You know, it would have been really nice if, instead of the estimated eight million credit hours my school insisted that I spend on calculus which I’ve completely forgotten and for which I had no use, they had had me take something that would have actually proven useful for everyone in that class.
Like home economics, for example. How to #&$%!#@ cook, provide first aid, clean a variety of surfaces, plan a budget, mend clothing, deal with a bank, vote, take out a lease, etcetera. That might have actually proven useful at some point in my life.
I guess they thought that by teaching us calculus, we would all become super-rich professors and engineers or something, and we would be able to hire maids to do all those things for us at every point in our lives (including the part up until we became super-rich professors or engineers or something.) And of course, none of us would ever go into a career where those things weren’t relevant.
I gotta join the OP in the Shakespeare. I hate Shakespeare, and will never like it.
Because of the reading material forced upon me when I was a student, I actually was against reading when I entered 9th grade. I scratched through grade 9 because I couldn’t stand reading “Canadian literature” (any book that mentions a canadian author, I put down). I then went to Japan for the summer, got so bored that I picked up a sci-fi book (Star wars actually) and became hooked with reading in general.
It’s funny because I breezed through College english (skipping 2 grades) all because of my love of Terry Pratchett and Timothy Zhan(sp). I still suck at spelling but that has more to do with my general memory.
PE doesn’t really have a “worth” I think. It’s there to prevent 15 year old students from dying of heart attacks
The subject I use the least in an everyday sense is grade 11/12/OAC math. I can do anything up to grade 10 math in my head (good for calculating taxes for shopping etc) but I haven’t needed trig since highschool.
If you have any hope ever of advancing beyond your career beyond being a barista, you WILL need to know calculus. Calculus and higher mathematics in general are indispensable in just about every field–need to know the comparative price increases of ice cream sundae ingredients over several fiscal quarters? Calculus. Want to sort out the month-to month net increase of resources needed to feed and house visiting demonstrators? Calculus.
Those are things one learns in the course of daily life. Formal education ought to be reserved for subjects which take time, effort, and discipline to master, like calculus.
“Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”–Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Outside of the academic world I have never used anything more advanced then algebra. Those advanced math courses do help enforce critical thinking skills and logic. Even though I’ve forgotten the Calculus I’m still glad I went through it.
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I took an elective my senior year called Independent Living which covered most of the above. I thought it would be a worthless blow off class but I was surprised by how useful it really for someone who had never lived alone.
I would argue that there are no Worthless school subjects.
Instead there are subjects which get taught to us badly, and lead to a disslike of them that the subjects themselves do not merrit.
In school (in England) English, French, History and PE were bad subjects for me, and at the time I found them “Worthless”. Now I realise I was wrong.
The English and French was taught by teachers who basically hated the subjects. History in schools in England during my time was taught as a date remembering course with no thinking required. And the PE was interested only in the school teams, and not in developing skills of the less gifted pupils.
I love Shakespeare, honestly. Except for Romeo and Juliet, if just for the reason that I can’t stand either of the title characters. Ugh.
The only use I really have for any math class [but particularly trigonometry] is to help me get a decent score on the ACT so I can get accepted to a good college.
Shakespeare is the epitome of what literature is supposed to do: provide true human experiences for those who have not exerienced them yet. In other words, Shakespeare’s works continue to last 400 years after their conception because the characters within them act so true to how normal people really behave in their passions, anxieties, flaws, foibles and triumphs.
Learn about life, young one. Your passive interests in sports, video games and popular music are good, but fleeting. Literature helps you reflect on who you are, a question you may not have confronted yet, but even the wisest of us continue to ponder every day.
And gym class is there to get your sorry ass in shape. Believe me, someday you’ll probably be in a chair for hours on end, and it will show.
No one’s yet directly mentioned the importance of learning how to learn. It doesn’t exactly come naturally to us sorry apes. If teachers limited education to the stuff that students will “need to know”, the students could easily end up lost at sea when first they encounter a new and unknown situation. Supplying a breadth of learning experiences prepares the student to meet the unknown by repeatedly thrusting it upon him.
I would have killed to be allowed to study Shakespeare in my school. I went to a Christian high school in which most secular literature was forbidden. (We did read * Heidi * in the eleventh grade, but even this had a disclaimer written inside the front cover that the views expressed therein were not necessarily those of the administration.)
Were I not a voracious reader, I would be utterly ignorant of literature and history.
Having to memorize fourteen lines?? Fah! I had to memorize entire chapters of the Bible. (I still know Matthew 7 by heart.)
I never learned algebra or calculus. I can barely add, or subtract, and multiplication mostly remains a dark mystery. I am dependent on a calculator.
However, I am well-read, and consider myself to be somewhat intelligent. I converse articulately, bathe, and keep my house reasonably neat, but I’ll admit, I do hate wearing shoes. I don’t quite agree with Heinlein on this, but if he had said that someone who does not read fits the above description, I’d be in full agreement.
For Giselle, who hates Romeo and Juliet, and any of the rest of you kids who hate Shakespeare in general: a suggestion. Go down to the local video store and rent a copy of Franco Zefferelli’s movie of R & J (NOT the one with with Leonardo di Caprio) and watch it a couple of times. Then get Shakespeare In Love and watch that two or three times. Then come back and tell us if you haven’t changed your minds.
Hey, Shakespeare did something that was not repeated to any great extent until Norman Lear – he wrote stuff that addressed the eternal verities, the human condition, and all the other reasons why [smarmy voice]Great Literature[/smarmy voice] is great, and at the same time made it interesting and funny for hoi polloi – the folks for whom going to the Globe on a Friday night was the equivalent of turning on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or “JAG” today.
