What electives did you take in high school?

I like electives!

as far as i can remember, in my high school these only existed for senior year english lit. i took russian lit which was amazing and political lit, which blew because the teacher was totally a libertarian and the only woman he assigned was ayn rand. he also hated me.

Oh fuck, Ayn Rand in the hands of high schoolers.

That annual 'essay scholarship contest' was a pretty insidious way of getting too many kids to be like 'no there was nothing wrong about selling mad opium to China bcz capitalism is perfect."

We walked around the school property four times.--somehow this is hilarious? maybe not the most imaginative lesson plan.

Yeah it was awesome!

Can you imagine getting a college degree to walk four times around a school w/25 students, siz times a day? And it's not special ed or anything?

the world revolutions class sounds great! i just remembered we also had senior year history electives and i took government first semester + world religions second semester, both with the same teacher, who was great. the world religions class was kind of awkward because there was a very nice but very devout Christian dude in it who would end up musing on how wrong all the other religions we studied seemed in class discussion.

xpost was there a special certified walking fitness instructor?

No, she was just a person who got a teaching degree and ended up teaching walking fitness. And a psychology class which was mostly spent readnig Phantom Tollbooth.

If that world religions class was any good it was probably devised by two teachers from my HS who rolled it out across the country. We had a perfect mix of protestant/catholic/jewish in my school and it had been created to help students not resent the hell out of each others' holidays, which I guess happened.

My electives: journalism, world literature, two other englit electives, school paper, theatre, Art Of The Cinema, AP English, TV/radio station, drawing and illustration, USSR, Political Behavior, World Religions, Psychology, European History plus writing a really crap novel every three months for the hell of it.

Freshman year:
Creative Writing, Speech and Theatre

Sophomore year:
Sociology, Mass Media*

Junior year:
??

Senior year:
Journalism, Psychology

*This was taught by an English teacher and basically consisted of watching all of his favorite movies of the previous year in class, including Scent of a Woman and Glengarry Glen Ross.

Bahaha, I had an English class where, over four weeks, we watched every episode of Dobie Gillis, and finished it by watching the Lifetime reunion Dobie Gillis movie from the '80s.

Media Studies - fun, bludgy
French
Modern History
Physics - i don't know why
Biology

god wtf high school english teachers?

Oh, I guess Spanish also counted as an elective past the two years it was required.

My high school was the suck. Small, relatively rural, poorly funded, no AP courses and very few interesting electives. Certainly nothing like the stuff you guys are talking about! Let's see, my electives included . . . hell, I don't know, this was more than 20 years ago . . . um, 20th Century America, a couple years of Calculus, Biology 2, Physics, an extra year of French, um . . . yeah, we had shitty electives.

If it makes you feel better, we had no swimming pool and no orchestra (lots of people seem to be baffled when I tell them that).

I had German. Three years, and found my first semester of college German covered everything we had learned in 3 years in HS into about the first 7 weeks of college.

wtf high schools have swimming pools?

mine didn't have a swimming pool, either, but it had a hockey rink. lol Buffalo.

Oh, I took "auto tech," too, in which I learned that my peers didn't want me participating in the one assignment for the whole semester: dissembling and reassembling a small lawnmower engine.

I stood around a lot.

To be fair, most of the people that are baffled by the lack of pool/orchestra are also the ones who argue with each other over whose high school had the fewest black students.

We had a really awesome pool and "sports centre". Had a climbing wall and all kinds of shit.

We had all of those things sans climbing wall (people might escape) and my class elected a black homecoming king.

Art Of The Cinema was fantastic: we got Un Chien Andalou, Metropolis, Psycho, 400 Blows, Midnight Cowboy, also permission-slipped not PC 'teaching moment' films like Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation. Teacher would have bitten off the head of anyone who tried to censor our viewing no matter what; also ran theatre dept.

i went to a poor school in retrospect, our choices were pretty limited. I took German (see? I don't think foreign languages are even electives at schools these days, they require it or something)

oh wait, I took psychology one year too. what the fuck was that about? I remember a time when everyone wanted to be a psychologist; these even carried over to college when it was, like, the major of everyone I knew who couldn't hack english lit.

