What was the most dismal, turgid and yawn inducing subject in secondary school ?

TTBZ · December 2017

I hated it all apart from science/biology to be honest.

frictionfraction · December 2017

Metalwork. 2 months making a serviette holder then 2 months making a sliding bevel which was never finished and i wouldn’t have known what to do with it anyway. Plus in those days no girls did metalwork - big downer.

CHRISB50 · December 2017

Physics
RE

boogieman · December 2017

Dominic said:

Latin
Belum,Belum ,Belum, Beli,Bello, Belo ,Belamus ,Balatis ,Belant
Present tense conjugation of the verb Belum (To wage War)
Why the fuck we had to learn that I don't know
I am quite old but have never been a Roman Consul or Emperor and have no intention of waging war on anybody
Res Ipse Loquiter

Latin for me too. What a complete waste of time. Our teacher was a grumpy, shrivelled old Irish guy who barely concealed his letching over some of the girls in our class. The highlight of two years of torture was discovering an entry in the textbook index that told us Arso meant “I am on fire”.

Emp_Fab · December 2017

I had a French teacher who was stunning with fabulous tits. I would spend every lesson gazing at her ample bosom through the bevelled edge of a clear plastic ruler, convinced that the refraction would make it look like I was looking at her face.

Phil_aka_Pip · December 2017

I disliked Latin, mainly because of the teacher. It seemed he wanted us all to think like Roman soldiers, that the State was everything and it was the highest honour to die for it. However I have since come to think that Latin is a good tool for teaching grammar, and the language per se is fairly interesting. If I had the time and the be-bothered-ness I don't think I'd regret studying more of it.

Phil_aka_Pip · December 2017

boogieman said:

The highlight of two years of torture was discovering an entry in the textbook index that told us Arso meant “I am on fire”.

So the Romans liked a hot curry as well, then?

Kilgore · December 2017

Emp_Fab said:

I had a French teacher who was stunning with fabulous tits. I would spend every lesson gazing at her ample bosom through the bevelled edge of a clear plastic ruler, convinced that the refraction would make it look like I was looking at her face.

Ow, got it bad, got it bad, got it bad
I'm hot for teacher.

Van Halen.

Teetonetal · December 2017

French

Mainly because the teacher was old, uninterested and very dull. I really hate that guy as he turned my off language for years. It was only when I moved to Europe and stated learning again that I realised they were awesome and fun. Can now speak German fluently and get by in french, Italien and Spanish.

If that guy was still alive I'd definitely tell him how awful he was. In his last year, all his class got D or below for GSCE

RobDavies · December 2017

Economics. Turgid.

Not helped by by the fact that our teacher was possibly the most iffeminate, affected gay man we'd ever known. Nowadays, it wouldn't matter one iota but back in '85, and to a group of 14yr old boys, the giant cockduster moustache, and the skin tight sta-prest meant the poor bloke was a target for all sorts of verbals.

Apparently, he died soon after I left school "after a short illness". He can't have been more than forty....

boogieman · December 2017

Teetonetal said:

French

Mainly because the teacher was old, uninterested and very dull. I really hate that guy as he turned my off language for years. It was only when I moved to Europe and stated learning again that I realised they were awesome and fun. Can now speak German fluently and get by in french, Italien and Spanish.

If that guy was still alive I'd definitely tell him how awful he was. In his last year, all his class got D or below for GSCE

Somehow I was persuaded to take French for an A level subject. God knows how, looking back, as I wasn’t particularly good at it and had only got a mediocre pass at O level. It was probably more to do with it fitting in with my A level timetable. Most of it wasn’t even conversational French, we spent two years mostly reading and translating French literature. It was only when it came to the final exams that we discovered the dried up old nicotine reeking crone we had for a teacher had had us studying a wrong book for the whole course. The syllabus had changed for our year but she hadn’t noticed... two bloody years wrestling through the turgid horror that is Antigone, and all for no reason. FML.

33% of the possible exam marks went straight down the Swanee too of course and I failed the exam. We were given a chance to retake the course but I’d had enough of school by that point, even though it meant I didn’t get qualifying grades I needed to go to Uni. Nowadays she’d be sued for negligence or professional misconduct, no doubt. My old man complained to the school but she kept her job so it obviously didn’t affect her career too much, unlike all her students that year.

jonnyburgo · December 2017

Trouble with our school was that the teachers were old burnouts waiting to retire they actually despised the kids apart from the clever ones.

proggy · December 2017

Religious Education. Education my arse, what a load of old fashioned, superstitious nonsense.

Grunfeld · December 2017

It's nearly always about the teacher rather than the subject.
I had a brilliant RE teacher -- bearing in mind I went to a Catholic boys school where nearly all the other teachers were deeply uninspiring -- but for a few years I had RE taught by a Jesuit.
I now know that what he was actually teaching was philosophy and history and critical thinking in the context of faith and science. Brilliant stuff and about the only thing in school which got me thinking and enjoying it rather than zoning out.

Nitefly · December 2017

Bloody lines - my god, how many lines I must have written for various infractions.

We had a maths teacher whose favourite punishment (other than corporal!) was 25 lines, from any book of your choice, in your best handwriting. It used to take ages.

I'd only been there a week when a mate and I were caught whispering during assembly. We were given the following to write out, 100 times:

"It is highly undesirable for misguided little boys to indulge in conversation during the course of morning assembly".

Try as you will, you cannot fit that into a single line of foolscap paper, so it ended up being 200 lines, to be handed in first thing next day!

I can still remember it word for word over 50 years later...

Sassafras · December 2017

Nitefly said:

Bloody lines - my god, how many lines I must have written for various infractions.

We had a maths teacher whose favourite punishment (other than corporal!) was 25 lines, from any book of your choice, in your best handwriting. It used to take ages.

I'd only been there a week when a mate and I were caught whispering during assembly. We were given the following to write out, 100 times:

"It is highly undesirable for misguided little boys to indulge in conversation during the course of morning assembly".

Try as you will, you cannot fit that into a single line of foolscap paper, so it ended up being 200 lines, to be handed in first thing next day!

I can still remember it word for word over 50 years later...

Sounds like you learnt your lesson.

Telejester · December 2017

Nitefly said:

Bloody lines - my god, how many lines I must have written for various infractions.

We had a maths teacher whose favourite punishment (other than corporal!) was 25 lines, from any book of your choice, in your best handwriting. It used to take ages.

I'd only been there a week when a mate and I were caught whispering during assembly. We were given the following to write out, 100 times:

"It is highly undesirable for misguided little boys to indulge in conversation during the course of morning assembly".

Try as you will, you cannot fit that into a single line of foolscap paper, so it ended up being 200 lines, to be handed in first thing next day!

I can still remember it word for word over 50 years later...

surely you did the cellotape 3 biros together method for lines ?

TimmyO · December 2017

I know people who loved History and who had great teachers - my secondary school was a guy reading out verbatim notes he'd been teaching from his whole career and us writing it down longhand in the lesson, then leaving for the next lesson. I fucking hated it.

Bridgehouse · December 2017

Lines huh?

We had to write ours out in Latin

"Quas dederis solas semper habebas opes"

Nitefly · December 2017

@Sassafras - indeed. I never speak during morning assembly now.

@Telejester - I did indeed try it with 2 biros, but it didn't work because it was 2 lines long - impossible to maintain the spacing!

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What was the most dismal, turgid and yawn inducing subject in secondary school ?

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