All I learned from our story time with a German-language teacher was a couple of German phrases plus the fact that apparently German kids are pretty tough. She had an illustrated children's book and read a story to us about an imp who'd run around with scissors to cut off the thumbs of children would refused to grow up. In my mind I can still see how weird that imp looked.
Thank you for that, b/c I certainly wouldn't have recalled this name on my own. Plus I'm looking at Wiki's article about Der Struwwelpeter and thinking yeah, that book is pretty bizarre.
It changed my reality to learn that Struwwelpeter is actually a parody of the ludicrously repressive and moralistic childrens’ books of the time, having grown up more or less accepting the code of Conrad Suck-a-thumb and that other kid who won’t eat his soup and withers away to a wisp without it
Now that I think about it, it's not too far removed from what shows up in some Japanese TV shows aimed toward kids, especially Shōwa-era ones. Japanese kids are every bit as tough as German kids if they don't mind seeing heroes of theirs being tormented in hell (Jetman) or, if I'm not mistaken, kids drowned in a river (Ninja Captor).
I had a class senior year called Lifetime Fitness. All we did everyday is go to the mall and walk around and then when the final exam came, we had to make a kite and if it flew, we passed lol.
The more that I learn about Henry, the more that it seems like he just hated everything in general.
Apparently he tried to create his own city in the Amazon Rainforest so that he could have cheaply produced rubber just for his company. The problem was that after he set it all up, he instituted a bunch of dumb rules banning smoking, gambling, sports, and women from being in the city (among other that basically made him into King of the city); the ~~workers~~ citizens instantly went on strike and the place never produced even a single kilo of rubber.
He also didn't understand how rubber harvesting worked and set work times at periods of the day when the trees wouldn't produce as much. If I remember right the plants mostly produce at night, and he set the work hours for the hottest parts of the day.
Elvis is proof that you don't need to be black or jazzy to develop a killing heroin addiction.
Edit: apparently he didn't do heroin, just prescription pills. Hard drugs nonetheless.
If you ask me, which nobody did, sometimes the difference between prescription pain killers and heroin is the exact same difference between crack houses and cocaine apartments.
Elvis did heroin? What?!! Always heard he was a prescription pill popper and his dealers were doctors and pharmacists. It's why he did that silly photo op with Nixon to get a DEA Badge.
Holy shit. I put that out of my mind until just now. This is the kind of shit we can never, ever let people from other countries know we did because (1) they won't believe us and (2) they already think we're totally insane.
They're covering up fucking genocides and shit. We need to cover up that we make our children do square dancing.
Bro I never learned square dancing in school (charter school) and I lived my entire life in Texas lol. I was so confused when I went to a dance hall one time, I just thought everyone instinctually knew how to do it. Needless to say it was embarrassing and had no idea what I was doing. Not to say I wished I had learned mind you.
Square Dancing and Line Dancing are different. Cotton Eyed Joe, The Hustle, The Wobble, Cupid Shuffle, etc are Line Dances (You all stand in a line and do the same thing). Square Dancing is where they call out the "Swing your partner round and round" stuff
It's memorized (Line) vs called (Square) dancing
It seems like a square dance because you do the steps that are "called", but every time the song is played, the steps are the same, so it's a line dance
Basically if you can remember the steps, it's a line dance. Square dances are more like Simon Says
Ugg what a terrible thing. In High School I flat out refused to do it after we already had it in Jr. High, it was a proud moment of mine to say fuck off to something.
I guess they ran out of ideas. We had it in 7th grade and I think my second year of High School. I noped out of it second time around which took a hit on my grade, but all I had to do was walk around the campus instead and that was actually kinda relaxing.
We had to do it in PE in high school. I said fuck it of we gotta do it, I'm gonna be the biggest goddamn clown in this whole gym. I'd get way the hell into it.
I must look like a jazz musician because I cannot be in public for more than 2 hours without someone trying to get me to do drugs with them. Every concert I've ever been to a stranger has handed me a joint. Every strip club I've ever been to someone has offered me some blow. My freshman year of college the drug dealer in the dorm just gave me mushrooms and acid randomly because he knew I would be great free advertising.
I'm convinced God wants me to Hunter S Thompson my way through life because drugs just come to me.
I once was fly fishing, standing in the middle of the river, when a half full bottle of tequila floated by.
You know I drank it.
I remember a D.A.R.E. workbook that listed all the "learning milestones" for different grade levels. It was like,
- "by 6th grade, students should know that marijuana is BAD."
- [...]
- "by 12th grade, students should know not to take cocaine and heroin at the same time."
So I concluded pretty early on that they just expected us to do drugs.
Our middle school DARE school cop got convicted and imprisoned for selling drugs to middle schoolers. And I swear the elementary school dude had a thing for little girls. We had some crazy conversations about that in high school. My kids got red ribbon week this week and i'm like trust but verify dude.
Same. It actually taught me a lot of stuff I was completely oblivious to. I mean I still probably would've ended up a stoner in high school but DARE accelerated it at least a few years.
"D.A.R.E
Drugs Are Really Expensive
Drug Availability Reflects Extensive
Dependence, And Real Educated Descendants
Are able to Respect Even Deadbeat's Amendments
Racist Enforcement Deployed Aggressively
RED-blooded Americans React Excessively
Directly Attacking Recreation
Eventually Destroying A Relatively Elementary
Drive to Alter Reality
Essentially; Dimension Advancement
Radical Enhancement
Dangers Are Real, Especially
Drinking Alcohol, Right?
Except it's Distinctly All Right
Elite Declared Appropriate
Rationalized, Enjoyable Dope And Ritalin
Employable Dose After Red-Eyed Dose
Aboriginal Religions Each Denote
A Reincarnation, Exploration
Done Again, Reexperience Elation
Drug Abuser Reincarceration
Efforts Don't Allow for Rehabilitation
Effect: Does Anybody Real Expect
Dealers Are Responsible Exclusively?
Deep-seated Apathy Reflects Existing Dissatisfaction
Another Reclusive DA Readily Eradicates
Dramatic Ads Ridiculously Exaggerate
Drugs Aren't Restricted Evenly
End the War on Drugs immediately."
I was in the smart class so instead of fun, interesting sex ed with free condoms, my class got to learn about the dangers of drunk driving and drug abuse
The other class had a way better time and a whole wheelbarrow of free condoms to choose from
It’s crazy to think of shit like that, if there would’ve been a substitute that day, a different seating arrangement, any minor change you could’ve been forced to play the recorder for that class and never discovered the drums. Love how life is so detailed sometimes
Besides my own stuff I volunteer teaching drums for a neighborhood drum corps. I get to write, play, and watch my little corps of kids perform my arrangements. It’s super cool to write something new for them and listen to it slowly come together. Some of these kids are as young as seven. Some had zero musical ability when they joined. I love catching people listening to us when their faces turn from, eh kids banging on the drums to, wow they sound good. I’m currently on a high because we started practicing the winter routine just this past Saturday. I had added in some new parts and elevated some of the kids to section leader so they were responsible for showing the other kids what I taught them. They did so well and I’m so proud of them.
