Foreign language instruction in the United States is basically a gigantic waste of resources that would be better served elsewhere.
Here in Canada, most things we buy in stores have bilingual labels (English and French). I've found it very handy to have a basic reading knowledge of French, for reasons ranging from stock clerks accidentally turning the French side toward the aisle, to helping my dad's girlfriend program some electronic thing she bought that had abysmally awful English instructions, but the French ones were quite clear.
High school calculus could be swapped for statistics, but otherwise I don't think so.
Neither of those were part of the high school math stream I was in. It was a shock when I showed up for my first day of an organic chemistry course in college and the instructor said, "There won't be
too much calculus in this class." Since I had neither the time nor the aptitude for a crash course in whatever he was talking about, I ended up dropping the course and switching to physical geography for my science course (one of the best decisions I ever made, since I loved that course and yes, we did learn practical things in it).
I went to a catholic high school and so had to take two mandatory courses: Grade 9 Religion class and grade 10 World religions class.
I ended up not minding grade 9 religion class because I already knew a lot of stuff about the old testament, so a lot of the tests were easy. The teacher would also frequently argue with all the secular kids in class, which was pretty much most of the kids. Catholic high school in (some parts of) Canada are pretty much like public schools with a chapel. They exist for historical reasons and there isn't a very big emphasis on religion. They generally provide a slightly higher standard of education compared to public schools, so a lot of non-Catholic parents enroll their kids in catholic school anyway. It's pretty much the same thing as public school except of those 2 mandatory religion classes, and "optional" church service for stuff like easter and christmas, which basically means you sleep in and show up to school late. Plus since it's sort of kinda maybe wishy washy public-like, technically they have to let kids opt out of the religious stuff.
So anyway, grade 9 religion class was easy and entertaining, but nothing overly memorable. 6.7/10
Grade 10 religion class was a lot more interesting, because we learned about a bunch of non-Catholic religions. Emphasis on non-Christian, but a bunch of time was spent on different Christian denominations too.
Anyway, these 2 classes were for the most part worth it. I didn't mind taking them.
I could be well without grade 10 English, which was basically all Shakespeare, it did not teach me anything useful. I pretty much learned which things Shakespeare found funny. All my essays were BS and I hated the teacher. It was the most boring class ever. I was learning English at the time, and watching TV was a lot more educational. Shakespeare is for hipsters and actual literary academics.
I can't fathom a mostly-secular class of kids in a Catholic high school.
Honestly, I can't. Maybe the two systems have nicer interactions in your province, but it can be awfully nasty here.
I did briefly consider attending the Catholic high school instead of the public one (I was taking private music lessons at the time and my teacher was Catholic; she recommended her own former high school). But recalling the arrogant attitude of some of the neighborhood kids who went there ("We're
better than you, because we're
Catholic"), plus a few other reasons, was enough to make me realize that the public high school would be the better choice.
Comparative religion is interesting, of course, but I never started on anything like that until college. In one of my cultural anthropology courses the religions being compared were native North American ones, not Christianity/Judaism/Islam/etc.. I took a couple of non-Canadian history classes - the one on classical history had some ancient Greek and Roman material, and ended with the Crucifixion (the instructor was scrupulously neutral on that, showing no bias whatsoever). The following course, taught by a different instructor, was supposed to be about medieval history, but the instructor often wandered off-topic and
did show bias in favor of Christianity. I also watched a televised course on comparative religion as Carleton University had one that was shown on University of the Air. This one discussed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and I found that rather fascinating.
Shakespeare isn't useless, warpus.
There are so many cultural things in our modern society, particularly in literature and movies, that draw on Shakespearean influences. It's a shame you didn't have a good teacher for that class. It's an unfortunate fact that most high school English teachers really don't know how to teach it effectively. It's meant to be experienced as a play, not as dry reading material. While I enjoyed the high school classroom material, I didn't really start to appreciate Shakespeare until I saw it performed live, on stage (
Twelfth Night).
I have probably never used chemistry, but I think its still useful to understand some terminology just in case. If I could restart my career with time machine, I would try pharmacist career.
If you've ever boiled water to make anything to eat or drink, you've used chemistry. That's how I was finally able to start overcoming my aversion to cooking - I started thinking of it as a practical application of some of the stuff I'd learned in my chemistry classes. Everyone uses chemistry in their daily lives.
In my Grade 12 English class, the teacher announced we were going to do a section on debating. We were allowed to choose our partners, but she assigned the topics and which side we were supposed to argue. So my partner and I found ourselves assigned to argue in the affirmative that history should not be taught in schools. Both of us considered that to be one of the dumbest things we'd ever heard, and I asked the teacher to assign something else. She refused, and so we were stuck trying to come up with persuasive arguments for something we absolutely did not accept as any sensible position to take.
We got through it reasonably well, and it wasn't quite as stressful as the debates in the Grade 12 social studies class, in which my partner (same person) and I had to argue in the affirmative that Canada should boycott the Moscow Olympics (this was in the fall of 1979). Most of that class were guys. Most of them were very sports-minded, and not happy at the possibility of a boycott.
