What's one thing you never understood in school?

[Saucycarpdog]

Whether it be quadratic equations or the human blood system or the writing of shakspeare, everyone has one thing they never really understood in school. We all have our weaknesses in certain school subjects.

So fellow escapists, what was yours?

 

[Hashime]

Weakness in a subject? Yes, but aside from the very advanced physics my profs do I have a pretty firm grasp of what is going on.

 

[Vault101]

why cant I chew gum? or eat....I'd concentrate on whats going on if I could eat somthing right now

snip.

I think if you liked drama memorzing line is easy (and fun) hell I was always prompting the other kids when we did plays

(and then the fucking cultral wasteland of a rural school stoped us doing plays..the assholes)

 

[Strain42]

Why my second grade teacher made me feel funny in my pants.

...I mean looking back on it, NOW it makes perfect sense but it didn't when I was 7.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

What was considered good drama. It all looked pretty narm-tastic to me.

 

[Talshere]

I didnt and still dont really get English. I understand the writing and I understand things like shakespere but then they make you analyse all these poems and crap. Now I get where they were going with this but I ask myself if realistically what Im interpreting this to mean was really what they, the auther, was writing down.

For comparison for my GCSE (16 year olds exams in the UK) I wrote a creative writing piece that was just under an A4 page. Despite being an average student in English I have an exceptional vocabulary doubly so at my 16 years and I aced this piece and get an A for it. Read back the comments were eye-opening into how pointless this is.

There was a list of all my teachers interpretations of my words and how well I had tied together these ideas. You know why I picked those words? They were beautiful to me. If flowed, it sounded nice and it made sense. So I wrote. Existentially the piece was about not getting to lost in modern living and taking the time to lose yourself in fantasy occasionally. But even at the time I didnt really know this and my teachers interpretations of some of what I had written were just complete bull, I hadnt meant that at all. It just sounded good.

Up till that point I though it was circumstantial and a little stupid. After that I KNEW it was pointless. Ultimately a story is individual to whoever is reading it. My English teachers tried to make me pin a specific meaning on a phrase or sentence when in truth the author probably meant nothing like that and it certainly means something different to me.

 

[Loop Stricken]

Cracking hydrocarbons. As interested as I was in Science, whenever that topic came up, and it came up at least twice, my brain just shut off.

Shakespeare I wasn't so good at either, largely because I just didn't care. I used to think I would read anything, then I took an arrow in the knee tried reading Shakespeare. Oh, and the Bible. Both a load of waffling guff.

 

[Pimppeter2]

The appeal of sports?

[sup]Oops, no, might need the flame shield for that one.[/sup]

.

Yes, In a video game forum occupied by nerds. *shakes head*

OT: Sig Figs in Chemistry. Never made any sense to me at all. Plus the teacher had a vendetta against me for calling her a ****, so I think she kept marking me off no matter what.

 

[Vault101]

The appeal of sports?

[sup]Oops, no, might need the flame shield for that one.[/sup]

.

uggghhhh dont worry, sports was everyones favoite thing to do (and my least favoite) and it pissed me off to no end, there were practically no non-sports extra curricular stuff

BUT to be fair for the school it was I did manage to do some fun things (bushrangers, theatre sports, art now and again)

 

[cerealnmuffin]

I never understood why PE was valued more than every other subject and why my school funneled so much money into middle school American football while the music dept had aging instruments.

Oh... you mean subject that was difficult. Due to the dumbing down of American education, I A'ed everything and never needed to study all the way up to college.

 

[Smiley Face]

I was always a jack of all trades when it came to school - had a balance between arts and sciences through to the end of high school, only big thing I never tackled was biology - I could've handled everything but the dissections.

One thing I could never get? Long division. Only test I ever failed, Grade 4 Long Division, I just did not get it. Once we hit proper division, it was all good, but when we went back to it for Advanced Functions/Calc, I got some odd looks.

 

[Ix Rebound]

Algebra
seriously when will we ever use it in life?
I wanna go back in time and find whoever invented algebra and punch him in the face!

 

[El Dwarfio]

That part of Newtonian Projectiles where you have the car go over the bridge and have to work out how fast it has to go to leave the ground.

I understood the theory and mathematics of projectiles fine, for some reason I could never apply it in that sense though (when I was in high school).

 

[SmegInThePants]

i had a teacher try and teach me about quadratic equations using cut-out blocks of paper, rectangles/squares/and large squares. You solved the equation by putting the blocks together. I already knew the standard way of solving quadratic equations and could do it fine, but for the life of me I could never figure out the thing w/blocks. I'm half convinced it was a con.

 

[Drenaje1]

Algebra
seriously when will we ever use it in life?
I wanna go back in time and find whoever invented algebra and punch him in the face!

*head explodes*

Instead of spending the next 20 minutes trying to respond to that, (Unless it was internet sarcasm, damn do we need some kind of program that will check sentences for you and then read them back to you in a snooty voice.) I'll just half-heartedly agree about Algebra. In fact, just today me and my friend spent our class period hunched over in the corner with our laptops, insulting the material's mother and complaining about "Random magical bullshit laws of math that seemed to have been pulled out of the ass of Cthulhu JUST for this one problem. When we move on to another problem and try to apply what we just did, the Cthulhu ass magical math laws have changed."

This could also be described as "Failure to pay enough cohesive attention to the lecture".

 

[Kae]

I never understood how to give the damn volleyball enough angle and distance to get it to the other side of the net and I never understood how to play an instrument, seriously I took flute for 2 years and guitar for 3 and I still have no clue how are you supposed to play music with those things.
[sub]I also never understood how to make friends...[/sub]

 

[Guffe]

I sucked at Chemistry...
I mean blending stuff and making explosives was cool but all the theroies and nucleons and exploreons here and there blending into each other mkaing electrons flow away from the darkness of the C!! WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!

 

[hazabaza1]

why cant I chew gum? or eat....I'd concentrate on whats going on if I could eat somthing right now

Because having the person sitting next to me snacking down on a cornish pasty is pretty damn distracting.
OT: Physics. Fuck physics. In the eyes.

 

[Davesdepository]

not really a subject but I never really understood women. Mind you I suppose this is hardly a failing limited to high school.