Was talking about home economics as a school subject in another thread and i realised that for me personally, taking “Food Tech” (cookery gcse) would have impacted me pretty negatively, even though generally speaking GCSEs don’t have much of an effect on the rest of your life or education.
So i wonder if anyone else has similar revelations? My post title is also phrased more openly than that, so it doesn’t have to be school specific, but i am mainly interested in things from the teenage time period.
Another choice i made in HS, for instance: i remember being really glad to have a medium-size group of friends in high school, but in retrospect they were terrible people and i realise that there would have been huge benefits to spending more time alone and in the library - yes, i genuinely look back and wish i studied more, lol. Something which I'm always told never happens.
This one “affects me as an adult” because i ended up entering adulthood with several friends determined to force their personality to be cool, relying on manosphere influencers to determine how they should behave; a lot of these people i didn’t want to know in the first place.
Probably most of them, at least in small “butterfly effect” ways. But mostly, I paid attention in class and remember how to think without having to have answers spoon fed to me. So many people I work with, of a variety of age groups, just seem to lack that skill.
You mentioned home economics, and I only had to take one semester as a required elective (yes, you read that right) and just kind of coasted through it. While I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I appreciate knowing how to use a sewing kit to make small repairs. I’ve patched several holes in my favorite “lounging around the house” robe and extended its life probably 3 times.