Most useless things taught in grade school

[May0]

Cursive handwriting.

I remember the teachers wagging their fingers "You need to learn cursive, you're going to need it when you're an adult!" "You're going to need it when you get into college!" "You're going to need it to pass high school!"


Apart from signing my name there is absolutely no use whatsoever for cursive handwriting. If you're a doctor that writes prescriptions you'll need it a little bit. Apart from that there is no use for it.

I didn't use cursive past grade school and it was never required for any higher education.


Unless you're really into calligraphy don't even bother with it. Learn to sign your name and you're set. Even then you can usually just scribble a mess of loops and no one will care.

What could possibly be more useless than cursive? I submit before you nothing

[AC9breaker]

My hands are tied,
but my eyes are now open.

[Scrub]

Hahahaha fuck cursive. My grandmother and her one friend I am friends with occasionally write me letters from home, and trying to decipher fucking CURSIVE to figure out what theyre saying is a god damn chore.

BTW I can't really even sign my name I just kind of wing it and everyone goes with it.

[Zeota]

Yeah, fuck cursive up its ass till it bleeds! Had that shit drilled into my head in 3rd grade. Reinforced by my dad once telling me that "only babies print." I had a science teacher in high school that gave tests that were all essay questions and you had to write your answers in cursive. I'm like "Oh shit! Been a while since I've written like this!" At least I could still clearly communicate what I needed to.

About the only time I ever use it nowadays is to sign my name.

My dad's a teacher and still has his students write some things in cursive. While I do feel it's antiquated as cardinal sin, kids should be exposed to it at least once if only for historical purposes. As a sort of "this is how some people choose to write" kind of thing.

[Retehi]

In 4th grade, we had a teacher that would purposely give us bad grades on report card day, if we didn't write in cursive, and put a god damn note on it for our parents saying "Your son/daughter needs to learn cursive!"

A few of us started rebelling, writing strictly in print, 'till we got detention for being smartasses by writing our numbers in cursive.

God she was an enormous bitch looking back at it now, hope that old phogey is long gone by now.

[Outrider]

Man, I can read cursive just fine but I haven't been able to write it since early high school.

I remember when I took the SATs, we had to hand-write a paragraph in our books stating that we wouldn't cheat or anything like that. We had to do it in script for some bizarre reason. Our testing aide literally had to write the paragraph in script on the chalkboard because so few of us could remember how to write in script.

This was like ten years ago! I can only imagine how it is these days considering even more school work is done on computers.

[Akaimizu]

Well, I think they make it worth it if only because Signatures need to be in cursive. I actually remember learning cursive before even being taught it. It was mostly due to the classroom wallpaper. Near the ceiling, the entire ordered alphabet was shown in cursive. So as a see-do kind of thing, I started to copy what I saw.

One of the most confusing things taught in grade school is the i before e except after c. Always taught close to the time you learn the spelling for possessives. Ones like "Their". The correct spelling. There's no 'c' there. And other words like Achieve. (But I thought there was a 'c' there.) Now one could change it to "i before e except *right* after c" but then the first example still doesn't fall in, nor does agencies, ancient, (or something a grade-schooler would already know "science"), any words that end with -ciest like spiciest, and the like. There's more than 500+ words in the english language, that break that rule. A good number of them you learn before college due to word endings.

Needless to say, I always had a confusion about that rule and how well does it stick. Seems a lot of people end up spelling things wrong because they aren't sure of the spelling and fall back to that rule.

[Zeota]

I remember when I took the SATs, we had to hand-write a paragraph in our books stating that we wouldn't cheat or anything like that. We had to do it in script for some bizarre reason. Our testing aide literally had to write the paragraph in script on the chalkboard because so few of us could remember how to write in script.

I had to do something like that in college before taking a similar exam.

Another thing I found useless, albeit past grade school - algebra. Fucking fuck algebra. I always had the worst time with that shit, even in college.

[Shadownami92]

I don't know about you guys. But I remember in grade school that we had to learn how to write checks in the correct format in the 1st grade. I'm pretty sure by the time you get a bank account and a checkbook, your not going to remember what you learned in 1st grade.

Also throughout different years of grade school, we learned about the Civil Was 3 times, and the Revolutionary War 2 times.

Seems a bit over excessive to me. Couldn't they just teach it once and get on with teaching more important things?

Oh and of course there is the large amounts of busy work. Teachers say "You are going to have to do this sort of thing in high school!" And once you get to High School it's a lot easier then they say, and then high school is like "You have to do this in college!" and then college is even easier then what they said in high school overall since the college professors don't wanna grade busy work.

[Zeota]

Checks in 1st grade!? Jeez! Teach 'em early I guess.

As for the American revolution and the civil war, I think I've dealt with those at least 5 or 6 times from 1st grade to high school.