Kate Hackett
I’m going to open this post with a note that I think this question could be both self-centered and myopic.
While it may feel like we don’t benefit from certain potions of our education, it’s important to also remember that you are not the only person in a classroom and you are not the only person who stands to learn something in it.
Maybe you never picked up another scalpel and dissected another frog, but someone in your class may have become a surgeon and this was his or her first experience with opening an animal up.
Maybe you never used calculus again in your life but someone else may have found it useful analyzing voice data patterns.
Selfishly complaining about not using something beyond school is ridiculous. There are many students and many minds.
So with that said, let’s check out the answers to u/elliotsilvestri‘s Reddit post asking:
“What is the most useless skill you learned in high school?”
1. Frogs
In biology class, I learned how to dissect a frog and identify its organs.
It’s a skill I’ve never needed since.
2. Soil
The types of soil and clay in the ground here. I mean, my last year of geography was spent entirely on studying the composition of Holland’s ground types, while most people in my class couldn’t point out Tasmania on a map if their life depended on it.
3. Gym
We learned the Macarena in gym class in elementary school. I can’t think of anything more useless than that.
4. Dopey phrases
How to say “I travel to school by…” [hellicopter] [spaceship] [rocket] [hovercraft] [other stupid forms of transport] in both French and Spanish.
Another stupid phrase drummed into my head in primary school is “You are opening the window” (which we had to parrot when the teacher came in and opened the window in front of us). Seriously, when am I ever going to go to a French speaking country and randomly tell somebody that they’re opening a window?
5. Pi
When I was in college, I knew this guy who had memorized pi to a hundred places and was trying to do 1000. He seriously thought he could get a job at NASA just by reciting Pi to 1000 places during the interview. He also thought NASA used Pi to 500 places for shuttle launches.
6. No calculator
I’ve never had to find the sin, cosine, and tangent of a triangle while not being allowed to use a calculator.
7. Pens
How to disassemble & assemble a ballpen within 10 seconds.
8. Poetry
How to identify types of poems. Although I appreciate the knowledge of the arts, this has been entirely useless so far.
9. The Recorder
How to play the recorder.
deleted
10. Duck & Cover
I was in an elementary school in the mid-1980’s that was still doing duck and cover drills in case of nuclear blast. As if ducking underneath a 1/2″ thick piece of wood was going to save you from a nuclear blast.
11. Latin
Here in Britain some schools still teach Latin. I understand that by learning Latin you will probably be able to use this to help learn another language but why not just learn the other language????
12. Paper Mâché
My 5th grade math teacher had us make anatomically correct hearts out of Papier-mâché for THREE MONTHS instead of learning, I don’t know, math. My dad was furious and went to the principal only to hear that her hands were tied because this teacher couldn’t be fired/reprimanded because she had been there so long. She would also take time to sit us down on the floor to talk about menopause. Guess who sucks at math.
13. Cursive
Cursive writing. As a kid who went to elementary school in the 90s we were told in 4th grade we would need cursive because nobody wrote in print as an adult. In 5th/6th grade we were forced to do all of our work in cursive.
By Middle School nobody cared anymore and most people I know stopped using it. Hell, you don’t even really need cursive to sign your name anymore, most people just use their initials/scribbles. . .I’ve always found cursive very difficult to read because people write so fast that it’s difficult to decipher between certain letters and how many loops, swoops and humps there are.
14. Self Defense
We had a self defense week in PE. It was literally just some guy, who probably watched some YouTube videos, doing demonstrations on his 12 year old kid. Buddy rear naked choked his son and is calmly explaining how to sink it nice and deep, meanwhile his son is furiously tapping on his dad’s arm in a vain attempt to get this physcopath to release him. We had and entire week of domestic violence.
15. Wedding Planner
had to take a class called “Women Leaders,” and for my final project, I was asked to plan a wedding for myself under a specific budget.