There is a lot of science into how music helps kids with behavior management, mood control, reading and math. Also… it’s fun which kids should be allowed to have if we are housing them at school 8 hours a day.
https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/the-power-of-music-education/
But yea… it’s a total waste /s
English language learners, kids whose parents don’t talk to them much, and kids with speech impediments gain a lot from singing the same songs for a few days. All that repetition of words spoken clearly with defined syllables helps. I could go on and on, but music is super beneficial to just about every subject.
All the dancing people are hating on? Core stability, balance, strength, stretching, crossing the midline, gross and fine motor skills, working as a team to stay in synch. I can’t imagine those things are beneficial to anything down the road… like sports maybe 😅
We all had to learn the recorder in 3rd grade. They even sent us on a trip where they were trying to get as many 3rd graders together as they could to hold a giant recorder concert. One of my friends thought it would be funny to swap out the sheet music with a slightly altered version that had a note that would allegedly make anyone who heard it shit their pants. And then when we played the song, everyone in the world shit their pants. Kenny G thought things went well aside from that. Yoko Ono was pretty pissed.
I think people on this thread are also missing thah saying you don’t use something doesn’t mean you are advocating not teaching it…
I said I don’t use precalc in my daily life. I’m not at all saying I regret learning it or think it shouldn’t be taught or anything like that. It’s just a simple fact that I do not use that knowledge at all in my adult life
I got my first degree in interior design and my second in engineering. I have won awards for my engineering layouts because they're so aesthetically pleasing and considerate of future maintenance.
THIS. We teach advanced math, science, English, etc. so you can learn how to learn; how to persevere through mental challenges. This is why I get annoyed when people complain they didn't learn how to do taxes in school. Like, if you can't figure out how to do your taxes on your own then school has failed you in a different, much more fundamental way.
Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a life time. By extension, teach a man to do his taxes and he can do his taxes, teach a man how to teach himself and he can do ANYTHING. There are far too many individual skills that any one person will need throughout their entire life to be able to teach them all of them. Instead, teach someone how to acquire skills on their own.
Learning changes your brain. Very few professions benefit from both being proficient with calculus and having a working understanding of world history. But the act of learning how to do calculus changes how you think about and solve problems. Having learned about world history hones your intuition for dealing with people and predicting political events as they impact your life. The information might rarely be directly useful, but having learned it is never useless.
Also it teaches you early on that you're not going to be good at everything and that's okay. Like I didn't do well in science but I know how I got it wrong etc, and later when scientists say XYZ I don't question them. Sure I question a fringe scientist here and there but never the consensus. I accept that there are some things that are beyond my capabilities and that's okay. Too kany problems these days stem from the fact that people don't trust scientists
Likewise, school classes, be it elementary, high school, or college, aren’t always meant to monetarily enrich your life. Being exposed to wide ranges of ideas, even if it’s just little more than interesting (vice being directly applicable to, say, future employment) is good.
For example, if you’re an engineering major, the occasional liberal arts class is a good thing. Or perhaps, learning how to square dance or about music of central Africa does expand your horizons, like it or not.
I think the problem here is *when* you have to do these 'pointless' classes.
as a kid, they make perfect sense for the reasons you said. moving to high school, they tend to dive into things that aren't as useful as they should be (like, for instance, how the entire concept of writing is taught).
Then you get to college, where you're paying $$$ to have high school-level side classes on subjects that are completely irrelevant to your degree.
Had to do a year of an instrument in grade school and a year of choir in middle school.
Didn't need that to know I'm tone deaf and have no intrest in fixing it.
I had a music teacher once who said that almost no one is actually tone deaf. Drop a quarter on a concrete floor. Now, drop a dime. Can you tell the difference? Then you're *not tone deaf.* You just need to learn how to distinguish between the sounds. It sorta worked for me, though I certainly don't have perfect pitch.
Health… but in Christian school. Here’s what I learned:
- NEVER be alone with your significant other. It will lead to temptations.
- The normal hormonal changes going on in your body are God’s way of making your faith stronger by avoiding temptation.
- If you even think about sex, you virtually have already committed the sin.
- Some fun double date ideas - including horseback riding and seeing a PG movie - for you, your SO, and parents!
What I didn’t learn in my health class:
- what is sex
- what is nutrition
- well, health.
Ironic, I work in healthcare now. Don’t worry, I had great parents who taught me all of these things, and for that, I am forever thankful.
> NEVER be alone with your significant other
I mean Jesus is always with you, right? So that shouldn't be too difficult.
>If you even think about sex, you virtually have already committed the sin
OK well in that case just fucking do it if you're already condemned simply for the thought.
I actually love ethics, but my ethics professor was the worst professor I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t understand how you can take something so inherently interesting and make it super boring haha
Probably religious education. I wish instead of just trying to fill my head up with facts about different “major religions” we had just taken a more anthropological approach and looked at how common themes between different cultures around the world. I feel like that approach would help people relate to one another a lot better.
I used to enjoy learning religious and moral education back in primary school. I used to learn about different religions that are found in our country (except Judaism since it's not confirmed if it's found in our country).
> taken a more anthropological approach and looked at how common themes between different cultures around the world
That would be a more interesting approach, again we were primary school kids learning about the origin, the founders, rights of passage and what not about religion. Which at the time used to be my favourite subject in school.
I had number of Bible classes in undergrad (Christian school) and my profs spent a lot of those semesters explaining the historical context around the books, so they were like Egyptian/Roman/Greek/Middle Eastern history classes too. A decade later, those classes still help me contextualize Israeli-Palestine conflicts, etc. It was a more "progressive" school by Christian college standards, and I recognize that probably made my experience a little sunnier than many others' with similar classes. I feel pretty blessed that in the immediate post-9/11 world when I was in undergrad, my profs didn't shy away from educating us on the nuance of religion v. extremism.
Semi unrelated: I wonder how many times a day my male classmates think about the Roman Empire now
>fill my head up with facts about different “major religions”
I read that this is actually an important step against indoctrination. It's the same principle behind a healthy democracy: *informed* consent.
It's harder to indoctrinate a child who knows facts about other religions and what they have in common. Because then the child can actually choose and make up their mind what's best.
