Most Useless subject from School

Blisterman

So, a lot of people here have been out of school, for a good few years. I've been out 3 now, come June. Looking back, some of the subjects, (i.e. business and French) have had some use in the real world. But a lot of them have not.
What do you guys think was the most useless subject you learned in school?

For myself, I would have said Irish, but I think, an even more useless subject, was geography. It could be a useful subject, but the problem with Leaving cert geography, is how specific and esoteric it is. I know how ox bow lakes are formed, and I know all about the fishing and gas industries of Norway, and yet I couldn't tell you the capitals of many European countries. It has not come in useful once. Even Norwegian people don't care.

wingnut

WHen you see some of the LC curriculum you have to wonder why ICT, soon to be compulsory at KS3 and 4 in the UK is still not a subject choice in Ireland. Seeing as much of Ireland is now dependant on Tech jobs we are really not making it easy on ourselves.

whiskeyman

English.
I meen, I kan spel purfactlee...

I guess it depends what your future career was. Geologists etc... might have found geograpghy useful (even thought I doubt there's many geologists out there). Irish was a total waste of time for me. Moreso for the length of time spent trying to learn it and not to be able to talk it proper now, and having no reason to either. Learnt far more french in half the time...

GLaDOS

Irish, defo

aidan_walsh

Nothing was useless. They all served to get me into the college course I wanted.

LadyJ

Geography, Irish, home economics(social and scientific) and most of the maths course.

zuutroy

Technical Drawing. Utterly pointless, but I loved it.

lemansky

English.Absolutely

Dave!

What ever happened to education for education's sake?!

R0ot

IT, I mean seriously wtf was the ECDL ment to help me with? :rolleyes:

Ruu_Old

zuutroy wrote:

Technical Drawing. Utterly pointless, but I loved it.

I would go for this as well and also those t-squares were deadly for giving someone a belt on the arse *smack*.

Red Hand

Irish and Business. Most of us don't speak the former now that we are adults and the latter is largely common sense.

Holsten

Irish, totally useless.

Hagar

Religion (a long time ago). It got equal class time with every other subject.
Un-Christian Brother School.:mad:

Zaph

DaveMcG wrote:

What ever happened to education for education's sake?!

Down with this sort of thing!

For me it has to be maths. I haven't been asked to prove Pythagorus' theorem once since I left school over 20 years ago. Nor have I had need to use a quadratic equation at any stage. I can do sums in my head though, so maybe it wasn't a complete waste.

Chemistry is another pointless one. I only chose it because it was the least bad of the options available to me, but I really don't care too much what happens when I add hydrogen thingy to sodium whatchamacallit.

monkeyfudge

Come on people... Surely nothing can be more useless than religion?

Zaph

Hagar wrote:

Religion ( a long time ago). It got equal class time with every other subject.
Un-Christian Brother School.:mad:

I got kicked out of religion class regularly for questioning the existence of God. For some reason the Christian Brothers took a dim view of this sort of thing.

monkeyfudge

PE was an utter waste of time as well.

eamoss

zuutroy wrote:

Technical Drawing. Utterly pointless, but I loved it.

Same. Loved the subject but have I used it since I left school(well it hasnt even been a year since I left school) No!

Also Geography never used it outside school tho that is mainly down to me doing a Computer Sci degree. But in saying that I did get a B2 at HL

zuutroy

Ruu wrote:

those t-squares were deadly for giving someone a belt on the arse *smack*.

A guy got thrown out of our school for doing a 'Last of the Mohicans' style attack on another guy and splitting his head open.

OPENROAD

Has to be Irish.

zuutroy

eamoss wrote:

Also Geography never used it outside school tho that is mainly down to me doing a Computer Sci degree. But in saying that I did get a B2 at HL

I think Geography is good general knowledge

Little-Devil

I also think Technical Drawing was useless as was Art. I knew from the start i was no Michael Angelo and so did my art teacher. I still passed it in the Leaving Cert tho :-)

zuutroy

Little-Devil wrote:

I also think Technical Drawing was useless as was Art. I knew from the start i was no Michael Angelo and so did my art teacher. I still passed it in the Leaving Cert tho :-)

I'm convinced

cson

Well in fairness I presume your leaving certificate contributed to you getting jobs in one form or another So in that case those subjects weren't useless after all...

Dord

R0ot wrote:

IT, I mean seriously wtf was the ECDL ment to help me with? :rolleyes:

I know, tell me about it!

