I was just thinking while reading this thread that apart from sciences which I detested at school.... my other pet hate was geography. it didn't help our Geography teacher was an archetypal tweed jacket, corduroy trousered wearing bore... so I paid little attention at school..I'd never travelled outside of Scotland, so I had no interest in the far east..or the rest of the European union ( of which we were not a member in those days) ..apart from a tiny interest in Canada because I had/have relatives there, I would have been more than happy to never have a geography class again, or look at a world map!! Well , today I'm so far removed from that young person, simply because I have travelled so much and lived and worked in various countries, spent a lot of time with the locals, learned a little of 3 languages, taken vacations in any more too ... over the years... and I would go probably as far as to say that if I take part in quizzes in pubs or clubs, or even playing a board game that has multiple choice questions...geography is one of my top choices of category!!
What did i learn in school that is still useful..................thinking................maybe i'll go over to Senior Moments, and see if i can spark some memory.
Hmm-----I think just about everything I learned in school is still useful, to me, in some ways. Taken as a complete body of knowledge, my formal education served to open my mind to considering new subjects, new ideas, I had previously not been exposed to. That taught me to delve into new subjects, along with the new experiences those subjects opened up to me, long after I left the cloistered halls of academia. There is no class I regret taking, even the few, in college, that I dropped after the first four weeks. They, too, taught me things, albeit about lousy professors and their terrible lack of teaching smarts and their lack of organizational skills. Yeah, no regrets. I like learning, to this day, and I thank my many, many instructors for instilling that pro-learning drive in me, along with thanking my first teacher, my Mom!
What I am hearing you say, is that even the things that were not specifically useful to you in life, were things that opened your mind to the habit of learning for the sake of learning. That is what my mother taught me when I was little, as well; so even though not all of the information that I learned in school has been important in my life, I believe that developing the habit of studying and learning something, with an open mind to gain new knowledge, has been one of the most important things that has helped me in life.
For me it's math that I most apply in my adult life. The gap I have yet to remediate and that bothers me the most is history.
That's exactly right. The most important thing is learning how to learn, or developing the desire to learn.
Some of it is elementary like reading and math. Over all though, subjects you like or dislike should give you an inkling as to what your future career path should point to. Subjects presented are a smorgasbord of choices.
I was going to say the pythagorean theorem, in addition to multiplication tables. I recently plowed a large garden (25' x 35') and wanted to make sure the fence posts were set up to form a rectangle, so I calculated the hypotenuse in my head to true up the corners. I did not "just do it." It took a bit of frustrating mental trial & error. But I was determined that I was not going to go inside and use a spreadsheet, calculator, or pad & pencil. Area of the circle is handy if you want to calculate the "per square inch" price different in sizes of pizza. I stopped buying "Medium" and now freeze leftovers from "Large." Also necessary if you cook and want to convert a rectangular product into a circle of a certain diameter (as I did with a Parkerhouse Roll recipe, fashioned as crescents.) If only I had the same retention of history...