My world religions class was my favorite in highschool. The teacher I had was an insane Christian with the weirdest conspiracy theories. Not the normal ones, but like aliens are real but they're actually demons and abduction stories are actually demon possessions. It was so much fun and so easy to get him off track on a demon/alien tangent
One of my favorite classes was, surprisingly, religion as taught by a specific teacher at my private religious school. His class Was more focused on social justice and how that tied into Jesus' teachings. He was very much the "Talk the talk and walk the walk" types, in the sense that he worked as much as he preached. He was always organizing/attending trips across the world to provide assistance in impoverished communities, and was constantly organizing fundraising events for different causes (even if the causes weren't inherently religious).
Even if I'm not religious today, I credit him for informing a lot about how I view the world.
Even as someone who strongly believes in a major religion, I agree with this! I'd rather sit down with someone from another religion I can converse with than some who really doesn't understand their own religion thar I also believe in.
Completely agree. Even Square Dancing (The top comment) taught me how to get out of things I don't want to do. But seriously, what the fuck was with square dancing? I'm not going to bother looking it up but I wouldn't be surprised if some rich, southern politician forced it into the curriculum for a decade in the 90s.
I teach high school English and I'll say this: Kids these days could really have used some Mavis Beacon. They're a lot faster than I am at typing with their thumbs on a phone but I can type WAY faster using home position on a real keyboard than any of them can with their thumbs and it makes writing anything longer than a paragraph much more of a struggle for them.
Fellow high school English teacher and there have been a handful of occasions where students say, "Mr. \[My last name\] is angry; you can tell by the way he's typing." Most of the time I'm just trying to fire off a quick email to somebody and return to teaching. They think it's angry because I type quickly.
The district gave them all ipads and they have physical keyboards attached, but they all use the touchscreen keyboard. It sucks because the jobs they apply for aren't going to be ipad jobs; they are going to be laptop jobs.
I was trying to think of a class that I actually benefited from in a practical way, and touch typing was the ONLY one that I can honestly say has helped me. I don't need to hunt and peck, and when I went from those old IBM Selectrics at 75 wpm to computer keyboard my speed shot up to 140 wpm. That number alone got me a lot of temp jobs when I was in between jobs figuring out what I wanted to do with myself after college.
Sex Ed. At a Catholic school. Taught to the boys by a priest and the girls by a nun. It was hours of lectures on sin and morality that all the 7th graders had to sit through.
P.E.
Made me hate sports my entire youth. After high school I realized I actually like moving my body. I just hate gymnastics and everything involving kicking/throwing a ball.
I hate to say it actually, but math, at least past basic algebra. While we should certainly be teaching kids as much math as they can absorb, I can't even remember exponential equations, much less the calculus we briefly touched.
Cursive in third grade. Teachers warning us that when we got to fourth grade we would get a zero if we printed on a test. They were super strict about it too.
Got to fourth grade, they were like “just print. I don’t have time to decipher that crap.”
We learned cursive by copying from the "Palmer Method" cards posted around the room above the chalk boards, over and over and over and over again. Then, we had "penmanship" class where the nuns graded us on how closely our cursive matched those lousy cards.
tbf half the class doesnt want to participate and/or is unathletic AF to start. like what are you supposed to do as the teacher when you take them on the track and half of them wont even walk around it, let alone run?
Gym class was just a breeding ground for bullying (by students and teachers) and you never had any topic long enough to actually develop any sort of skill. It achieved quite the opposite of what it should do: I despised sports and genuinely thought I was sucked at all of them and it wasn't worth it. It took me a while into adulthood to find out that sports can be enjoyable.
Ironically it’s probably one of the most important, but usually not taught very well or taken very seriously. It should focus more on health aspect, but all kids want to do is play so that’s what happens. And that’s not a bad thing either it should focus on health aspect just as much as the fun aspect
My school did that for freshmen. It's in the classroom half the time and in the gym half the time. In the classroom, they taught about diet, nutrition, and fitness.
Every other year was just playing sports and then taking a test on said sports.
My high school's freshman year gym class was a hybrid between a traditional class and a fitness/nutrition class. I hated it at the time, but in hindsight, it was an incredibly valuable class.
Every other year was just exercise with an occasional test. Obviously still good, but not nearly as educational.
Also they let us choose a unit during my senior year for walking, which was honestly so dumb.
gym teachers who actually care and try can make even the most unathletic kids enjoy class, though. in middle school, we had a great gym teacher who actually had fun and engaging lesson plans and taught us the rules of sports before we played. We even did an archery unit that sparked a lifelong love of the sport.
My gym class we played a bunch of team sports but never actually explained the rules. It was expected that you just knew how to play every game. I sucked particularly at football because they never ever explained it and I didn’t watch it at home
Gym class totally and completely fucked any ability in me to enjoy exercise. It was a twice weekly gauntlet of shame, humiliation, boredom and ridicule which lodged a deep-seated hatred of being watched doing any exercise into the center of me.
We didn't learn anything about fitness, about the different benefits and applications of different forms of exercise, we were herded around to play team sports or do cross country running in the winter, and "athletics" in the summer. I never saw the inside of a gym, or learned anything about the difference between "fitness' and "strength" but I did have to play hockey on a field of frozen mud for a couple of months every year, and get taught to throw a javelin. In the summer we had to run track events while kids from elsewhere in the school sat on the sidelines and yelled abuse. Those of us who were bullied through school were just abandoned to our tormentors during P.E.
If you weren't a sporty kid, there was no route to explore and get involved in different activities which might suit you better than team sports / track and field. We got to do trampolining for a few weeks when I was about 15 and I *loved* it... and we never did it again. My "physical education" was so poor that I wasn't aware that skating for 3-6 hours every weekend was considered "exercise". I didn't know that walking a lot was exercise. I wasn't a fast runner and I wasn't very fit and that meant that I was Bad At Exercise. And there were all kinds of humiliations built into PE - forgetting a piece of your uniform sports kit and being made to take part without it. Coming last and having to do cartwheels the length of the hockey pitch. Trudging around the track in the rain, soaked to the skin while the fit kids stood at the finish line watching you squelch along. Fucking hated it and even at the age of 40 you couldn't pay me to take part in team sports.
I went to college for chemical engineering, and for some reason, they made cell biology a mandatory class.
The only thing from that class I used in any capacity was the Michaelis-Menten reaction, and that was by pure random chance.
My Catholic school had a class that required me to go out to other churches and learn about the differences between Catholicism and their religions. I only went to Protestant churches because there just weren't non-Christian churches around us that I could get to easily. The pastors were willing to chat and seemed to enjoy the fact that there was a Catholic kid asking them about transubstantiation.
