Least Favorite School Subject

[Leave a Whisper]

I have always struggled with Math and I hate it. Plus, is it just me or are math teachers predisposed to being petty and mean? At least mostly.

P.E. is a close second. I'm unathletic and clumsy. But I never cared about doing well in p.e since I have never had any intentions of doing sports or the military.

[Taffeta]

PE. The lesson where all the kids who didn't get top marks took their chance to pick on the kids who did, even though at no point did I ever bully anyone for not getting into the top set or making the higher grades. Ever. Plus the PE teacher till I was in year 9 was a bully as well. She'd make us play netball in the snow in skirts, no jogging bottoms, no jumpers - while she was allowed to wear both. Then she had to retire through injury. PE was better after that but the damage was done. At primary level I played netball for the school, so I wasn't totally anti-sport before secondary school. But yeah. PE.

We didn't get any kind of grade in it, really, though. Unless you took it as an option for GCSE. It was just a weekly routine, twice a week, of ritual humiliation and torture. Until year 10 when our new teacher told us we could not bother if we didn't want to, and y11, when our awesome teacher arranged for us to do bowling and ice skating and other more bearable things like badminton, rather than hockey *hate*. So it got better. But I still hated it. Did you guys do the bleep test?

After that my worst subject was probably art/graphics. I had to take Graphics for my GCSE. It didn't end so well. But I didn't hate it in the sense of PE nor dread it.

I didn't like Physics but I was good at it. And our teacher was nice. It was just very dull.

@LAW - I had mostly nice maths teachers but only one of them really taught me anything. He was a very crazy guy who taught us all these maths theories based on stories of drunken aardvaarks and so on. Not even kidding. But when he got annoyed, you knew who was in charge. I learned more from him than any other teacher I had. I liked maths, though I had trouble with some number things because of my dyscalculia.

[Safflower]

P.E. by a long shot. We would always run and jog which would trigger my asthma, and I wasn't allowed to do less, just walk for a brief periods of time. (I actually had a teacher tell me he had athletic friends with asthma and that it didn't matter for running, and he wouldn't let me walk at all.) I had an asthma attack while running once too, which could have been avoided. P.E. caused me a lot of pain. We are also suspecting that I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (and even if I don't, my joints are still very hypermobile) which could have contributed to the pain.

And while I didn't like some other classes, P.E. actually caused physical pain, so it wins.

[Leave a Whisper]

Wow. Your guys' p.e. teachers sound like real jerks. I hope your folks chewed him out good Safflower.

[Taffeta]

Wow. Your guys' p.e. teachers sound like real jerks. I hope your folks chewed him out good Safflower.

The bleep test had a similar effect on kids here. One girl in my class got into real difficulties because teacher also didn't allow her to have her inhaler at the side of the netball court where the test was being run. If you didn't have this, it was a stupid thing whereby there's a recording, like a metronome, that bleeps every so often, and you are meant to run from one end of the court to the other before it bleeps, If it bleeps first, you are out. But it gets quicker as it goes on, and as you get tireder, so it really doesn't prove anything. It just makes you really tired, and it gives asthmatics asthma attacks...

And we did it twice a year, once in winter and once in summer, once inside (summer) and outside (winter). Yay. My sister went through the same torture (she is properly asthmatic).

Also, happy birthday Safflower

[Safflower]

Oh, I guess we had the bleep test, we just called them pacers. Not fun whatsoever... We did them once or twice a month.

[bright rabbit 1]

P.E my most hated subject in secondary school, I got out of it when it was double because I had to do physio. Plus when I was on my monthly I didn’t do it.

Next was maths, I had the worst maths teacher ever, didn’t learn nothing.

The other subject was languages french was okay when I was in Year seven and eight, but my dad forced me to take it again, let’s just say I hated the teacher, I flanked the exams.

[Griffin]

Ugh, we used to have an annual strength tests where one of the tasks was to do situps keeping up with the bleeps.  

Yeah, I hated PE. It was pretty much the only class where they never actually taught you anything - you either knew how to do the stuff, or you didn't. And those who were physically fit got good grades, while those who weren't never got anything for trying. At least that's how it seemed to me at the time, and I know many, many people share my views... I mean, in most sports you can train the technique ad infinitum, and that's what professionals do. But I don't think we (at least in the girls class) were ever even taught how to throw a ball, for instance. If it was team sports, the teacher always selected to "captains" (popular kids and those who were good at sports) who got to choose their teams. Needless to say, I was always among the last to be picked. Way to support your confidence... 

Maths would be the close second. There was a period I was actually pretty good at it (junior high / lower secondary school) which prompted me to take advanced maths in high shool - wrong decision. My grades decreased steadily through high school and after suffering through all the courses I ended up taking the matriculation exam at the easier level, haha.

Languages and arts (incl. literature and music) were always my favourite subjects.

[Taffeta]

My PE experiences definitely similar to Griffin's. PE was an exercise in making people feel inferior and encouraging bullying through the picking of teams and the blaming of the "not part of the clique" kid in the team for any failure/assigning of worst task etc. Although similar kind of happened with our prefect system because it was also based on cliques, so...yeah.