I barely remember high school, which I'm fine with. But easily the most practical class I took out of all my years there -- the half-year typing course. I followed that up with a computer course, which was the same time I got my first computer at home, so I was able to stay in practice. And ever since then I've been VERY glad of that.

Best choice: Advanced Biology

Worst choice: some weird home ec elective called Essential Life Skills (no recollection of what it was about)

Skill No. 1: Don't post on Internet sites all da...wait.

I completely overloaded my Humanities classes whether elective or not through all four years but stopped with the French because I believed I'd be handicapped by teacher's shitty accent (our lang dept was shit compared to rest of school's offerings). Our requirements were English all four years, two years social studies ie Civics followed by American History, then you went to the electives smorgasbord if not into AP History, Science all four years (general, bio, chemistry, physics), Math (algebra/geometry), two years of gym,a year of art, one semester of either Home Ec or shop, one semester of Health. I think.

I absolutely did not take Secretarial Skills because I thought that was all local employers would want from me if I did and honestly someone else could join up with the typing pool, fine with me. OH BOY PUNK OR WHAT.

sophomore:
intro to journalism
sociology/psychology (one semester each, sociology was taught by the CHEERLEADING COACH, she showed us The Outsiders twice, it was a nightmare)
something I can't remember

junior:
newspaper
Academic Decathlon
something I can't remember

senior - I had finished pretty much all requirements except for English/government/econ:
newspaper
literary magazine
Academic Decathlon
AP Euro History
off period - got to show up 90 minutes late every other day

oh yeah, typing, took that too

oh and creative writing senior year (which I failed, because I skipped the final - kind of want to go back to apologize to that teacher)

Man, you people had interesting high schools. Mine just had drama and creative writing and other basic stuff. The highlight was psychology, in which we viewed no less than eleven full length Hollywood feature films, featuring provocative thinkpieces such as What About Bob? and The Sixth Sense.

Psychology/Sociology (one term each), which everyone called Psych/Sosh - great, remarkably walrus-like teacher whose main teaching method was to pose a 'controversial' question at the beginning of class--like "Can pets think?" --the ensuing argument would take up all of the class period, meaning he wouldn't have to actually teach.
Two years of Latin -Awesome old eccentric teacher who'd been a warden in Texas somehow like forty years prior to our time with him and invited us over to his house once to basically hurl insults at us. he died a couple years after I graduated ;_;
Photography (<--met a girlfriend in that)
Yes Typing! (Although I sort of remember it was called keyboarding wtf?)
Oh yeah and CHOIR.

Like someone would be all "you wanna go get some grub?" and I'd be all like "nah, man, I got psych/sosh, I'll check with you laters."

I don't completely remember, but I think I took AP courses in English, American History, European History, Calculus, and Physics, as well as Computer Science (AP?) and Econ. I'm pretty sure I didn't take the political theory class. We had to take a language up to a certain point and mine was French and only up to that point. I was in the Glee Club (and, by the end of school, mostly as a matter of seniority, the 'Boys Ensemble'), which counted as classes, and did some theater (crew early on, later some small, comedic (stoic- or deadpan-comedic, of course) acting roles), which I think also 'counted', and also took a music theory class, a music history class, at least some sort of studio art class (don't remember how elective or broad this was, tho I remember 'printmaking' being involved). I also wrote and ultimately co-edited two publications, but these didn't count as classes as far as I remember.

