In today’s schooling, there are many things that we learn that are either outdated or just irrelevant to the real world. Even as we are learning some of these things, we were asking ourselves, when will this ever matter? These are just a few of those things that we never really needed to learn in school:

1. Cursive

Remember when we were learning cursive, every teacher always talked about how one day you will have to write everything in cursive? Well, that day never came and apart from that one paragraph we had to write in cursive on the SAT’s I haven’t used cursive since learning it in third grade.

2. Calculus

Unless you are going into an engineering or math field, there is no real use for such a high-level math. I’m not saying that no one will ever use this, but for most people, there is no real use for calculus outside of the math classroom in everyday life.

3. The Recorder

I mean yes it was really cool on that day in music class when the teacher announced that we were going to learn to play an instrument, but does the recorder even qualify as a real instrument? I highly doubt that there will ever be a situation where playing the recorder is required.

4. Memorizing the Periodic Table

While the information in the periodic table is definitely useful, there is no real reason that it needs to be memorized. In most instances where you would use the information in the periodic table, you could either look up a periodic table or would be given one.

5. How to get an egg to the ground without breaking it

Even at the time we were making this, most people had no idea how this tied into science at all and even now I am just as clueless. As far as we were concerned, it was just who could get their eggs to the ground without cracking or breaking them not the physics behind it. Even if we had known the actual physics behind it, it probably would not be something we use regularly.

6. Iambic Pentameter

All of the poetry we learned throughout school is basically completely useless now. Writing those acrostic poems was definitely fun but realistically there will never be a time that we will need to know the structure of a poem or even how to write our own poems, unless we are trying to impress a girlfriend or boyfriend and even then the main thing that matters is if we can rhyme.

7. Not being able to use a calculator

This was understandable to a point. We need to know how to do simple math facts in our heads, but for anything with two or three digit numbers, what would have been the harm in letting us use a calculator. Teachers always argued that in the real world we wouldn’t have a calculator, but personally I always have one available on my phone if I need it.

8. The history of sports

In high school gym, for each unit we did we were given a test on the history of the sport we had been playing. The test were usually pretty tricky and you would actually have to study to be able to pass them, but now when are we ever going to need to know the history of tennis or volleyball? Knowing the rules is enough for basically any situation we could be put in.