In the UK, GCSE (school leaving exams) used to (before this year when they went stupid and numerical) go from A* (top) to some letter like G and then U and N which were fails. When I started maths in year 10 I would've easily got an A* on the maths paper. Then the teacher changed syllabus to an 'easier' one. And after that I struggled to get higher than a B (my eventual grade at the end of year 11). Possibly partly because I struggled with the easier stuff (because of dyscalculia and the fact this often involved number sequences) but mostly because on an easier syllabus it is much harder to get higher grades because of national averages. I really should have taken the option to do Maths early but I was already doing Science and English and I wanted to spread my exams out more over 2 years :/

I didn't learn a huge amount through much of school :/ I think it was a case of learning some facts to pass exams, but that isn't exactly learning? But I didn't learn anything in primary school...I could already read and write and add up before I even began that, so all I learned there was that the headteacher didn't know what to do with kids who were 12 maths books ahead and who had already read all the books in the school library by the age of 9. I guess by contrast I did learn some useful things at secondary level...but most of those seemed to come in year 9, like maths and every bit of French grammar I learned in school :/

 I loved languages but hated how we were taught German and my French, again, "lets do the easy course" which meant I had to really fight to get accepted to do it for A-Level (university entry exams). I really hated our MFL teacher for that and it put me off studying German forever, I never went back to it (took Spanish instead).

I hated classes that didn't challenge me to think. So I loved things that involved analysing stuff, like history, and literature, and using imagination, like performing arts. Also language because it fascinated me. Anything else was something to be got through.

By the time I left school I also hated Science because we were made it do it twice over. Legal requirement at that point was to take at least double award Science and obtain 2 grades if possible in Science. I left school with 5 GCSE grades in science. That's called overkill, and it killed any interest in me going into science ever.

Hence why I now do premodern Japan.

[banditpony]

I don't think I had any issues with classes..
Just certain teachers.

I remember going home crying because of my 3rd? Grade English teacher. I was a well behaved kid who got good grades. It still doesn't make sense to me.

I loved science and my 9th grade physical science teacher was mean too. It made the class so awful.


OH. Also.
I was put down in my art classes which to this day makes me second guess myself. I work in a creative place now and work on art in a technical sense for print... Some of my work is in retail stores Instead of encouragement I got put down in class.

In my first drawing class we did self portaits and I did something abstract and my teacher said I had to add a nose. I didn't because I said it represented name how it was. I got an F on the assignment.

In another class-- Once we turned in artwork without out names and people wrote comments to judge the art. Well the teacher wrote "great job Jessica" (Jessi was my friend). It was the FIRST TIME he didn't tear apart my work and it's because he thought she did it. He ended up apologizing at the end of the semester because he realized he was a jerk all year.

I was a pretty good student (As and Bs).. so I dunno. I'd rather sit in a class subject I don't like then have a terrible teacher. There's always something to learn. Even PE I can appreciate because it kept me moving. Way better then sitting for 8hr a day despite not being athletic *shrug*

I didn't learn a huge amount through much of school :/ I think it was a case of learning some facts to pass exams, but that isn't exactly learning?

this is the summary of 90% of classes at school.

[SaraMari]

I chose math because my brain simply doesn't have an easy time understanding it and thus the classes were tiring for me. I don't recall any particularly mean math teachers. I avoided it when possible and only took logic in college.

PE again because I was a fat kid however I only recall being embarrassed by my fat kid self in gym a few times. Most activities like soccer, dodgeball volleyball etc I was average enough to not stand out. In highschool I was only required one semester of PE.

Overall I was a terrible student in high school, I skipped a lot. Which is too bad because most subjects are a breeze for me as I have a very good memory. If I had tried even 20% harder I may have been a decent student.

[StrawberrySundance]

P.E. mainly due to horrible teachers and the students. I was heavily bullied in school and I dreaded P.E. Our classes were split into 3, boys only, girls only and a mix. I was in the girls only group and I hated it- we all got changed in a room with no separate stalls it was open so everyone could see everyone. I usually attempted to stand in the corner of the room away from everyone because I got so anxious over the other girls' comments about my body at one point I had 2 girls make fun of the size of my chest. By the last year it got to a point where I skipped P.E. and studied in a classroom because I had a group of girls go into my bag and cut out pieces of my uniform and my friend had her uniform covered in water and tossed in the bin. The boys weren't as bad during P.E. but if we had to walk past them to go into the gym or outside one of them would whistle or have a go at me. I also broke my fingers during a game of netball and all the girls stood there and laughed as I panicked.

I wasn't a big fan of maths, I couldn't get my head around it, in one of the years, at least half of the class moved into a different class because they could not stand the teacher we had, she'd spend the lesson complaining or threatening to knock students teeth out, luckily she left after a year and I got a lovely maths teacher in my final year, he was great- he helped me out so much with my anxiety I couldn't thank him enough.

Got to admit, I think I was the only one who genuinely enjoyed biology and chemistry in my school (I couldn't stand physics )

Im so glad to be in college now, even though the school I went to was absolutely terrible, I managed to pass with mostly A's and B's and although I have a lecturer I'm not fond of, everyone is lovely plus I'm studying something I'm really interested in and speaking of school, I'm actually studying to become a teacher

While this is not a subject, I still cannot get my head around the new numerical grades that we have here in the UK

[bright rabbit 1]

I failed Humanities exam only because I got picked on in the classroom and I didn’t understand history (but I got rewarded when we done a subject on Jesus Christ).

Science in my exam I got E

French I got a D

The only subject I passed in was IT, I remember once I was listening to Phantom of the Opera I sang Think of Me, I didn’t see the teacher sitting behind me, but when he sing ended I got applause. Now that was embarrassing.

[tailrustedtealeaf]

Definitely P.E.
I wasn't competitive and don't really like playing sports. Last to be picked, I didn't understand the rules for some...and if I didn't have one of my few friends in the class, it was just dreadful. I always changed completely seperate from everyone.

[Einhornbaby]

Definitely Math! And P.E. ... gosh I hated both soo much. I still dont have a feeling for counting and numbers :/ P.E. was kinda ok sometimes... I loved Basketball for example but mostly it was just a pain to get through...

My favourite subject were languages, history, science and geography. Arts were ok too.