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.

  • i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca
    16·
    3 days ago

    The elective classes I chose played a huge part in who I became. More so than friendships or cringey moments or anything that happened in the mandatory classes.

    I took home ec and made crappy fried rice and sewed an apron with the pattern upside down. I thought it was lame at the time. Today I cook every day and I can sew well enough to fix things. They are ridiculously valuable skills.

    I took electronics and made a dumb little siren that pitched up and down when you held down a button. Once every couple of years, I need some simple bit of electronics and I design a circuit board, etch it onto copper, and solder on some components. If I hadn’t chosen that elective classes, I’d think that sort of thing was super advanced.

    The hilariously basic “IT” class (I made a PowerPoint slideshow with animation and fart sound effects) is probably responsible for me having a career in software development.