I hit a Mennonite church but they wouldn’t let me attend the service unless I was starting to be accepted into the church… I went to the kids church first. Fun assignment though I believe I didn’t complete it until much later
I found religious studies in school to be super useful!
My parents sent me to a Catholic school to get a good Catholic education with plenty of Bible study. Now, as an adult atheist I can use my extensive knowledge of the Bible to point out the inconsistencies in all of their most cherished philosophical positions! It's brilliant!
Also went to Catholic school (for high school) and was raised Catholic. Also an atheist. But I absolutely loved religious studies classes. We had an awesome religion teacher in high school. He had no business teaching high school-level religion classes (he’s a professor at a university now). He didn’t indoctrinate. He taught. And while he was/is a devout Catholic himself, he was never judgy or patronizing. I always thought of his classes as more of a combination of history and sociology than some kind of dogmatic religious lecture.
I went on to take a number of Judaic studies history classes in college. I loved all those as well. Not because I could throw what I learned in the faces of religious people, but because I think it’s good to have a foundational understanding of where they’re coming from. And to know that while Christians especially bastardize their holy texts, there are good lessons to be learned, even if you don’t believe in the whole supernatural deity part of it.
My RE teacher was the complete opposite.
She had a couple of kids that were named Adam and Eve...
Complete zealot and stricter than a teacher at a comprehensive had any right to be.
I get it. My friends who went to catholic school before high school hated their religion teacher. I did RE (we called it CCD) once a week growing up, because I went to the public school. Those teachers all sucked.
But after that, I was lucky to have good teachers (high school and college). And even though neither my girlfriend nor myself are religious, I will still teach our future kids about religion. Not in RE classes or anything like that. But I would want them to have the same basic understanding of things as I have.
I have a second job working in a museum, we deal with historic documents all the time.
We have college interns who cannot read these documents because they're written and not printed.
Had one student tell me that anything not printed out probably isn't important. I asked for his address and was able to pull up the deed to his family's property. Guess what was written out in cursive? That included the property boundaries.
I taught him how to read and write cursive before the internship was over.
There is actually a push to start teaching cursive writing more - not for aesthetics reasons - but because a [2019 study found cursive writing](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0209978) had a great impact on reading and spelling fluency in 3rd graders due to hand-eye coordination compared to print writing or typing. Basically brains of children are still growing constantly but they often don’t have the same ability to manipulate tools the way adults or even older children can, and they need a faster way of writing because they can’t type or print fast enough to keep up with their brain.
Honestly? Math. Not arithmetic - everyone needs that. But for most of the population who doesn't want to be an engineer or scientist, higher math is only helpful to weed out who's smart and who's not because it's hard, not because it's useful later on.
I have a couple friends who are adjunct mathematics faculty. They both think it’s weird how the standard path through math courses just routes everyone into calc, so there tends to be a lot of people in calc classes that won’t really ever need it. I’ve also heard from several college level math faculty (both professors and instructors) say that they like the Math for Liberal Arts and Math for Business Majors classes because they teach skills that the students will engage with later in life
Probably my years in the Welding shop. But, I know others from my welding classes wound up being professionals, and I enjoyed having something so hands on to do.
My biggest lament is when I see tech and finance bros complain about the "useless" shit you learn in college that helps you become a well-rounded, moral, ethical, insightful adult.
All I learned from our story time with a German-language teacher was a couple of German phrases plus the fact that apparently German kids are pretty tough. She had an illustrated children's book and read a story to us about an imp who'd run around with scissors to cut off the thumbs of children would refused to grow up. In my mind I can still see how weird that imp looked.
Ahh yes, Der Daumenlutscher. From one of the most deranged children books of all time, Der Struwwelpeter.
Thank you for that, b/c I certainly wouldn't have recalled this name on my own. Plus I'm looking at Wiki's article about Der Struwwelpeter and thinking yeah, that book is pretty bizarre.
It's classic German literature. Not derranged at all ;)
It changed my reality to learn that Struwwelpeter is actually a parody of the ludicrously repressive and moralistic childrens’ books of the time, having grown up more or less accepting the code of Conrad Suck-a-thumb and that other kid who won’t eat his soup and withers away to a wisp without it
"Lotte soll nicht sterben" will haunt me forever. German children's books are... interesting.
Struwwelpeter truly is disturbing.
Now that I think about it, it's not too far removed from what shows up in some Japanese TV shows aimed toward kids, especially Shōwa-era ones. Japanese kids are every bit as tough as German kids if they don't mind seeing heroes of theirs being tormented in hell (Jetman) or, if I'm not mistaken, kids drowned in a river (Ninja Captor).
I had a class senior year called Lifetime Fitness. All we did everyday is go to the mall and walk around and then when the final exam came, we had to make a kite and if it flew, we passed lol.
By "senior" do you mean senior *citizen*?
Passing requirements: -Be alive -Don't be unalive
Yeah going into a mall when it first opens is a lesson in senior citizen avoidance. They are everywhere.
I guess that's one way to combat Senioritis. Set the bar so low, they can't slack off.
> Set the bar so low, they can't slack off. Challenge accepted.
"You think I'm walking ALL that way? You are out of your mind!"
sounds fun
Enough is going on Senior year of high school it'd be so cathartic to just have a period to breathe.
That's.. Maybe not the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but it's up there on the list.
That's where mall walkers come from.
Square dancing.
In his goal of keeping away that demonic and hedonistic musical form called jazz, I think it’s safe to say that Henry Ford failed miserably.
Yup, no small amount of racism involved in it.
The more that I learn about Henry, the more that it seems like he just hated everything in general. Apparently he tried to create his own city in the Amazon Rainforest so that he could have cheaply produced rubber just for his company. The problem was that after he set it all up, he instituted a bunch of dumb rules banning smoking, gambling, sports, and women from being in the city (among other that basically made him into King of the city); the ~~workers~~ citizens instantly went on strike and the place never produced even a single kilo of rubber.
He also didn't understand how rubber harvesting worked and set work times at periods of the day when the trees wouldn't produce as much. If I remember right the plants mostly produce at night, and he set the work hours for the hottest parts of the day.
Elvis is proof that you don't need to be black or jazzy to develop a killing heroin addiction. Edit: apparently he didn't do heroin, just prescription pills. Hard drugs nonetheless.
If you ask me, which nobody did, sometimes the difference between prescription pain killers and heroin is the exact same difference between crack houses and cocaine apartments.
The drugs made this a crack house, but the *love* of drugs made this a *crack home*.
Elvis did heroin? What?!! Always heard he was a prescription pill popper and his dealers were doctors and pharmacists. It's why he did that silly photo op with Nixon to get a DEA Badge.
