Yeah I know 'hanged' is correct but it pains me to say it; it sounds so wrong!

I'm trying to think of one that I thought was useless and I can't!!
Um.. I would say Phys Ed, but that actually does teach you a bit about yourself. Health was very good. Picked up on a lot about drugs.
I'm going to say Metal work and Wood work, only because I wasn't interested in making a career of it. I can see it being useful to others though, even so, I learned how to make ninja stars in metal work!!

You made ninja stars?! Gosh, I just made a poxy ring!

Well.. we weren't supposed to make them.
We kinda figured it out.

stupid pointless math that i will never use again
yeahhh....

When i was in middle school i believe i was in 8th grade. We had to make baby dolls out of bags of rice. We put them in a pair of panty hose, and used arts and crafts stuff to make the other body parts. then we dressed them and carried them around for a week. i had to be different cuz i couldnt decide if i wanted a boy or a girl so i had twins and pushed a stroller for a week. it was pointless and it taught me nothing. it wasnt a baby it was a bag of rice.

LOL. This reminds me of that episode in 90210 ;D

We had to make "babies" out of eggs in grade 7 or 8 xD.

OMG i remember making egg babies! we had SO much fun with them!!!

we had to learn how to write letters. at the time i thought... well... ok? lol weird. we had to make sure our paragraphs had a good opening line, about 4-6 lines of content on the matter, and then a conclusion. and the letter overall had to be about the same. beginning, content, ending. i guess that could be useful at some point in life. to be a writer or maybe we need to write a formal letter to a boss to say how much the job blows and i quit? who knows.

a few people have mentioned that teaching on how to fill out job resume's and such things would have been more useful and i agree with that as well. in 6th grade however, we had a course thrown in were we did those things. we filled out fake stuff, or at least were told how. and then we had to team up in groups and create a business and learn how to promote said business and... loads of business mumbo jumbo. i think that program would have been a lot more productive if it wasn't just a week long thing. had it been a normal class... who knows, i might be more productive with my life today lol.

by the way... writing the letters was something we did in 5th grade. i was 10/11 years old.

I really enjoyed high school, but one thing that really annoyed me was IMP. It stood for integrated math program. Instead of teaching us algebra, they tried to make the math into situations that we could use in real life. The book was in three sections and I only remember two of the sections, which was The Oregon Trail and The Pit and the Pendulum. Each page was a problem or two, it was so annoying. This one problem was about bagels. This woman bought so many bagels at a bakery, but didn't know how many she had bought. On her way home, she gave certain people so many bagels and when she got home she only had 2 left. We had to figure out how many bagels she had before hand. I couldn't get over how stupid the woman was for not knowing what the hell she was buying it was hard to concentrate on the problem. That really fucked me up in math, and it was probably the stupidest idea that school ever had. After that I transferred to another school, to learn real math.

Haha. Sounds like yet another failed education idea. Did they teach you the basics first before putting you through IMP? Or did they USE the IMP to teach you the basics... if they did, that'd be a worry. xD

I really have no idea. This was at a public school, and I had been at a private school my whole life. I wanted to get away from all the people I have known since I was like 4 or 5, so I went to a public high school. I was in the advanced math in middle school, and I tried to tell them that, but they still wouldn't change me to a different math class. After that year I went back to the private school, but that year of IMP really messed me up, and I had to re-learn everything all over again!

The most pointless thing I studied in high school was Tech Discovery. All we did was make freaking bridges and shit out of popsicle sticks. Then we made paper airplanes and measured who's flew the farthest. It was ridiculous.

The most important subjects to me would be English & Math. I mean we are surrounded by letters and numbers all day long. You HAVE to know them to be able to be a productive member of this society.

Pointless topics touched on - Shakespeare! I had to do a debate in Year 10 based on Romeo and Juliet... clearly a life lesson for me, coz I don't actually remember what we debated about... but still wtf?!
And I admittedly never use anything I used in Maths.

