Worst course ever taken in school or elsewhere!

[HawkOwl]

My worst class was in high school in the mid-70’s. The teacher was a hippie who had just received her teaching certificate, and with the exception of a one-hour talk about the morality of serving in the military, she totally ignored the class all semester. We were told to read books of our choice during class, but she never checked to see what we had read or to ask questions. Mostly she sat in her corner reading and tried to ignore the chattering and horseplay that resulted.

 

[Marita40]

Definitely Organic Chemistry when our teacher--the only one in the department who taught the course-- had a nervous breakdown in about week 5, left, and the rest of the semester was taught by various TAs or stand-in professors. I had already been pretty much lost early on and never got back on track. I know nothing about Chemistry to this day I'm afraid...

 

[Bullwinkle]

Hands down, it was the USAF Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) School, every last course.

Famous last words: "How hard can it be - I love camping out."

If you don't mind, what stood out about it? Just curious. I grew up doing multi-week trips in the mountains and thought it was normal so sometimes would think about things like that like "aw I could do it" which is surely the famous last words of every country kid going into one of those classes. I never found out if I could in fact do that kind of thing though, and now I never will.

I do remember doing a "wilderness survival" thing and one of the exercises was to go through the woods in the dark towards someone and not be detected. The reason I remember it is that I unknowingly crawled through a patch of poison oak and spent the next few weeks with eyes-swollen-shut level rash on my face and belly. Was it worse than a research paper due next month and not a word written? Not sure actually... but it was pretty awful.

 

[Brat]

I was a math major, grabbed my diploma after 3 years, and ran. My worst course, actually textbook, was number theory. I aced the class but the text was awful because it used "thusly" when laying out theorems. The author used so many shortcuts following the text was a challenge.

The other challenging course was German, which I hadn't taken in high school. I took the course only because the best mathematics texts in that era (pre-1960) were in German. I quickly concluded I didn't need to know German to understand mathematics in German so dropped it.

 

[FlaGator]

Hands down, it was the USAF Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) School, every last course.



Famous last words: "How hard can it be - I love camping out."

All this time I thought you were JAGOTI

Bada$$!

 

[Pointby2]

The only class I failed was English. One year in Junior High they taught all the terms like nouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, verbs, etc. At that time I thought that was the biggest waste of time so I refused to even listen to the instruction. I couldn't figure out why they had to add NAMES to all the things I already knew.

Turns out I ended up in marketing and writing was a large part of my responsibilities. I did fine.

It wasn't a hard course, but it was the worst, for me.

 

[REWahoo]

If you don't mind, what stood out about it?

Here is a summary of the course:

Students rise early in the morning, and spend many hours without sleep. They endure extremely hot and extremely cold temperatures to become SERE specialists.

Students spend six days in the Colville and Kaniksku National Forests mountains, while the rest of the course is conducted at Fairchild. Students first learn how to handle the psychological and physical stress of survival, after which they learn post-ejection procedures and how to handle parachute landings. They are also instructed in survival medicine. Shelter construction, gathering and cooking food, land navigation methods, evasion and camouflage, signaling and aircraft vectoring are all taught during students’ six-day stay in the mountains. After their stint outside, students return to Fairchild and learn about how to behave if they are captured.

I'll pass on discussing that last part, but those six days in the mountains left a mark. I have vivid memories of being absolutely miserable while trying, without success, to stay dry in the rain for days, using only a parachute for shelter. Compunding the wet were bone-chilling temps in the 50's, and all the while we had almost no food, which was an incentive to learn to live off the land. Fern tip soup, anyone?

 

[MichaelB]

Fern tip soup, anyone?

You had fern tip soup? Luxury!

 

[FlaGator]

Intro to FORTRAN.

7:30 a.m. class, way too early for me. Stopped attending, but didn’t formally drop it. The only blemish on a solid academic record.

Realized later my brain isn’t natively wired for that work.

 

[REWahoo]

All this time I thought you were JAGOTI

Bada$$!

No, if I was a Bada$$ that school would have been a piece of cake - and it dang sure was not!

 

[aja8888]

Intro to FORTRAN.

7:30 a.m. class, way too early for me. Stopped attending, but didn’t formally drop it. The only blemish on a solid academic record.

Realized later my brain isn’t natively wired for that work.