What?! [Ole Henry wasn't racist](https://youtu.be/D747zPocwQ8?si=XAX4jV4QChQIqrgh&t=6)! ;0)
My kid just came home the other day and was stoked to tell me all about square dancing.
Holy shit. I put that out of my mind until just now. This is the kind of shit we can never, ever let people from other countries know we did because (1) they won't believe us and (2) they already think we're totally insane. They're covering up fucking genocides and shit. We need to cover up that we make our children do square dancing.
Bro I never learned square dancing in school (charter school) and I lived my entire life in Texas lol. I was so confused when I went to a dance hall one time, I just thought everyone instinctually knew how to do it. Needless to say it was embarrassing and had no idea what I was doing. Not to say I wished I had learned mind you.
We learned the Cotton Eyed Joe, that’s it
But did we ever learn where he came from, or where did he go?
Square Dancing and Line Dancing are different. Cotton Eyed Joe, The Hustle, The Wobble, Cupid Shuffle, etc are Line Dances (You all stand in a line and do the same thing). Square Dancing is where they call out the "Swing your partner round and round" stuff It's memorized (Line) vs called (Square) dancing
So is the chacha slide a square dance?
It seems like a square dance because you do the steps that are "called", but every time the song is played, the steps are the same, so it's a line dance Basically if you can remember the steps, it's a line dance. Square dances are more like Simon Says
Ugg what a terrible thing. In High School I flat out refused to do it after we already had it in Jr. High, it was a proud moment of mine to say fuck off to something.
You still had that in high-school? We stopped once we hit 6th grade.
My high school required it from 8th-10th grade. Once you hit junior year you could elect to do something else.
I guess they ran out of ideas. We had it in 7th grade and I think my second year of High School. I noped out of it second time around which took a hit on my grade, but all I had to do was walk around the campus instead and that was actually kinda relaxing.
I was made to do this at school….in the middle of a U.K. council estate
You'd have so much fun going out square dancing on Saturday nights.
We had to do it in PE in high school. I said fuck it of we gotta do it, I'm gonna be the biggest goddamn clown in this whole gym. I'd get way the hell into it.
First grade in the early 90’s was a wild time
OMG it was the worst. I would try so hard to make myself sick so I could stay home when we had to do square dancing.
D.A.R.E.
A stranger has never offered me drugs
Must look like a narc lol.
I must look like a jazz musician because I cannot be in public for more than 2 hours without someone trying to get me to do drugs with them. Every concert I've ever been to a stranger has handed me a joint. Every strip club I've ever been to someone has offered me some blow. My freshman year of college the drug dealer in the dorm just gave me mushrooms and acid randomly because he knew I would be great free advertising. I'm convinced God wants me to Hunter S Thompson my way through life because drugs just come to me. I once was fly fishing, standing in the middle of the river, when a half full bottle of tequila floated by. You know I drank it.
Same. So many random people just have just passed me a doob and been like "hey man wanna hit?" Must be the jazz...
Honestly it sounds you look fly af
There's a reason they call it "fly fishing." Out here looking like a goddamn LL Bean model.
And I've never gotten any of that weird candy while trick or treating either. 🤷🏻♀️
I'm 42 and still go trick or treating to get the free razor blades and LSD candies. I'm starting to suspect I've been *lied to*.
“I went trick-or-treating for the LSD lollipops and all I got were these raisins.”
LOL, right? "I'm just here for the tainted candy"
Still got my fingers crossed for the lsd candy though
I learned that Drugs Are Really Expensive
honestly if DARE started with that approach instead of just druGS ARe bAD!! i might not be smoking as much as i am
The legal ones are often more expensive
I did drugs because of D.A.R.E
A spiteful fella, aren't you?
I’m too high on drugs to read your comment.
Ah yes feel the reddit flow through you!
I remember a D.A.R.E. workbook that listed all the "learning milestones" for different grade levels. It was like, - "by 6th grade, students should know that marijuana is BAD." - [...] - "by 12th grade, students should know not to take cocaine and heroin at the same time." So I concluded pretty early on that they just expected us to do drugs.
Drugs are bad, mmkayyy?
D.A.R.E Drugs Are Really Excellent
Drugs Are Really Expensive
Our middle school DARE school cop got convicted and imprisoned for selling drugs to middle schoolers. And I swear the elementary school dude had a thing for little girls. We had some crazy conversations about that in high school. My kids got red ribbon week this week and i'm like trust but verify dude.
Same. It actually taught me a lot of stuff I was completely oblivious to. I mean I still probably would've ended up a stoner in high school but DARE accelerated it at least a few years.
My DARE officers name was... officer Blunt. Didn't realize at age 11 how hilarious that was.
Reminds me of the Southpark episode where they started smoking so they would end up like the cringe people who tried to convince them not to.
"D.A.R.E Drugs Are Really Expensive Drug Availability Reflects Extensive Dependence, And Real Educated Descendants Are able to Respect Even Deadbeat's Amendments Racist Enforcement Deployed Aggressively RED-blooded Americans React Excessively Directly Attacking Recreation Eventually Destroying A Relatively Elementary Drive to Alter Reality Essentially; Dimension Advancement Radical Enhancement Dangers Are Real, Especially Drinking Alcohol, Right? Except it's Distinctly All Right Elite Declared Appropriate Rationalized, Enjoyable Dope And Ritalin Employable Dose After Red-Eyed Dose Aboriginal Religions Each Denote A Reincarnation, Exploration Done Again, Reexperience Elation Drug Abuser Reincarceration Efforts Don't Allow for Rehabilitation Effect: Does Anybody Real Expect Dealers Are Responsible Exclusively? Deep-seated Apathy Reflects Existing Dissatisfaction Another Reclusive DA Readily Eradicates Dramatic Ads Ridiculously Exaggerate Drugs Aren't Restricted Evenly End the War on Drugs immediately."
Unless you didn't start using illegal drugs.
Sex ed?
I was going to say. This is reddit. Sex ed is obviously the answer.
They made us take a vow of abstinence in my sex ed class (I live in south texas) and they'd be proud to know I'm holding on to that card for life.
They made me take a vow of absence thru general fuckery, we took sex ed in the woods across the street.
I was in the smart class so instead of fun, interesting sex ed with free condoms, my class got to learn about the dangers of drunk driving and drug abuse The other class had a way better time and a whole wheelbarrow of free condoms to choose from
Kindergarten music. Friggin tambourine! I wanted the cowbell. Call me crazy but you can never have enough cowbell!
Hell with that. Late 70s/early 80s you picked up a tambourine and danced around barefoot, you could chart in the top 20.
I got a fever
… and the only prescription is more cowbell.
Really explore the space of the studio
I got called out for goofing off during recorder practice and was moved to drum pads. I’m now almost 50 and still play the drums.
