Right after I graduated my school system bought into the newest craze-“Chisanbop” math. More of a freakshow excuse for lazy teachers than anything actually useful. Chisanbop - Wikipedia
I don’t think diagramming a sentence was ever in our curriculum where I’m from.
Quite a lot of the maths I learned turned up in things like the 3D software I used to make stuff in when I was doing Visual Effects for short films.
But I never did need to light another bunsen burner, calculate a derivative, or make an ashtray out of clay.
That’s not really a signature, it’s a lazy abbreviated form of their actual cursive signature. I’m sure that’s not how they sign legal documents. Just like Steve Mnuchin’s printed “signature”, it’s purely symbolic. No one is going to check if my doctor’s signature on the prescription form is genuine – there are much more effective ways of validating the authenticity of prescriptions. Just like my “finger signature” on a courier delivery has no resemblance to my actual one, but no one cares. But AFAIK, banks still use pattern recognition technology to verify the authenticity of signatures on cheques.
Standard to metric conversion calculations.
Those calculations were useless then, and we knew it-- we were saying to one another “Why don’t they just teach us metrics?” They are even more useless now, and if the US actually used metrics, they would be something even more useless than plain uselessness.
We had to solve pages of problems like “5 1/2 feet = _____ meters?”
Since we had not learned decimals, we had to calculate by dividing dividing 5 1/2 by 3 1/4, with pencil and paper (show your work!) And the conversion formulae were supposed to be committed to memory.
The above is my answer to the OP. If that’s all you are interested in, go on to the next post; but for the interested, what follows is a bit of an OP/ED (READ: Rant, albeit, informative, well-punctuated, and with paragraph breaks) about WHY the US failed so miserably to convert to the metric system back in the 1970s.
In the third grade, our teachers announced the US conversion to metrics. In addion to regular math, we were going to have a unit on metrics every day (extra math? 
) The “metrics unit” meant memorizing a lot of formulae, and doing endless problems that involved converting “8 liters to gallons”; “7 feet to meters”; and the dreaded “15 grams plus two pounds = how many kilograms?” and so forth. We had not learned decimal places yet, although we had learned rounding up and down, so the problem would ask us either to “round up, or truncate.” And every problem involved a fraction.
If would have been far easier had they simply taught us decimals first, but out curricula said decimals were a 6th grade skill. Nevermind that metrics is a decimal system.
At some point, we further learned to calculate the centimeters remaining on something like feet to meters problems, or the inches left on a problem going the other way. I don’t think we learned to calculate the ounces left on a liter to pound calculation/deciliters, centiliters, whatever, or lower measures on anything other than measures of length, although we did learn the prefixes: deci, centi, mili, micro/deca, hecto, kilo, mega-- I think that’s the number of places we learned, and that “centi” and “kilo” were the key ones to remember, and why.
Oh, dear lord was this boring. And it taught us nothing about metrics, other than that it was hopelessly long and complicated-- when the opposite was true.
This was 1975-76, right after Pres. Ford had signed The Metric Conversion Act, and the US was supposed to convert to the metric system, like the rest of the world. It notes that in 1975, The US was in the company Liberia, Yemen, Brunei, and Burma in not having converted to the metric system. Currently, the other four are using the metric system, and the US is having a party to which no one has come,
I firmly believe that, if all children across the US were being taught conversions as I was, that was the exact reason the conversion failed.
Instead of being taught to “think in metrics,” we were being taught that the metric system involved a lot of hard math, and took a long time.
Remember, this happened about that same year that IBM made “pocket” (not really, they were about they size of three large smart phones, stacked) calculators affordable to the middle class, by pricing them at around $30 (about $180 buying power in 2026) instead of the $300 (about $1800 buying power in 2026) they’d been since they’d come on the market around 1971. No one envisioned us performing these calculations quickly with a Smart phone app-- not that we would have needed to, had conversion succeeded.