Funny how brains work and how different we are as humans....I loved FORTRAN and took three courses in it between 1972 and 1973 when working on my BSME. The computer we had was one of the early IBM huge mainframes and we used keypunch machines to cut our cards for the programs. Then we ran them on the big IBM machine.

I still have a stack or two of the cards with programs somewhere in a box in the attic.

 

[PaunchyPirate]

My worst college class experience was Political Thought and Philosophy. I was a straight A student majoring in Geography and minoring in Applied Statistics. I started toward a second minor in Political Science and then ran into the Philosophy class. In my defense, the professor was a bumbling, nearly incoherent moron. But I also found that the assigned philosophical readings went in one eye and out the other. I got a D on the first test (all essay) and dropped the class right after. I ended up getting my second minor in Computer Science. That’s when I realized I was more a numbers/science guy than a ponder life guy.

 

[lucky penny]

Toughest course ever for me was a physics course in my senior year of high school called "PSSC physics" - don't recall what the acronym meant, but we jokingly referred to it as "pick-and-shovel science course." I think it was a new approach to physics & though science & math were always challenging for me it was assumed the "smart" kids could handle all the hardest courses. I remember virtually nothing about the substance (and never took another science course in my life) but I vividly remember there were periodic tests with 30 questions & once I got only 9 right! -- which was mortifying but not really surprising; I knew I was struggling. After that I met with the teacher who tried to explain some concepts to me by demonstrating them with a rubber band, & for a moment things seemed to make sense. I was determined to stick with it & somehow ended up doing OK, but man, this was way out of my league.

I now see that the PSSC-physics course I mentioned was developed in the 1950s & it has its own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Science_Study_Committee

I love the comments here & can definitely relate.

To paraphrase one poster, I think I ended up with a B in the course, but realize it was probably a "pity-B".

And to borrow from another, that experience confirmed that I was in no way a science person, but more a words/ponder-life person.

 

[stepford]

For the posters who said they loved Diff E: you are either mixing this course up with some other course you actually liked or you are not human.

I went to a nerd school with lots of folks who liked DE's (and many nastier bits of math as well). I spent my career working with folks of similar abilities.

And you know what? Ability in math is no predictor of financial acumen. Many of my mathlete colleagues ended up in debt and are still working in their mid-60s. Some of the ones who thought they were smartest (and maybe even WERE smartest) ended up playing options games and lost a ton of money. Fortunately, though I did kinda like DE's, I realized soon enough that I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Following the herd in passive investing is good enough for me.

Wrapping this back into the thread topic... the way I realized my unsharp tool status was by trying to take some of the "hard" physics classes in grad school. I gave Many Body Quantum Theory a good solid 3 week effort before realizing it was designed for smarter folk than I. Dropped it and never looked back.

 

[jollystomper]

The only course I can remember as a "bad" experience was Art in High School. I just could not get with what the teacher was trying to convey. We had number grades then with 65 being a passing grade, and I ended up with a 68.

I had some tough courses in college but nothing that I would consider a bad experience. Even the courses I received a "C" in (fortunately nothing in my major) were good learning experiences. Maybe being in the first generation of the family to go to college, and at an Ivy League school to boot, influenced that.

My "worst" experience was in the opposite direction - I took a course on "Governments of Western Europe after WWII" and signed up pass-fail grade, as I was taking 5 1/2 courses that semester and going through training at the college radio station. I thought I was doing "C" level work, but just before the deadline for changing from pass-fail to a letter grade, my first paper was a B+, and after the deadline the teacher pulled me aside and said he really enjoyed my contributions to the discussions ("you do not use a lot of words, but when you do it is profound and I can tell from the eyes of the other students it makes an impact on them"), and that I was doing A-level work. Drat... unfortunately I was not the type to deliberately slack off, so my final grade in the class was an A... but on my transcript, it shows as "Pass".

Edited to add: I now recall one course - I forget the exact title, but it had to do with theory and analysis of computer algorithms - that was so difficult I was meeting with the professor almost every week to review the lecture. By the time the deadline for dropping the course came around the class, which had started at 30, was down to 8, and only 3 of us were undergraduates. However, the professor said at that point that he made it deliberately tough early to see who was serious, as as all of us who were left had met with him several times during his office hours, as long as we kept doing the work none of us would receive lass than a B. SO it was worth toughing that one out.