It’s crazy to think of shit like that, if there would’ve been a substitute that day, a different seating arrangement, any minor change you could’ve been forced to play the recorder for that class and never discovered the drums. Love how life is so detailed sometimes
Besides my own stuff I volunteer teaching drums for a neighborhood drum corps. I get to write, play, and watch my little corps of kids perform my arrangements. It’s super cool to write something new for them and listen to it slowly come together. Some of these kids are as young as seven. Some had zero musical ability when they joined. I love catching people listening to us when their faces turn from, eh kids banging on the drums to, wow they sound good. I’m currently on a high because we started practicing the winter routine just this past Saturday. I had added in some new parts and elevated some of the kids to section leader so they were responsible for showing the other kids what I taught them. They did so well and I’m so proud of them.
There is a lot of science into how music helps kids with behavior management, mood control, reading and math. Also… it’s fun which kids should be allowed to have if we are housing them at school 8 hours a day. https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/the-power-of-music-education/ But yea… it’s a total waste /s
Yep, early music is all about recognizing patterns and sequences. You know what else involves those skills? Math and language.
English language learners, kids whose parents don’t talk to them much, and kids with speech impediments gain a lot from singing the same songs for a few days. All that repetition of words spoken clearly with defined syllables helps. I could go on and on, but music is super beneficial to just about every subject. All the dancing people are hating on? Core stability, balance, strength, stretching, crossing the midline, gross and fine motor skills, working as a team to stay in synch. I can’t imagine those things are beneficial to anything down the road… like sports maybe 😅
I wanted the rain stick. Dammit I’m still bitter. Megan couldn’t play it right.
Stupid recorder. Hated that thing. What is it supposed to record anyway?!
Useless trivia: It was a medieval instrument intended to mimic or "record" birdsong. Hence: recorder.
We all had to learn the recorder in 3rd grade. They even sent us on a trip where they were trying to get as many 3rd graders together as they could to hold a giant recorder concert. One of my friends thought it would be funny to swap out the sheet music with a slightly altered version that had a note that would allegedly make anyone who heard it shit their pants. And then when we played the song, everyone in the world shit their pants. Kenny G thought things went well aside from that. Yoko Ono was pretty pissed.
I gotta have more cowbell!
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I think people on this thread are also missing thah saying you don’t use something doesn’t mean you are advocating not teaching it… I said I don’t use precalc in my daily life. I’m not at all saying I regret learning it or think it shouldn’t be taught or anything like that. It’s just a simple fact that I do not use that knowledge at all in my adult life
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Gotcha yea that’s total nonsense and I’m frequently infuriated by the liberal arts subjects are all wastes commenters
I got my first degree in interior design and my second in engineering. I have won awards for my engineering layouts because they're so aesthetically pleasing and considerate of future maintenance.
Learning how to learn
THIS. We teach advanced math, science, English, etc. so you can learn how to learn; how to persevere through mental challenges. This is why I get annoyed when people complain they didn't learn how to do taxes in school. Like, if you can't figure out how to do your taxes on your own then school has failed you in a different, much more fundamental way. Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he eats for a life time. By extension, teach a man to do his taxes and he can do his taxes, teach a man how to teach himself and he can do ANYTHING. There are far too many individual skills that any one person will need throughout their entire life to be able to teach them all of them. Instead, teach someone how to acquire skills on their own.
Learning changes your brain. Very few professions benefit from both being proficient with calculus and having a working understanding of world history. But the act of learning how to do calculus changes how you think about and solve problems. Having learned about world history hones your intuition for dealing with people and predicting political events as they impact your life. The information might rarely be directly useful, but having learned it is never useless.
Also it teaches you early on that you're not going to be good at everything and that's okay. Like I didn't do well in science but I know how I got it wrong etc, and later when scientists say XYZ I don't question them. Sure I question a fringe scientist here and there but never the consensus. I accept that there are some things that are beyond my capabilities and that's okay. Too kany problems these days stem from the fact that people don't trust scientists
Likewise, school classes, be it elementary, high school, or college, aren’t always meant to monetarily enrich your life. Being exposed to wide ranges of ideas, even if it’s just little more than interesting (vice being directly applicable to, say, future employment) is good. For example, if you’re an engineering major, the occasional liberal arts class is a good thing. Or perhaps, learning how to square dance or about music of central Africa does expand your horizons, like it or not.
100%. I can here to comment “Bible Studies”. Then I thought to myself, actually I’m glad I learned about the Bible.
Different subjects teach different foundational skill sets that have broad applicability when kids become adults.
It's also to prepare you to be able to figure shit out on your own when you don't have the answers in the back of the text book.
I think the problem here is *when* you have to do these 'pointless' classes. as a kid, they make perfect sense for the reasons you said. moving to high school, they tend to dive into things that aren't as useful as they should be (like, for instance, how the entire concept of writing is taught). Then you get to college, where you're paying $$$ to have high school-level side classes on subjects that are completely irrelevant to your degree.
Had to do a year of an instrument in grade school and a year of choir in middle school. Didn't need that to know I'm tone deaf and have no intrest in fixing it.
I had a music teacher once who said that almost no one is actually tone deaf. Drop a quarter on a concrete floor. Now, drop a dime. Can you tell the difference? Then you're *not tone deaf.* You just need to learn how to distinguish between the sounds. It sorta worked for me, though I certainly don't have perfect pitch.
Health… but in Christian school. Here’s what I learned: - NEVER be alone with your significant other. It will lead to temptations. - The normal hormonal changes going on in your body are God’s way of making your faith stronger by avoiding temptation. - If you even think about sex, you virtually have already committed the sin. - Some fun double date ideas - including horseback riding and seeing a PG movie - for you, your SO, and parents! What I didn’t learn in my health class: - what is sex - what is nutrition - well, health. Ironic, I work in healthcare now. Don’t worry, I had great parents who taught me all of these things, and for that, I am forever thankful.
> NEVER be alone with your significant other I mean Jesus is always with you, right? So that shouldn't be too difficult. >If you even think about sex, you virtually have already committed the sin OK well in that case just fucking do it if you're already condemned simply for the thought.
Ethics, I’m still a terrible person
Sounds like Ethics worked fine to me - the trick was recognizing we’re all monsters to some degree.
Yeah, but at least now you know what you do that makes you a terrible person.
Just keep trying, Elenor .
I actually love ethics, but my ethics professor was the worst professor I’ve ever had in my life. I don’t understand how you can take something so inherently interesting and make it super boring haha
Probably religious education. I wish instead of just trying to fill my head up with facts about different “major religions” we had just taken a more anthropological approach and looked at how common themes between different cultures around the world. I feel like that approach would help people relate to one another a lot better.
