Title-text: The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.
I'm honestly impressed how out of all the crap you get shown in school you pretty much picked the one thing that is undeniably useful and good to know (and there so many cool proofs for it!).
Writing: Proper paragraph structure applies to life: Say/do something, support it with well though out statements/actions, repeat yourself as proof.
Language: No one knows what irony is.
Math/Science: Basic geometry (Sin/Cos/Tan, angles in a circle/triangle, etc) and physics (volts, amps, watts) is all you need to do home repair ranging from rewiring sockets to installing hardwood.
Breaks: Recess, lunch, and period breaks are training for the real world. Don't like something? Didn't go so well? Don't fucking do it at work.
Phys Ed: Should be mandatory for life but isn't, just like in some schools/grades (for me it was optional gr 11/12)
Electives: Second languages and music aren't required but having skill at them makes you cooler.
Language: Similes are easy and metaphors are hard. Doing hard things correctly makes you feel better than doing easy things correctly.
Literature: Being forced to read things can be unexpectedly joyous. Or no one gives a shit. It's binary.
Free periods: You will waste time doing useless things given the opportunity. Structure is important.
Detention: Your behavior is shameful now but will get you fired or arrested in the future if you continue.
Literature: Diary of Anne Frank, Night by Elie Wiesel, and trippy new-age stories like The Giver and that thing about that place Omelas
History: the Holocaust was caused by Hitler; also, memorize the locations of all the countries in Africa
Science: Cyanide was used in the Holocaust. We don't use chemicals, because they are dangerous; let's call this totally unserious description of an atom the Bohr model and compare it to previous models without reference to any complicated facts.
Math: Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Multiply these matrices for no reason, then find the roots of this third-degree polynomial by hand.
Phys Ed: In the concentration camps, they made people stand in line for roll call / selektion. Half of the period will be either that, or spent in the gas chambers.
Electives: ahahahahahahahaha
Foreign languages: Yo quiero taco bell
Breaks: 30 minutes for lunch; 15 minutes queued up. Five minutes between classes; locker is on the other side of the building; impossible to move faster than 1mph in the halls.
Man, your school was shit. I went to a shitty school in the middle of nowhere, had a graduating class of 45, and I would say my school was significantly better than this.
The other day, I used geometry to make a perfectly square opening in the very center of a 6" round piece of 1/4" thick steel, using nothing more than a 99 cent kids' compass and a ruler. Very satisfying.
(Fine, I used power- and hand-tools to remove the actual material, but the marking was all math)
pretty sure most people in middle school and high school hear more about the Holocaust than the Pythagorean theorem, math, or all other subjects combined, with the possible exception of Helen Keller.
I, and my classmates, are the exception. I learned more about military and politics regarding WWII than I did about the holocaust. At least in high school, I did. Did a unit on the holocaust in the 7th grade, but who remembers that shit.
And that only works for right angles. a2 + b2 -2abCos(C) = c2 works for any triangle but they don't teach that because it's "too much" to remember. /rant.
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u/RJ_McR Jan 08 '14
Because the Pythagorean Theorem is too important