You know when you think about your school days and you just wish you could go back and tell younger you, ‘honestly, dude, it doesn’t matter’?
While there’s obviously all the social advice like ‘avoid that douche, Tristan, he’s a total loser’ and ‘no, experimenting with fake tan right before your formal is not a good idea’, there’s also all the academic stuff that we used to fret over.
Do you remember the days of trying to perfect Pythagoras Theorem, or recite actual Shakespeare? Yep, same. And has it come in handy, I ask? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
And, you know what? Sometimes we even called it at the time. I vividly remember kids asking our maths teacher, ‘Miss, when will we actually use this in real life?’ and she couldn’t even answer it. Pah – we knew it.
In tribute to your younger self, here are a load of things you totally learnt at school that have been useless as an adult:
1. Remembering SOH CAH TOA
Sine, cosine, tan? What an absolute joke that was. In fact, that trig stuff is so damn useless, I’ve completely erased it from my memory as a sort of survival mechanism. Putting the ‘trig’ in ‘triggered’, if you ask me.
2. Making punnet squares
I think I can safely say that no respectable adult is working out the inheritance patterns of their traits over family dinner.
3. Learning how to make dioramas
These were kinda fun but, despite how long you spent on it, it always looked like a load of greasy paper stuck together with the wrong glue. Also, totally useless IRL.
4. Making potato batteries
I have no idea why we turned potatoes into batteries – if it helped cook them, maybe that would’ve been useful, but alas. All I remember is people pinching each other with those funky crocodile clips.
5. Mastering long division
Bahahahahahaha. Good one, pass me the damn phone.
6. Learning how to play the recorder
Great for ‘woe is me’ stories, useless for everyday life. It’s not even like the skill is transferrable to something like the flute which, granted, still ain’t super helpful, but still.
7. Reciting the Periodic Table
Well, that’s a few months of my life that I’ll never get back.
8. Drawing box and whisker plots
Box and what plots? Exactly. Legit just think our teachers made this crap up to keep us busy. It was… successful.
9. Writing poetry
Writing them, reciting them. You name it, utterly redundant.
10. Conducting dissections
Unless you’re planning on turning into a fully fledged serial killer with a penchant for decapitation, I’d venture to say that this sadistic crap was also wholly unnecessary.
11. Finding metaphors in books
You know what would’ve been useful? Looking for sarcasm in texts. The real world application of that is significant.
What if we told you there’s somewhere where you can actually learn all those super duper useful life skills, like how to network and resolve conflict in their Business course, or about the future of content creation in Digital Media? What about learning to tell other people’s stories in an in-depth Journalism course, or managing stakeholders in Advertising? Y’know, useful stuff.
Macleay College is currently offering a slew of courses on exactly this kind of thing, so jump on over to their website for more info on how to acquire skills you’ll actually use in life.