I was fortunate enough to have my first exposure to Shakespeare from a teacher who helped us to “get” all the dated “in” jokes – like the situation where the guy with the hots for a girl longs to “die” – which was an Elizabethean double entendre equivalent to the worst puns you can make on “come” today.
As for history, somebody said “Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” There’s a thread, now moribund, in MPSIMS that gives 14 eerie parallels between the Adamses (John and John Quincy) and the Bushes (George H.W. and George W.). There’s a thread in Great Debates on the parallels between the America First Movement of 1939-41 and the anti-Iraq-war movement today (largely BS IMHO). Tariff disputes, the most boring part of American History for me, seem to have a lot to say about whether NAFTA was a good idea or not. The fact of the matter is that one can learn from what happened then to better guide what’s a good idea to do today.
Almost all of math is useful in almost anything you end up doing for a living, if it’s not total drudgework. (Of course, if your career aspirations extend only to “Do you want fries with that?” you may not need to know anything more than making change – but two of my “kids” ended up in management at fast food joints, and the tight budgeting required in such positions meant that they had to be able to forecast sales and ensure they had supplies and staff on hand to meet demand, without overstocking or overstaffing, and that took some tricky calculation.)
Science? Just stroll over to GD and take a good look at how even a rudimentary knowledge of any of the sciences comes in valuable.
But my final comment doesn’t address the OP – it’s that any thread in which December quotes Lerner and Leowe and Gobear Heinlein has got to be a worthwhile thread on those grounds alone!
Same here. While I don’t particularly enjoy some subjects just because there are periods within them that are just. so. boring … that a particular teacher/prof enjoyed the material/wanted to give it to us, rather than just standing and reading from prepared notes (some of which I have a strong hunch my father heard when he went to that school), made an enormous difference.
As to the OP, wait a year or ten and see if that obscure fact you picked up in that high school class doesn’t come back to revisit you when nobody else in the room knows Rome was conquered in 476 AD, or that the difference between civilian and military pull-ups is that in the former, your palms face toward you and in the latter away.
I have to agree that the current P.E courses are fairly worthless. Its basically a way to force students into exercise. While some do need it, others (me) just get bored with the repetitivness of it all. It really need to be adjusted to include more variety in activities.
The best thing I got out of the course was very late in the semester when we were taught first aid. Unfortuantly after learning the techniques and acing the live exam (in which we were put into a situation and had to determine the correct actions to take in order to save a persons life) we were not given certification, even though the required amount of hours were put in.
In the first English class that I taught, we read the Scottish play by Shakespeare. My students liked the bard so much that they asked to read another. There was a small woodlot on campus and we gathered there to read and talk about A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even my fundamental classes liked Shakespeare. They just had to learn how to have fun with it.
Mapache, those first classes that I taught were just after the Zefferelli version of Romeo and Juliet* was released. I think that movie made a big difference. It made much more sense to see the roles played by very giddy adolescents. Juliet was played by then thirteen year old Olivia Hussey. Talk about having to memorize!!
I don’t think any of my high school classes were a waste of time, but I wasn’t fond of Algebra II or biology. Loved geometry and physics! There is just no way of knowing what is going to appeal to individual students.
The only truely useless HS class I had was a byproduct of my district. The freshman year had a class that was split in half: half the year it was “health” and the other half was “introduction to High School,” which gave you maps, phone numbers, and protocol for the school. A pity that I took that one in the second half of the year, so all the material was worthless.
To all you Shakespeare haters: there is a huge difference between a play that you follow along as others plod along reading it aloud and a play which is actually acted out by people who know the inflections and sentence patterns.
I think that at the time most classes appear useless to everyday living. The idea is for a rounded education. I do think that some of the classes could be better presented and the content revised.
P.E. is to me one of the tortures of schooling, for the first 4 years we were forced to go through football, i hate football, for any of you not from the UK or Europe this is tantamount to heresy for a boy. Then there was gym class, being on the larger size this was pure hell. Luckily for me Rugby become a sport in high school, this was something i was good at so it wasnt so bad. School physical education is for the sporty type kids, if you were not good at any particular sport it was 2-3 hours a week of hell. I think that more aerobics/tai-bo type of leason would be much more advantagious to kids, more emphasis on excersise/physical health would be better than skill type sports.
English Lit. im not sure about, i quite enjoyed it. But as to it being relevant to everyday life im not sure. Basic gramma and reading is better. Maths, a good understanding of the basics is essential
if you are to progress to anything in adult life. The more advanced stuff is more for specialised careers in science and engineering. So if you do not plan for these then i would imagine that maths would be hard for you.
My advice to any kid would be whilst it may seem boring and useless at the time, try your hardest to get something from it, your school days soon fly past. Once you enter work you will soon wish you were back to good old boring Lit. and Maths.
Gotta disagree with you here. I learned how to write well by reading and studying other writers, not by learning about prepositions and whatnot. I mightn’t know how to diagram a sentence, but I can write a damn good one when I need to, and that’s more important as far as I’m concerned.
And re: Baz Luhrman’s R+J, that was actually the first time that I ‘got’ Shakespeare. Seeing it portrayed on screen with vibrance and energy, where the words had life and meaning made me appreciate the play for the first time. The next play we studied was Macbeth, and I appraoched it completely differently to the way I had Romeo and Juliet, and I loved it straight away.