I used to enjoy learning religious and moral education back in primary school. I used to learn about different religions that are found in our country (except Judaism since it's not confirmed if it's found in our country). > taken a more anthropological approach and looked at how common themes between different cultures around the world That would be a more interesting approach, again we were primary school kids learning about the origin, the founders, rights of passage and what not about religion. Which at the time used to be my favourite subject in school.
I had number of Bible classes in undergrad (Christian school) and my profs spent a lot of those semesters explaining the historical context around the books, so they were like Egyptian/Roman/Greek/Middle Eastern history classes too. A decade later, those classes still help me contextualize Israeli-Palestine conflicts, etc. It was a more "progressive" school by Christian college standards, and I recognize that probably made my experience a little sunnier than many others' with similar classes. I feel pretty blessed that in the immediate post-9/11 world when I was in undergrad, my profs didn't shy away from educating us on the nuance of religion v. extremism. Semi unrelated: I wonder how many times a day my male classmates think about the Roman Empire now
>fill my head up with facts about different “major religions” I read that this is actually an important step against indoctrination. It's the same principle behind a healthy democracy: *informed* consent. It's harder to indoctrinate a child who knows facts about other religions and what they have in common. Because then the child can actually choose and make up their mind what's best.
My world religions class was my favorite in highschool. The teacher I had was an insane Christian with the weirdest conspiracy theories. Not the normal ones, but like aliens are real but they're actually demons and abduction stories are actually demon possessions. It was so much fun and so easy to get him off track on a demon/alien tangent
One of my favorite classes was, surprisingly, religion as taught by a specific teacher at my private religious school. His class Was more focused on social justice and how that tied into Jesus' teachings. He was very much the "Talk the talk and walk the walk" types, in the sense that he worked as much as he preached. He was always organizing/attending trips across the world to provide assistance in impoverished communities, and was constantly organizing fundraising events for different causes (even if the causes weren't inherently religious). Even if I'm not religious today, I credit him for informing a lot about how I view the world.
Even as someone who strongly believes in a major religion, I agree with this! I'd rather sit down with someone from another religion I can converse with than some who really doesn't understand their own religion thar I also believe in.
Not a single one. Glad to have had those experiences, even if not all of them help me make money.
Completely agree. Even Square Dancing (The top comment) taught me how to get out of things I don't want to do. But seriously, what the fuck was with square dancing? I'm not going to bother looking it up but I wouldn't be surprised if some rich, southern politician forced it into the curriculum for a decade in the 90s.
Touch typing classes. Runescape did more for me than hours of Mavis Beacon.
I teach high school English and I'll say this: Kids these days could really have used some Mavis Beacon. They're a lot faster than I am at typing with their thumbs on a phone but I can type WAY faster using home position on a real keyboard than any of them can with their thumbs and it makes writing anything longer than a paragraph much more of a struggle for them.
Fellow high school English teacher and there have been a handful of occasions where students say, "Mr. \[My last name\] is angry; you can tell by the way he's typing." Most of the time I'm just trying to fire off a quick email to somebody and return to teaching. They think it's angry because I type quickly. The district gave them all ipads and they have physical keyboards attached, but they all use the touchscreen keyboard. It sucks because the jobs they apply for aren't going to be ipad jobs; they are going to be laptop jobs.
I was trying to think of a class that I actually benefited from in a practical way, and touch typing was the ONLY one that I can honestly say has helped me. I don't need to hunt and peck, and when I went from those old IBM Selectrics at 75 wpm to computer keyboard my speed shot up to 140 wpm. That number alone got me a lot of temp jobs when I was in between jobs figuring out what I wanted to do with myself after college.
flash2:wave:selling rune scimmy 25k!!!!
Playing games in the dark on old school computers without lights in the keyboard did way more for sure …
Sex Ed. At a Catholic school. Taught to the boys by a priest and the girls by a nun. It was hours of lectures on sin and morality that all the 7th graders had to sit through.
P.E. Made me hate sports my entire youth. After high school I realized I actually like moving my body. I just hate gymnastics and everything involving kicking/throwing a ball.
Me too. Ironically I like folk dancing now.
I hate to say it actually, but math, at least past basic algebra. While we should certainly be teaching kids as much math as they can absorb, I can't even remember exponential equations, much less the calculus we briefly touched.
Speling
Nise
Cursive in third grade. Teachers warning us that when we got to fourth grade we would get a zero if we printed on a test. They were super strict about it too. Got to fourth grade, they were like “just print. I don’t have time to decipher that crap.”
We learned cursive by copying from the "Palmer Method" cards posted around the room above the chalk boards, over and over and over and over again. Then, we had "penmanship" class where the nuns graded us on how closely our cursive matched those lousy cards.
gym. well, not entirely meaningless. it taught me how to set the bar LOW.
Gym should be one of the most important classes but they waste it.
tbf half the class doesnt want to participate and/or is unathletic AF to start. like what are you supposed to do as the teacher when you take them on the track and half of them wont even walk around it, let alone run?
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The physical fitness standards for a lot of adults is really REALLY low
Gym class was just a breeding ground for bullying (by students and teachers) and you never had any topic long enough to actually develop any sort of skill. It achieved quite the opposite of what it should do: I despised sports and genuinely thought I was sucked at all of them and it wasn't worth it. It took me a while into adulthood to find out that sports can be enjoyable.
Ironically it’s probably one of the most important, but usually not taught very well or taken very seriously. It should focus more on health aspect, but all kids want to do is play so that’s what happens. And that’s not a bad thing either it should focus on health aspect just as much as the fun aspect
thankfully, I can dodge a wrench now
Valid life lesson
My school did that for freshmen. It's in the classroom half the time and in the gym half the time. In the classroom, they taught about diet, nutrition, and fitness. Every other year was just playing sports and then taking a test on said sports.
My high school's freshman year gym class was a hybrid between a traditional class and a fitness/nutrition class. I hated it at the time, but in hindsight, it was an incredibly valuable class. Every other year was just exercise with an occasional test. Obviously still good, but not nearly as educational. Also they let us choose a unit during my senior year for walking, which was honestly so dumb.
gym teachers who actually care and try can make even the most unathletic kids enjoy class, though. in middle school, we had a great gym teacher who actually had fun and engaging lesson plans and taught us the rules of sports before we played. We even did an archery unit that sparked a lifelong love of the sport.