The teacher that was "teaching" us that ECDL sh!te knew less than me.

But i think the most useless subject was Religion. I know it wasn't in the LC but still, it was crap. What a load of bollix. :mad:

rannerap

history:rolleyes: i could feel all the information just leaving my head as i walked out of the exam center after the leaving cert exam

Wertz

monkeyfudge wrote:

Come on people... Surely nothing can be more useless than religion?

I dunno, it was handy for doing last night's Irish homework for the next class.

I think any of the older people here will recall much longer hours of religious study than ones only out of school a few years. Precious learning time wasted....the same can be said of communion, confirmation and everything else so much schoolime seemed to have been wasted on and that (IMO) is all but utterly useless to me now...

aidan_walsh

monkeyfudge wrote:

PE was an utter waste of time as well.

We had a great fella for that one year. Used to drive from the staff room to the gym, before making us run laps.

Doomspell

For me it was Irish, maths, history and religion.. just why!

Stabshauptmann

Religion; twas totally pointless. Now a good philosophy course (with bits from the various religious philosophies as well as secular) that I'd appreciate. But classes on the Popes view on marriage and sex. Seriously, what are you at.

CSPE. Again, potential, but no substance to the course.

Biology. that has proved useless to me. I have used my JC science knowledge a bit but the extra depth I learned for LC hsa either been useless or forgotten (and I got A2 Higher level).

All the others Ive used.

I have used irish while on holidays. Its useful for private conversations and impressing some people.
English, so so important. I just laugh at all the people who once they leave primary school dont need a dictionary any more.
French, week in france and two francophone g/f's
Math, I've a career in finance, its made me more logical, and I enjoy a small bit of programming. Very useful for me
Accounting, hated it. Ive done 8 years of accounting at this stage. But obviously I'll need it.
Ditto for business. Jeremiah 16:1 you're a tool, theres no such thing as common sense. How would you know what act says what unless someone told you?

Stabshauptmann

And how could you not love PE. Mens sano in corpore sano

Muineach

Am I the only one ever to have done "Agricultural Science" ?

I had a choice of honour's History or honours Ag.Science so I thought I'd have to remember stuff for History, but for Ag. Science I was up against 1,000 farmer kids so I went for the Ag.Science

Had to laugh at the poor kids doing the history, I had to do a project to see if worms would have a difference on how well potatoes grew, yep, and this counted for 25% of the final LC result for Ag.Science
and one more thing, its counted as a science subject for the LC hahahahahaha

Zaph

Little-Devil wrote:

I also think Technical Drawing was useless as was Art. I knew from the start i was no Michael Angelo and so did my art teacher. I still passed it in the Leaving Cert tho :-)

I have the distinction of being so bad I failed Art for my Inter Cert (for all you young folk, that's what we had before this fancy Junior Cert yoke). Needless to say I didn't do it for my leaving.

paperclip

German. I'm doing pharmacy so I use all the science subjects in my course and I used to go to NCAD so the art came in handy there.

Also, I'm a pretty good cook and seamstress- that'll be the Home Ec working.

However, EVERY time I run into a German, their english is pretty darn near perfect. It would appear I need to specifically go to a little town in the middle of a german speaking nation in order to use it.

Also, meine Grammatik ware furchtbar!

70s

OPENROAD wrote:

Has to be Irish.

Well, i speak it every day so it wasn't useless to me.
History was a waste of time. What's the point in learning things that happened in the past?

cson

70s wrote:

What's the point in learning things that happened in the past?

Learn from mistakes perhaps?

70s

cson wrote:

Learn from mistakes perhaps?

Yes, but why force us to learn it in class - surely if we want to learn it, we should have the choice to pick up a book and read about it in our own time. Anyway, I got an E in my InterCert.

r3nu4l

cson wrote:

Well in fairness I presume your leaving certificate contributed to you getting jobs in one form or another So in that case those subjects weren't useless after all...

Hmm, the question was about the most useless subject from school, not the leaving cert! No religion and PE didn't help me get any of my jobs tbh! :rolleyes:

I'm a practicing Roman Catholic but religion was never taught in my secondary school and in Primary school it was only taught from a Catholic point of view. Total waste of time.

As for PE...a total load of crap! Until Inter Cert we 'played' either basketball, soccer, rugby, football or hurling in a mostly unsupervised manner or at least with little interaction from our PE 'teachers'. After the Inter Cert we were allowed to play either bowling, pool or go swimming, completely unsupervised and with no checks from our 'teachers'. As a result, of the 90 guys supposedly doing PE on Friday after lunch about 4 of us did! Total waste of time!