 

[1242Vintage]

Gave this topic some more thought. There were other hard classes in college besides the academic ones.

Had to take a 1 unit “PE” class. So the skinny nerdy engineering student I was back then signed up for boxing! After learning a new skill we went six 3 minute rounds with a 1 minute break between. Hardest work out ever. And there’s more pain. Since I was the smallest guy in the class the instructor … a former Golden Gloves fly weight champ who was about my size … would usually pick me to demo the new skill. Twice a week I got my butt handed to me by the instructor and then spent the rest of the class trying to keep from getting my bell rung too many times by one of the bigger guys in class that I was sparring with.

Only used those boxing skills outside of class one time, and it wasn’t me that swung first.

 

[scrabbler1]

I had some bad classes in high school and college.

I don't know if Vector Calculus is the same as Differential Equations many others have mentioned here. I took VC in my freshman year of college, having placed out of Calc I and II due to good grades on AP exams in high school. I think I had the same professor someone else mentioned here. He was a Chinese man who spoke with a very heavy accent, making him tough to understand. Early on, I made the mistake of asking a question about something, and I got the same heavy-accent gobbledygook he said the first time. I kept my mouth shut the rest of the semester, as did everyone else. Somehow, I got a B in the class.

But that wasn't the worst class in my freshman year. My college (NYU) had expanded its liberal arts requirements that year, and the list of courses in the many required areas looked dreadful. I took a course called "Power and Politics in America," as I had some interest in politics (although it would be years before I would be come the political junkie I am today). I nearly failed the class, only passing the final exam to pass the course.

But the grades in those 2 courses, and 2 others, ended up not counting in my GPA because in the middle of my second year, I switched to NYU's business school, so those courses were reclassified as free electives - the credits counted, but not the grades.

In my third year, I took a course in Cobol, as I was a Comp Sci major in the business school at the time. I did an extra credit project to get my grade up from a B+ to an A-, but the professor for some reason disregarded my effort and I ended up with a B+, keeping me from making the Deans List. I was furious, and after the next course in my major was not to my liking, I switched majors (to Economics). A good move, because I aced all those courses. So that Cobol professor did me a big favor.

But the worst classes I took were in high school. The first was 9th grade Social Studies. It was Asian and African studies, and many of my honors-level classmates were failing or doing poorly. It was so bad that my mother led a petition drive to oust the teacher for incompetence. The teacher had tenure, so unless he raped a student or burned down the building, the district couldn't oust him. That was the only thing I learned in Social Studies that year.

Another bad class was 11th grade English. The teacher wasn't incompetent, just not suitable for 11th grade (non-honors) English. In a parent-teacher conference, my mom spoke with him and then headed to the guidance office to get me switched out. She told me later that he should be teaching college-level English. My new English class was much better, as I had a friendly, easy-going, and more HS-appropriate teacher.

 

[GalaxyBoy]

Ah, Diffy-Q's! What nightmares.

I majored in Mechanical Engineering as well. My buddies who were in Electrical had to take so much math as part of their curriculum they were only a couple of classes short of a math minor, so some went ahead and took the few extra courses to add that to their diplomas. They swore that once you reached a certain stratospheric level in math it became much easier. I didn't believe them.

The class I had the most trouble with was biology in high school. Nothing but memorization to me. I learned best when I could understand the "why" things worked, but just memorizing names of things never worked for me. Organic chemistry was the same way; good thing I never had to take a class in that and it was just part of freshman chemistry in college.

 

[Markola]

Business Calc. Forget that noise. I passed with a low grade then accumulated a seven figure portfolio, and that’s all the math I need.

 

[aja8888]

Thinking back, the course that was the most enjoyable for me was Ancient History, specifically Greek and Roman times. And somehow, I became an engineer.

I got an MBA in finance going nights for two years and it was 60 credit hours of work. I had been working in industry for a few years and was in a management position at that time so I really enjoyed that curriculum.

Funny thing is that I never had the opportunity to use any of the calculus courses I took in college in the working world.

 

[Chuckanut]

At this school, the math classes were deliberately designed to weed out non-serious engineer wannabees and that they did. What a nightmare.

In my school that job fell to the Physics department.

"Calculate the electric field of this cube with 1 inch diameter dice pattern holes on all sides." Uh, Yea! Sure.