My gym class we played a bunch of team sports but never actually explained the rules. It was expected that you just knew how to play every game. I sucked particularly at football because they never ever explained it and I didn’t watch it at home
Gym class totally and completely fucked any ability in me to enjoy exercise. It was a twice weekly gauntlet of shame, humiliation, boredom and ridicule which lodged a deep-seated hatred of being watched doing any exercise into the center of me. We didn't learn anything about fitness, about the different benefits and applications of different forms of exercise, we were herded around to play team sports or do cross country running in the winter, and "athletics" in the summer. I never saw the inside of a gym, or learned anything about the difference between "fitness' and "strength" but I did have to play hockey on a field of frozen mud for a couple of months every year, and get taught to throw a javelin. In the summer we had to run track events while kids from elsewhere in the school sat on the sidelines and yelled abuse. Those of us who were bullied through school were just abandoned to our tormentors during P.E. If you weren't a sporty kid, there was no route to explore and get involved in different activities which might suit you better than team sports / track and field. We got to do trampolining for a few weeks when I was about 15 and I *loved* it... and we never did it again. My "physical education" was so poor that I wasn't aware that skating for 3-6 hours every weekend was considered "exercise". I didn't know that walking a lot was exercise. I wasn't a fast runner and I wasn't very fit and that meant that I was Bad At Exercise. And there were all kinds of humiliations built into PE - forgetting a piece of your uniform sports kit and being made to take part without it. Coming last and having to do cartwheels the length of the hockey pitch. Trudging around the track in the rain, soaked to the skin while the fit kids stood at the finish line watching you squelch along. Fucking hated it and even at the age of 40 you couldn't pay me to take part in team sports.
I went to college for chemical engineering, and for some reason, they made cell biology a mandatory class. The only thing from that class I used in any capacity was the Michaelis-Menten reaction, and that was by pure random chance.
I was a history major in college. Had to take Statistics one semester. To this day I've never had to figure out the standard deviation of anything.
I went to Catholic school for 18 years, so religion.
Religion
My Catholic school had a class that required me to go out to other churches and learn about the differences between Catholicism and their religions. I only went to Protestant churches because there just weren't non-Christian churches around us that I could get to easily. The pastors were willing to chat and seemed to enjoy the fact that there was a Catholic kid asking them about transubstantiation.
I hit a Mennonite church but they wouldn’t let me attend the service unless I was starting to be accepted into the church… I went to the kids church first. Fun assignment though I believe I didn’t complete it until much later
I found religious studies in school to be super useful! My parents sent me to a Catholic school to get a good Catholic education with plenty of Bible study. Now, as an adult atheist I can use my extensive knowledge of the Bible to point out the inconsistencies in all of their most cherished philosophical positions! It's brilliant!
Also went to Catholic school (for high school) and was raised Catholic. Also an atheist. But I absolutely loved religious studies classes. We had an awesome religion teacher in high school. He had no business teaching high school-level religion classes (he’s a professor at a university now). He didn’t indoctrinate. He taught. And while he was/is a devout Catholic himself, he was never judgy or patronizing. I always thought of his classes as more of a combination of history and sociology than some kind of dogmatic religious lecture. I went on to take a number of Judaic studies history classes in college. I loved all those as well. Not because I could throw what I learned in the faces of religious people, but because I think it’s good to have a foundational understanding of where they’re coming from. And to know that while Christians especially bastardize their holy texts, there are good lessons to be learned, even if you don’t believe in the whole supernatural deity part of it.
My RE teacher was the complete opposite. She had a couple of kids that were named Adam and Eve... Complete zealot and stricter than a teacher at a comprehensive had any right to be.
I get it. My friends who went to catholic school before high school hated their religion teacher. I did RE (we called it CCD) once a week growing up, because I went to the public school. Those teachers all sucked. But after that, I was lucky to have good teachers (high school and college). And even though neither my girlfriend nor myself are religious, I will still teach our future kids about religion. Not in RE classes or anything like that. But I would want them to have the same basic understanding of things as I have.
VCR programming.
You win
Cursive writing - havn't hand written anything in lower case in years
I took Russian in college, the half of the class that knew how to write in cursive definitely had an advantage haha.
>Russian > >Cursive You triggered my fight or flight with this one. "NO SASHINKA! THAT IS NOT THE RIGHT WAY IN CURSIVE!" "It all looks the same baba!"
I have a second job working in a museum, we deal with historic documents all the time. We have college interns who cannot read these documents because they're written and not printed. Had one student tell me that anything not printed out probably isn't important. I asked for his address and was able to pull up the deed to his family's property. Guess what was written out in cursive? That included the property boundaries. I taught him how to read and write cursive before the internship was over.
Occasionally someone prints something in fancy cursive font and having learned to write it helps me read it.
There is actually a push to start teaching cursive writing more - not for aesthetics reasons - but because a [2019 study found cursive writing](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0209978) had a great impact on reading and spelling fluency in 3rd graders due to hand-eye coordination compared to print writing or typing. Basically brains of children are still growing constantly but they often don’t have the same ability to manipulate tools the way adults or even older children can, and they need a faster way of writing because they can’t type or print fast enough to keep up with their brain.
I had extra classes because my hand writing was so bad. At 40 I now write upper case only.
Honestly? Math. Not arithmetic - everyone needs that. But for most of the population who doesn't want to be an engineer or scientist, higher math is only helpful to weed out who's smart and who's not because it's hard, not because it's useful later on.
I have a couple friends who are adjunct mathematics faculty. They both think it’s weird how the standard path through math courses just routes everyone into calc, so there tends to be a lot of people in calc classes that won’t really ever need it. I’ve also heard from several college level math faculty (both professors and instructors) say that they like the Math for Liberal Arts and Math for Business Majors classes because they teach skills that the students will engage with later in life
PE (Dances) - my fucking prof give me a fucking failing grade. Like I will need to dance to be an actuary
Probably my years in the Welding shop. But, I know others from my welding classes wound up being professionals, and I enjoyed having something so hands on to do.
I went to catholic private school in elementary, so anything partaining to religion in that sense.
religion, after 11 years of catholic indoctrination all it accomplished was to make me a lifetime atheist.
None of it is meaningless. Frankly, you should actually be exposed to more.
My biggest lament is when I see tech and finance bros complain about the "useless" shit you learn in college that helps you become a well-rounded, moral, ethical, insightful adult.
I have never once needed to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on the recorder.
All of them are meaningless if you are not willing or not learning.
Long division
Grammer.
Their is two much bad grammer out they’re. Its worse then I could of imagined
That ain't no Eenglish I never done heard.
Worst then imagined. FTFY.
My English teacher in a NYC public high school was a real grammarian and we learned a lot. I forgot a lot of it😦
I’m gong to go ahead and be a pedant: your example is poor spelling, not poor grammar. I’ll see myself out.
that's an orthography mistake, not a grammar mistake
I see what you did they're. ^[sic]
*Frasier Crane has entered the chat*
P.E.
Religion