That being said all the times they made us write essays and letters and stuff in English... I never realised that I DO use it... particularly in my job which expects the highest in grammar and spelling (there is very little room for error).

Never understood why we studied Shakespeare. xD I mean, sure, it's nice to study maybe one of his texts, but to devote like 2 solid years to Shakespeare seems a bit stupid to me. If anything they should be exposing students to more of a variety of texts. And I'm sorry but I HATED Shakespearean English. Grrrrr!

I always LOVED Shakespeare at school ;D but, even back then, I was a fan of his plays and I was brought up going to Shakespeare every summer whenever we had holiday here in London (this was when I lived in Asia and we'd come to Europe for the holidays) so that's perhaps why I really enjoyed studying Shakespeare ;D

Ooh I always think childcare classes would be a good idea. Like how to change a nappy, how to feed babies via a bottle etc. You could do it with those horrible crying dolls that won't turn off! Maybe it would put off a few kids from having sex for a while, because obviously the sex ed classes never did! ;D

Or how about First Aid? I just did a course in Paediatric First Aid today (because I work with children), and gosh, if that isn't a life skill then I don't know what is!

The only time I enjoyed studying Shakespeare is when I had a CGP revision guide, filled with funny cartoons and it had the text in plain English on each opposite page. I studied Romeo and Juliet that way and now I really understand all the subtle little jokes and it helped me a great deal. Although I also did The Tempest that way too and I still hate it!

You can take childcare classes from 14 years, at least in Lincolnshire you can. Instead of doing all GCSE's you can do childcare, health and beauty, brick laying, plumbing and general building.

I actually took a parenting class my freshmen year of high school, and we had one of those lovely 'baby think it over' dolls. Lots of fun let me tell you ;). We also learned first aid in my health class, only it was so long ago I don't remember anything from it anyway!

Is that one of those dolls that you had to take home and take care of it as if it were a real baby? It actually cried and such? If so, I had to take one of those horrid things home too. The first time it cried was when my Aunt Alicia popped her head into the room to give me a hard time about something. I thought that was hilarious (as if she actually scared it). It helps that she isn't the most maternal person in the world, I guess.

first aid... and paediatric first aid would be brilliant if they taught it at school!

I wasn't really taught anything pointless at school, there were some things I considered pointless when I was at school, like referencing and health and safety, but now I have to use that constantly at uni, because I was taught at school I can just do it without thinking, which is handy when you've left your practical write up until the last minute. We did have a tampon talk in year 10 though, pointless to me as I was 15 by this point, but loads of people hadn't heard of TSS which was quite shocking. I used to think citizenship was a waste of time as well, until it came to renting a house and sorting out my own bills!

I went to a really good school so everything was taught really well and with relevance.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH PYTHAGORAS, YO? GOSH, YO - I ADORED PYTHAGORAS' THEOREM, YO! SCHOOL WOULD HAVE BEEN A LESSER PLACE WITHOUT IT!

STUFF LIKE COOKING CAN'T REALLY BE TAUGHT TO A CLASS OF KIDS. LIKE, IT DOESN'T WORK. WE HAD ALL KINDS OF COOKING LESSONS AND I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING. I LEARNT TO COOK NATURALLY AS AN ADULT - IT'S A NATURAL THING THAT YOU DON'T NEED TO BE TAUGHT. BUT PYTHAGORAS TOTALLY NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT, YO, BECAUSE YOU AREN'T LIKELY TO THINK OF IT AS YOU'RE GOING ABOUT YOUR DAILY BUSINESS!

I DON'T THINK I WOULD HAVE LIKED LESSONS ON HOW TO APPLY FOR A MORTGAGE - IT WOULD HAVE MADE IT SEEM FAR MORE COMPLICATED THAN IT REALLY IS, JUST LIKE COOKING LESSONS. GOSH, LIKE, I TOTALLY ENJOYED LEARNING ACADEMIC STUFF THAT HAS NO RELEVANCE TO REAL LIFE! ;D