Worst subject in school?

It was maths and PE.

Edited by Snow Dog - April 16 2012 at 07:56

I joined my colleagues in celebrating not doing math after the 10th grade through bacchanalian festivities, burnings of the manuals and quickly forgetting everything we ever learned. 

I guess math, I had to take it twice. Right now I am doing Chinese Language which is quite hard, but the teacher goes easy on me.

I also had to take Human Communications twice. And I managed to avoid doing languages until now.


I am a history major and those things don't really enter into it, you wouldn't think.

I did very poor in spelling and geography. They both seemed to be pretty pointless and dull subjects to me. There's no substance to them. Subjects which do not penetrate simple rote memorization of arbitrary facts carry no importance to me still.

PyramidMeetsTheEye wrote: why the f**k will i need an freaking linear function?

I don't know, probably to understand anything in modern life. If you're going to be ignorant about something, at least have valid reasons for it instead of inane cliches devoid of any truth.

That's the more fundamental issue. There's a bit of apocrypha about Euclid which I always tell on the first day of the math courses I teach.

As it goes, a youth had just begun to study with Euclid. He had just learned Euclid's first theorem, which proves it is possible to produce an equilateral triangle from a given line. He asked Euclid, " What shall I get by learning these things?"

Euclid called for a slave and commanded, "Give him three-pence since he must make a gain of what he earns.", then he dismissed him from his tutelage.

Ha, I knew it would be math before I even opened this. However, when I was young I did hate math, but I believe that was more because of the way I was taught. For some reason my school used these textbooks called Saxon math, and when I opened one as an adult I thought it was the most deeply stupid way to organize a math course possible. They tried to be "cumulative", so they would introduce a concept in one chapter but then only have 3 problems about that concept, the rest of it was stuff from before. So you had to keep doing the same sh*t over and over again through the whole year. The headmaster was a brilliant mathematician, I don't know why he loved them so much. Also early math is much less interesting (even if much more concretely useful, obviously). 

I hated languages at school.  I now think it was the teaching to a certain extent.  I still get nightmares over doing French in the Language Lab!  Basically listening to tapes and repeating or answering q's.  You never knew if the teacher was listening in!  Torture.

Its not that I would say "what's the point of math," "What's the point of language" but they are difficult subjects that may not be worth teaching everyone, except in general.

I had to take

Elementary School Math
Middle School Math
High School Math
College Math:
Level 1: Intro To Math (Tested Above [Miracle])
Level 2: Intro To Math 2 (Tested Above [Miracle])
Level 3: Intermediate Algebra (Took twice, Passed)
Level 4: Survey Of Mathematics (Passed)
Level 5-> not required for me
Hopefully no more

But that is a F LOAD of math. I don't need to know that much about the subject, and the end result is that I don't know, because I forget.

And in terms of basic decision making and judgement in non-scientific fields and among those just wanting an associates degree, such an extensive familiarity with math should not be a requirement, whether or not it could possibly be valuable in rounding out such decision making and judgement.
 

The T wrote: I was in a German School (again, not only for Germans) in Quito and I had to take chemistry in German. That was a total nightmare.

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