There was a method to the madness, but it was not well-thought out: it was that all this converting would train us to do quick estimates in our heads of what n liters equaled in gallons (etc.)
This “quick estimate” method was maybe a good way of teaching adults over about 30 to deal with metrics, and adults, mostly over 30, conceived it. Children, however, were not “firmly set,” in the standard system. Children (and willing adults), should probably have moved away from standard together, and learned metrics from the ground up.
In other words, for about 1st - 6th grade (in pre-K, simply “speak metric”), have a lot of class activities where kids took turns measuring things with metric instruments-- metric scales (they could even weigh themselves), metric rulers-- measuring things around the classroom, etc. Kids would be clamoring to have their turn.
Worksheets would have questions like “How would you measure weight? A) in grams; B) in meters; or C) in liters”
And
"(Fill in the blank) “A cat is measured in _________________?” The answer sought would be kilograms, but if many students wrote “centigrams,” this could provoke a class discussion.
As the class learned to conceptualize metrics, worksheets would progress to questions like "A cat weighs about ___________________. (Anything from 3 - 5 grams would be acceptable.)
And, of course, “2 liters of water weighs ______________.” And “Water freezes at _______________ degrees _____________.”
Those questions are kiloliters, kilometers, and kilograms easier than conversion calculations, and as far as schoolwork goes, “fun.” They ask for educated opinions in some cases, and kids like those kinds of questions. The “2 liters of water equals 2 kilograms of water” is a gimme for kids half-paying attention, and throwing a few of those in a quiz or worksheet is a good idea-- it momentarily relieves stress, and is like comic relief in a drama.
I would have looked forward during the school day to metrics had it been taught like that. I would have used it all the time, and tried to get my parents to use it (being academics who spent a lot of time in Europe, they surely would have). I think this is generally true; at the time, this was not a partisan issue-- it was something with a lot of popular support.
The divisions were somewhat along class lines, even more along generational ones (and the Standard supporters would die off first). The class lines blurred as well, because academics, and anyone in a STEM field preferred it-- but so did lots of people who were mechanics and plumbers, and in other skilled labor fields, because parts and equipment frequently came in metrics. The same for anyone with a military background-- the US military had converted to metrics in 1957. Nonskilled labor, to the extent that these were people who came from other countries actually had to learn Standard to function here, after having grown up with metrics.
I think the US pulled the rug out from under itself here. For several years, I hated the metric system; I learned to appreciate it, and use it, only in my late 20s. It’s all I use now, unless I’m speaking to someone who doesn’t know it, or talking about the outside temperate to Americans (even STEM people us Fahrenheit to discuss the weather here. Eh. The Brits still weigh themselves in stones.)
Now, I’m a little angry about this failure; I don’t know why it happened-- why this method of teaching was chosen (big donation from IBM?) But it was my generation’s loss.
When we converted to metric in New Zealand, we had both systems on every ruler, every road sign, every car odometer and speedometer, and also just made the hard cut off commitment to no longer teach Imperial in schools or have it on food products etc. Conversion for us kids never factored in, we just learned metric straight-up; it was the adults trapped in an old way of thinking who struggled with it, and those doubled-up measurements over the coming decade is what made it work.
I once won one of those “How many jelly beans in a jar” by eyeballing the size, calculating the volume, looking at bags of jelly beans in a store, which stated the approximate number in the bag, and calculating the volume of the bag, the number of bags it took to fill the jar, and guessing that they didn’t open another bag just to top it off when it was almost full, and they be left with an open, almost full bag.
I guessed within something like 110 jelly beans, and not only was it the closest guess, the next closest was off by nearly 800. No one else got within 1,000.
I won some cool stuff (it was at a mall reopening after major remodeling) and $100 (in the 1990s) gift card for any store(s) in the mall, and the jar and beans.
But yeah-- I think that was the only time. 30 years ago, and 10 years out of high school. I still have the jar, though.
