What were you taught poorly at school?

[Spinneret]

History not enough range

 

[tvguy]

Geometry. Had a very impatient teacher who was just calling it in and refused to help students who needed it.

 

[rangerxenos]

History, none of my high school classes made it very far into the 20th century back in the 80s!

 

[RUDisney]

History

I agree with @rangerxenos. We never even got up to WW1 in our history classes in HS.

The classes were droning and boring. I truly don't understand why we had to memorize dates throughout history. While it's important to know that the magna carta was the basis on which all future constitutions were written, we were forced to memorize the year that it was signed. I had no idea why the magna carta was significant, other than it was old., I learned its true meaning as an adult. I know that it was written in the 1200s, but I couldn't tell you which year.

I felt that history was taught so poorly in HS that I opted to take 2 years of Ancient Greek instead of history. I can still bless myself and recite the first 4 lines of the Odyssey in Greek. Quite useless trivia in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

 

[TippyThomas]

We were only expected to go through to 8th grade in my community school and there wasn't much, if any, government involvement in the program, so the teachers were less than qualified in most cases. I'd say I was taught most things pretty poorly.

 

[BlueStarryHat]

English in high school. The teacher would put these terrible Shakespeare albums on with really hammy actors, and then she'd just sit at her desk. Afterwards, she was always surprised that we weren't soaking it up.

 

[mylilnikita]

Home Ec. But to be fair we had 3 different teachers that year. The first teacher was retiring and didn’t give a dang.
The second one came in and was intimidated by some of the students for months.

The last one came in and was like well year almost over lol.

We learned how to make Mac and cheese from the box.

 

[SandyinMonterey]

In 4th grade, my math teacher taught us how to play chess than learn Math. So much so that practically the whole class attended summer school.

 

[sailorstitch]

Another for history.

I kid you not, I've learned more about American history from American Girl books than I ever learned in school.

Especially the history of non-white Americans. My school's idea of black history was using February to teach us about the Civil War. I had no clue that there were free people of color before the Civil War until American Girl released a doll of one.

Before I was even out of elementary school I was fed up with the format. We started with Columbus "discovering" American and worked our way up to the "important" wars (Civil/WWI/WWII). Absolutely NOTHING after WWII. When I was in high school I had a teacher that told us on the first day that we were going to start with the 1970s and work our way backwards. I was so excited to learn something new. Unfortunately he didn't actually teach us anything. He sent us to the library and told to do a report on somebody from the 70s. No guidance. No parameters. No list of important people from that decade to choose from. Any living breathing adult would do. I could've done a report on my mom and he wouldn't have cared. What was teach doing? Well he was also the basketball coach. He staid in the classroom so he could watch tapes of the previous night's game. Because preparing for the next game was more important than teaching history.

 

[georgina]

Physics. Catholic all-girls high school, had a great chemistry teacher, so-so calculus, but some of the kids in our physics class had not had trigonometry so there was a lot of basic stuff we didn't learn. Got to college in an engineering school and was WAY behind in physics, took a long time to get up to speed.

 

[superme80]

English and history. My English teacher in 7th grade was a worse speller than I was! My 8th grade teacher did not want to be there. We also never got past WW2 in history. Our history books weren't very good either.

 

[MIGrandma]

Algebra, had the worst teacher. If you didn’t understand it, he wouldn’t help you, always just told you that “you missed the boat.”

 

[Gracedis1]

Geography. There is a joke about Texans thinking their state is the center of the universe. I didn't know where any of the northeast US states were. Now I love learning about geography and read my atlas just for fun!

 

[Colleen27]

History, for sure. Our district liked to avoid controversy with parents/families so American history more or less ended with WWII. After that was just a short run-through of the presidents and a few notable moments (the Kennedy assassination, Apollo landing, Watergate), with no mention of minor events like the civil rights movement or the Vietnam war. This was in the 90s.

 

[momz]

I feel that my high school experience was excellent.

Now, my kids... Oh my. I will say they were not taught well at all. They are both in college now. But as I look back, when we started them out in school, I had no idea how much it had changed since I was a kid. It's become so cookie cutter and impersonal now. I will say that they were not taught (at school) interpersonal skills, executive functioning skills (like how to organize time to get a project completed), and life skills like budgeting, job application and interviewing skills, etc.

What they actually learned is that school is a competition...everything about it is competitive. I hated this for them. I will tell you....they never "won" anything. But they had the joy of seeing the same kids get accolades after accolades. While lots of other "good" kids looked on. They learned that accolades mean nothing, they are not worth anything to anybody except the recipient. And really how does this help the kids who constantly get these awards? It prepares them to think they are better than everyone else...big surprise coming up for them when they discover they're not actually special.

My opinion of school is in no way reflective of teachers, but of the educational "system". I feel that kids coming out of high school are not prepared for the real world at all, no matter where they fall in ranks, the ones who got the awards and the ones who did not. It's all such a waste of childhood.

If I had to it do to all over.... I would make a different choice on where they attended.

 

[disneyseniors]

History

I agree with @rangerxenos. We never even got up to WW1 in our history classes in HS.

The classes were droning and boring. I truly don't understand why we had to memorize dates throughout history. While it's important to know that the magna carta was the basis on which all future constitutions were written, we were forced to memorize the year that it was signed. I had no idea why the magna carta was significant, other than it was old., I learned its true meaning as an adult. I know that it was written in the 1200s, but I couldn't tell you which year.

I felt that history was taught so poorly in HS that I opted to take 2 years of Ancient Greek instead of history. I can still bless myself and recite the first 4 lines of the Odyssey in Greek. Quite useless trivia in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

I agree completely about history!
I had a very boring, quiet talking, non demonstrative teacher who was a hundred years old, LOL.
Actually, he taught my Dad in high school. Apparently he kept on teaching after I left! He never made it interesting, just quietly talked. I didn't learn a thing about history in that class and I never liked history because of it.
My class was after lunch, so his monotone teaching about put me to sleep

 

[disneyseniors]

This is about my granddaughters "teacher" this year in high school.
She signed up for a needed health related class, can't remember what it was called?
The first day, the teacher came into the room singing in Spanish. She then proceeded to teach the students SPANISH!!! This was not a Spanish class - far from it.
The next day she did the same thing, insisting the students learn Spanish. She danced around and sang!
The next day every one of her students dropped the class. I'm sure she was fired, or maybe hired for Spanish, LOL, I don't know. It was just weird.

 

[Kathryn Merteuil]

My initial response would be math.... but I don't know if my teachers were bad, or I was just that dumb.

 

[CGB]

Totally agree about history and I loved the subject. My dad encouraged my interest. I can't remember anything I learned in my high school history classes.

And I try my best as a history teacher to not repeat it. My next lesson includes Reagan & Desert Storm. We definitely make our way through the decades.

 

[chrisney]

Teacher here...I would say Math. Most other subjects if you miss something, you miss it and it doesn't have an effect on your overall understanding and capability Math is like building a wall--enough bricks missing and the whole thing tumbles down. Math education suffers horribly from the "this is how you do" a skill orientation. It NEEDS a "this is why you do" approach. I remember teaching algebra to learning disabled kids; writing an X on the board and asking what it meant. No clue. I did the same thing when the school experimented with creating a class with both "my kids" and a few jocks, and poms and cool kids. Same reaction. They didn't identify it as one X, define whether it was positive or negative, or anything. Just X.
That is both poor training and poor teaching.