But, the worst class was a Fortran class taught by a Fortran programmer who obviously knew his Fortran. But, he knew nothing about teaching. Jargon filled lectures that assumed you already knew Fortran and EDP basics filled the one hour a week class. I passed only because I had a cousin who coached me through the assignments by basically doing them for me and telling me why he wrote the code that way. I never went near Fortran again.

 

[Zona]

Intro to Theater Arts was excruciating for this introvert who hates public speaking. [emoji15] Even though decades have passed, just thinking about it now makes me inwardly cringe and my heart rate goes up. I was most definitely not destined to “tread the boards”. It was one of the few university classes I did not enjoy; I think I switched it to pass/fail midway through the semester so I wouldn’t torpedo my gpa over an elective course.

 

[Telly]

Diffy Q! I did better in it than I did in all the Calculus classes leading up to it!

At my Big U, all the required core classes for Engineering were flunk-out courses. So many people switched majors by second semester sophomore, to things like liberal arts and sciences, school of social work (to be forever poor), some to the business college, etc.
The Big U was rated tied for second place in my field, MIT was in 1st place. The competition was deadly. The best of the best in math, who were encouraged by their HS guidance councilors to take it up. I was far from the best in math. But I aced every lab of any type I ever took, they struggled. I had practical experience, lot's of it. And a previous two year degree. They had none. Many years later, architecting, managing and hiring Engineers on ground-breaking projects, I found how rare Engineers were who were equally comfortable in EE and ME, and understood the physical world!

My worst class was a tie. A lines fields and waves class taught by a snooty @##@!!@ who sorely needed his @@@ kicked (I dropped it just before the last date, took it over with a different prof and did OK). The other class was a semiconductor class, taught by a clothes horse, who was fooling around with his secretary, and seemed to have a weird relationship with his TA, who looked like he was dragged through a sewer. This prof made the course into a "take every equation and somehow magically manipulate it into something else, and vice-versa". All mathematical manipulation. Learned nothing about semiconductors in that class. The same class taught by a different prof was OK, but I couldn't drop/add to get into any section of that class, they were filled!

Ah, the IBM mainframes, FORTRAN, and the IBM 029 keypunch. I was carrying my open-top card box 2/3'rds filled with an almost-done problem, when it slipped out of my hand all over the floor. I learned what those diagonal magic-marker stripes I had seen on some people's card decks were for...

 

[big-papa]

EE here. Was in college back in the days when somebody believed that all engineering majors had to know how to build a bridge with a large focus on passing the EIT exam, since eventually having a PE license was important in the state where I went to college.

So we all had to take courses outside of our discipline that many of us would likely never use like statics, dynamics, thermodynamics. And even within our major there were courses we had to take even if was outside of our chosen area of specialization. For me that was power machines and power transmission. Always thought this was beyond the usual common math, English, and science classes we all took to give us a foundation. And to add a common theme to this thread, we had to take a combo Diff-Eq and Linear Algebra class. I liked the Linear Algebra part, but the Diff-Eq part not so much.

Dynamics, especially, was set up as "weed out course" for all engineering majors with many otherwise bright engineering majors not making it through the hurdle.

Fast forward to today and that's all changed. There is still subject matter for those classes with statics and dynamics for non CE/ME majors made into a combo class. Thermodynamics is still there and there's now a version for non CE/ME majors. Power machines and transmission are offered, but now only as electives for people who want to specialize in that area. And more classes offered for particular areas of specialization than before.

 

[Winemaker]

Differential Equations was a struggle; but Matrix Theory and Equations was worse. Fortunately/unfortunately, your final overall grade could not differ one letter grade from the grade you made on your final exam. I did repeat 2 of my Calculus classes.

I still am suffering the side effects of taking a Diff E final, Thermodynamics final and a Physics final all in the same day. All 3 were 2 hours long, and I can remember walking out of the very last final classroom, and sitting on the floor outside in the hall for what seemed like hours. My head felt good but also felt like it was about to split open. I hardly ever get headaches, and I never smoked, took drugs, or drank alcohol ( other than an occasional brew after I turned 21, my senior year). I was told that was "what a hangover" felt like. I never wanted to experience that again, so I don't drink enough alcohol to this day to ever want to experience that again.