We have double measurements on everything here. You can’t buy a tape measure without both. But few people look at the metric side. It’s like they don’t even see it. If you say “A centimeter is about the width of which of your fingers?” they have no idea.
Never happened.
Remember that Artemis crewed space mission where the crew received course correction burn data over the radio in feet per second and had to enter it into the flight computer in units of feet per second, even though all the control software uses SI units internally and the astronauts themselves said they were more comfortable using metric units?
It turns out that the U.S. aerospace industry uses “U.S. Customary units”, that is why. That is the standard. Even civilian flight levels are designated in feet.
As for converting between USC and metric like you had to do, it is about as useful as, and taught for the same reasons as, all those exercises schoolchildren had to do in the 18th Century to convert, e.g., 3 s. 4 d. in Virginia currency to Massachusetts coinage, and the like.
Yeah, that was in my post a few times, and every American knows it.
I believe it was in the U.K. that some people were bitching about— whether real or imagined— it being illegal to sell tomatoes by the pound, for example. Doubling up the measurements was only supposed to be transitional.
Going back a bit to get to this: I can read the “Lynn.” Her middle name looks like it might be “Roberge”? Her last name is completely indecipherable to me. Maluba? Maleika?
Looking her up, I see that it’s “Malerba.” Would not have guessed that.
I am all in favor of cursive fading from use. It’s faster, you say? Sure my cursive is faster, if I want the result to be a series of messy loops that even I can’t read ten minutes later. If I want it to be legible, I have to go painstakingly slowly. Printing is much faster if the goal is to produce readable text.
As for signing things, every legal document that I have encountered within the last, oh, ten years or so, I have “signed” by typing my name into a box on a computer screen.
You need to feed your cat a bit more 
Most younger people in the UK use kilos now to weigh themselves, but we still have an unholy mess of measurements in the UK. For distance both are used, road signs are in imperial, but otherwise we tend to use metric for precise measurements and imperial for approximations. Behold this diagram from the instructions on where to place the supports for a polytunnel, I’ve shown it to a few British people and it took them all a few seconds to even notice:
https://construct.firsttunnels.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/6dg.png
I’d say most of us can do the rough conversions, but I have no memory at all of using imperial measurements at school, except miles in geography when the map was scaled that way. Otherwise it was purely metric.
Sitting in a chair for 6 hours.
Are you implying that lawyers don’t use clear unambiguous language? You find legalese hard to understand, so you think it is unclear?
Ordinary language is often ambiguous, where a phrase such as “go around” may have multiple interpretations, and can lead to disputes.
Legalese is supposed to avoid that. A legal document is supposed to use precise language where every word or phrase has an exact meaning clearly defined. It’s either a standard phrase whose definition can be found in a legal dictionary, or else they spend a few paragraphs defining it.
It may seem obscure to a layman, but it’s clear and unambiguous to another lawyer.
Oops. Pretty good typo, though.
What is this, a pet store for ants?
I guess it is just me but every one of the useless skills mentioned so far either was valuable or would have helped me I as I grew up. Learning metalworking in shop or diagramming sentences by itself might not have been a skill I use$ after school but the whole point of learning was learning new things. Alll these skills are at least practice in learning. All are / were worth it.
As far as cursive- I don’t understand. Who doesn’t need to write things down on occasion? Do you print words in block letters? I’m confused.
Yes. Of course. Who would do otherwise? That’s how English is (legibly) written.
Yes, many people, also those who had learned cursive in school, have gotten to write in block letters. For me, it was simply because I often couldn’t read my own notes anymore (I always had bad handwriting in cursive), so after college and at the start of my professional career, I started to take notes in print. That was more than 30 years ago and since then, most of what I’ve written has been on a keyboard anyway.
Sure, so do I. That’s how I write my shopping lists and to-do lists. But my signature is still cursive, just like that of almost every literate human being on the planet!