Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Home Economics. Who made the ridiculous assumption that I would be the one that would want to/have to cook & sew? I wanted Auto Shop.
Shorthand. I’m sure most readers here wonder “WTH is that?” My parents thought that a brilliant career for me would be typing, filing, & taking dictation all day, every day, all of my working life. No, thank you! However, now I can write something in those weird little squiggles & no one knows what I’m saying.
Most useful:
Any college prep .
Same here! I took shorthand and typing at my mother's insistence. Two of the most miserable experiences of my life! Although I was college prep, my mother kept insisting I have "something to fall back on"
World Geography
Enviro Science
Psychology
Photography
Intro to Law
Really like the twist you added to this ...
On the high school wish list, I would add:
- World Religions (I grew up in a university town, but the townies were nearly all WASPs and Catholics ... I only knew a couple of Jewish families and Muslim families);
- A REAL Human Sexuality & Relationships course ... not just an anatomy class, would have surely cut down on pregnancy, poor relationship decisions for some, physical and emotional abuse to more than a few and fewer divorces down the road;
- A core course on how to study, how to research, how to organize your time, how to learn ... how to study was touched on a few times throughout school, how to research was a big part of a composition elective I took and there was constant harping on "organize" your time but nothing about what that meant. My kid in middle school is getting a healthy dose of all of this, purposefully infused across the cirriculum since third grade and it makes a huge difference (they also have a lot more homework than we did ... also, though, they were grades ahead of us in most areas);
It's important to know our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, how our country was founded, the true story of the Pilgrims journey here, why our wars were fought, the biographies of great leaders in our country, the world wars, the definitions of socalism, communism, and how such societies function and look, democracy, tyranny, totalitarianism, fascism.......etc etc. Lest we forget and repeat past atrocities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1986pacecar
It baffles me how anyone can say History is useless.
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
The only one that truly strikes me as useless was typing class. I can see it being useful in a typewriter world. But for many of us it went out with the backspace key.
It was taught in High school. By the time that it was taught, in the early 2000's, I and everyone in my class had been typing at least some of our homework for years. So, we weren't slow at typing anymore. What made it worse, for those of us that hadn't had a typing class previously in early years, we were forced to "unlearn" a technique that was perfectly effective. We weren't typing from a written page anymore, and most of us couldn't outwrite our fingers when typing answers, papers, etc...It was a negative grade in a subject whose time had passed with the rotary dial phone, you couldn't "study" for it...Such a waste.
The computer class where we learned Microsof Office was USEFUL, but since there were no teachers that required us to apply the knowledge down the line, it never really stuck. Its one of those things you have to use to keep sharp with. Word and PowerPoint are easy. Excel takes a bit more practice to make things "look good."
Everything else, even if I don't use it or apply it regularly, I can't call useless. Algebra, Geometry, Literature, English Composition, Theology, World Religions, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, History, all have their use in life and even if its rare, I pull from them now and again.
One of my former employees, a PhD in polymer chemistry, described his freshman honors chemistry at Michigan: the median score was 12%. The high was 22%, and the low was zero. He said that was the toughest class he'd ever taken.
That means that either the professor was completely incompetent in teaching the class, or that the exam was not appropriate for teaching the material learned.
Just my opinion, but diagramming sentences does not make anyone a better writer.
I must be the only person whose school never taught diagramming sentences.
Quote:
The educated people I encounter most often who cannot write a sentence that makes sense to save their lives are primarily engineers. Oi. Incredible bad writing or really non-writing. A few are quite good, but 80% or so are terrible. When they try to explain to you what they are trying to say, the problem becomes clear. They are not that good at communicating, not just at writing, but they are especially bad at writing. It is tough because these are smart successful people. You have to learn to say "this does not make any sense at all" very politely.
A possible theory: maybe the books we were required to read in English class and the topics we were required to write about were especially uninteresting to the type of people who become engineers. Whether rightfully or wrongfully, engineering fields tend to be male dominated, and most English teachers are women, who (whether intentionally or not) tend to choose books that are of more interest to girls. Remember, as I said earlier, my parents said that my 7th grade English teacher was bragging at meet the teacher night about how much boys hate the books that she chooses to have us read.
At the college level, calculus is a prerequisite for prob & stat.
I suspect that those probability and statistics classes go beyond what is needed for everyday life. Or, I have seen classes that have completely irrelevant prerequisites in order to keep certain people out of the class.
I wish high schools taught a course in practical financial literacy. I imagine such a class would include how & why to balance a checkbook, compound interest, basics of a household budget, debt & the potential consequences of racking it up, saving for your own retirement, etc.
Yes! That would be far more useful to everybody, regardless of career interests, than most of what is being taught! My cynical side says that the schools want us to be uneducated in those areas.
It baffles me how anyone can say History is useless.
Yeah no kidding.
This thread very quickly became more about "subjects I wasn't good at," or, "subjects I simply didn't enjoy."
I suppose I never really needed to or otherwise felt motivated to look at classes only through the lens of "will I need this later." Accordingly, I can't really think of any HS classes that I'd call useless.
What so many fail to grasp is it's not about learning math they think they'll never use, but about learning how to think in a logical manner. Schools have failed at teaching how to think.
I often felt that many (not all) math teachers were more about teaching discipline, rather than math or even logical thinking. I've mentioned my 8th grade math teacher (who I despised) many times. In her class, we could spend a half hour solving a complex problem, but if you did not show every trivial step, including something as trivial as showing that 1+1=2, she would give you zero credit for it. Also, she would only give credit for things that were done exactly her way, which meant that I had to unlearn everything that I learned the previous year.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
