
No, my high school classes were useless in this regard. Really, all they did was to teach me how to underline words with a straight line, and to underline others with squiggly lines. What words? Nobody knew; the teaching was done by people who did not themselves understand it.
In spite of speaking it, I did not really understand English until I took linguistics at university. Then, it all fell into place.
ETA: “Bill” is the object at the end of a prepositional phrase. “The pen” is the object of the entire sentence.
If that’s what “diagramming a sentence” means, I concur that it’s pretty useless. What I meant, what I learned in fourth grade was understanding the basic elements of a sentence and its logical structure, and that was a revelation for me because like everybody, I had learned my native language intuitively and without knowing the rules, but I first realized that it had rules I had been already using intuitively. Identifying the subject, predicate and object of a sentence was just a test on how well us students had understood these concepts.
Definitely notehand (a simplified version of shorthand). I took a typing class in HS and it was actually one semester of typing and one of notehand. This was in 1970, so a man being able to type well was a little rarer then. But I was going to be going to college and grad school and thought it would be a good idea.
It was, but notehand was useless…except for the fact that I could use it as a sort of secret code. For many years, I would make notes to myself, lists of things to do or buy, and so forth, in notehand so they could sit around on my office desk or at home in the open. In that respect, I guess I did use it a bit and it was of SOME help.
And, from time to time, I had a chance to see a secretary’s steno pad and could actually read most of it. But time marched on…
The thing is, back in the day, in order to get a job as a secretary you had to be proficient in both shorthand and typing. So, depends what you mean by “useless”. Not that being able to take notes and type are entirely obsolete skills today, especially in an academic setting. Do you have a secretary to type your documents for you?
Does anybody who’s not a CEO still have one?