PE and religion, what a waste of time when I could have been learning how to start my own business! That was 16 years ago so maybe things have changed but back then it was crap!

zuutroy

70s wrote:

What's the point in learning things that happened in the past?

Thats a comment I'd expect from a teenager or a troll.

cson

r3nu4l wrote:

Hmm, the question was about the most useless subject from school, not the leaving cert! No religion and PE didn't help me get any of my jobs tbh! :rolleyes:

You coulda been going for the priesthood Then it would have helped.

Religion is an examinable subject at leaving cert these days for those of you of a certain vintage for whom it wasn't.

r3nu4l

cson wrote:

You coulda been going for the priesthood Then it would have helped.

Yeah but I wasn't!!! Ergo, the piss-poor/lack of 'teaching' of the subject meant it was useless.

cson wrote:

Religion is an examinable subject at leaving cert these days for those of you of a certain vintage for whom it wasn't.

Yeah but it wasn't then...going to show that unless there is some accountability for all teachers then some will do absolutely nothing. Scandalous in a profession that is supposed to be 'educating the future leaders of the country'.

I'm glad to see that the laziest of these teachers won't be getting away with it anymore!

/Until it becomes easier to sack the deadweight teachers there will always be piss-poor teachers. In any other job the same performance would have these people on the dole-queue and rightly so!

Feral Mutant

Irish, hands down. I will never use it again and no, it didn't help me for points, it was my worst subject. If it was counted in my points it just would've dragged them down.

r3nu4l wrote:

After the Inter Cert we were allowed to play either bowling, pool or go swimming, completely unsupervised and with no checks from our 'teachers'.

You got to go bowling for PE? I officially hate you now.

projectmayhem

hang on, from the title of this thread i am to assume there were useful subjects in school?!

cson

Jesus teaching is a great job! Once you actually get a foothold in a school its fairly impossible to get fired no matter how bad you are. You get off early in the afternoons, summers off, you can do grinds for extra cash, get paid €30,000 a year or more (im not sure exactly so excuse my ignorance of the payscales)

Aisling(",)

higher level maths has to be one of the most useful things invented.......im conviced pythagorus was having a laugh....n da sin rule...never going to need it!!

gahhhhh.....maths is the bane of my school days!

little miss

Chemistry... I have never had to use any of that information again. And since I've forgotten it all now, I know I never will!

r3nu4l

Feral Mutant wrote:

You got to go bowling for PE? I officially hate you now.

Unsupervised and we had to pay for it ourselves...hence nobody went (I did play pool once or twice over the 2 years after the Inter Cert.

A few years later I got some bowling lessons because at that time a 1 hour lane lesson was cheaper than a 1 hour lane session so it made financial sense to a poor student. Hence I'm not a bad bowler now and love it as a sport as well as a recreational activity.

Devon

It would be a two horse race between history and irish... with history winning by a photo finish.

Blisterman wrote:

So, a lot of people here have been out of school, for a good few years. I've been out 3 now, come June. Looking back, some of the subjects, (i.e. business and French) have had some use in the real world. But a lot of them have not.
What do you guys think was the most useless subject you learned in school?

For myself, I would have said Irish, but I think, an even more useless subject, was geography. It could be a useful subject, but the problem with Leaving cert geography, is how specific and esoteric it is. I know how ox bow lakes are formed, and I know all about the fishing and gas industries of Norway, and yet I couldn't tell you the capitals of many European countries. It has not come in useful once. Even Norwegian people don't care.

Diarmsquid

Leaving Cert Honours Maths is soul-destroying. It's not my weakest subject, but everything I take in, I know will never serve any use for me at all at all after my Leaving Cert.

Never will I be required to find the second dirivitave of a curve, or know that sin2A = 2.sinA.cosA

And yet we spend 2 years, 6 maths classes a week learning it.

Donald-Duck

Diarmsquid wrote:

Leaving Cert Honours Maths is soul-destroying. It's not my weakest subject, but everything I take in, I know will never serve any use for me at all at all after my Leaving Cert.

Never will I be required to find the second dirivitave of a curve, or know that sin2A = 2.sinA.cosA

And yet we spend 2 years, 6 maths classes a week learning it.

It teaches you problem solving, tedious problem solving at times.