^1600 on SATs.

xpost G00b, our psychology class was taught in similar fashion by a man with the curriculum-appropriate name of Dr. Richard Koch. Yes, he did insist we call him Dick.

i took two english classes senior year, AP english and regular american lit, because i liked english and i genuinely thought it would be fun.

it was not.

forgotten soph elective = Computer Science (pathetic C++ skillz) - this was basically 'typing' for nerds

also took intro to film and an amazing class taught by an amazing guy called "the other wall" about race in america--looking back on it i was sort of unconscionably conservative and probably said some pretty racist shit, but it was one of those "life-changing" classes or whatever you call them, still smarter than 90% of classes ive taken in lol college

at the height of the dot-com boom, so I thought if I stuck with it I would be rich
quickly realized I'd kill myself writing code all day, that's why all my later electives were completely useless in terms of me not being poor

I did Media and it was horrid - a combination of nerds just when South Park started showing on TV (around '97/'98) and skateboard dudes wanting to film "some fully sik trix".

Highlight was the skateboarders coming up with a flyer for our mini film festival, containing a picture of an attractive woman in a bikini and the tagline "The Film Festival will make you COME" without any irony whatsoever.

are you saying I got a 1600 on the SAT, suzy? hardly, tho under the current regime I think I would have.

wrote and ultimately co-edited

wrote for

I took drama courses during tenth and eleventh grade. I was something of a drama geek for a while. Then I got tired of the sort of people who gravitated to drama and I reformed. I still love good acting.

In twelfth grade I took a creative writing course from my father, who taught English in my high school. Before he consented to have me in his class (there was no other creative writing course), we had a brief but necessary discussion about the ground rules I was to observe. It worked out ok.

a girl my sister and i waited for the bus with got a pre-recentering 1600. she's now an md/phd.

I did horribly in Physics, btw

I loathed Econ and its teacher. Never seriously studying it is one of my big regrets.

I did Drama partly because I really liked it and partly because the Drama teacher was always flirting with me.

Nobody got arrested and now I do Theatresports...

I'm not counting AP classes as electives. I mean, I guess I only really needed to pass pre-calculus to graduate, but calculus was sort of expected for students on a honors track who had done well in other math courses. And the AP courses I took in English and history were just the honors versions of classes I needed to take, anyway.

The thing about the electives I'm talking about is that since GPA at my high school was weighted for honors and AP classes, I was actually bringing my GPA down by taking them.

One I forgot: Sunrise Singers (sophomore and junior year), which was the school's main choral group and was so named because it was before school started, from 7 to 7:45 AM.

I had an art teacher who pretty much graded you inverse to your cup size. But I managed to get an A on my final project by making a detailed penciling of an '80s Calvin Klien model's ass. "God shading," he said. RIGHT.

Girls w/big tits got 'help' on with their aprons. :(

a music history class

actually, I think it was more 'appreciation' than 'history'?

ugh we had this awful physics teacher who had pictures of all his favorite female students lining the inside of his office. i can't believe he never got fired.

xpost

I should mention that my Drama teacher was female, by the way...

one of our studio art guys was a (half?) Vietnamese dude who played an awesome tele and helped run the semi-unofficial annual rock show.

Gab, of course I was kidding about the SAT but yo action-packed schedule and serious potential for My Hothouse Hell.

Ancient Greek
Physics
Economics

I wonder if this Dr. Koch would prefer two tapes or two CDs?

I guess this is like which GCSEs did you do, in which case:

Combined Science
CDT
German
Geography

(Maths, French, English were compulsory)

and Additional Maths

Sophomore: Music Theory I
Junior: Music Theory II
Senior: Music Theory III; Band Assistant; Video Editing; Typing

I haven't seriously played music since freshman year in college or something. Still, it was a fun group of people.

If it makes you feel better, we had no swimming pool and no orchestra (lots of people seem to be baffled when I tell them that).

Ha! My high school didn't even have a FOOTBALL FIELD. The field was over at the middle school and was shared by the 7th grade, 8th grade and HS teams.

Gcse

Geography
German
Design technology

Maths
English
English lit
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
French

Were compulsory

A-level

Maths
Physics
Chemistry
Design

After school activities

Book-binding
Theatre-tech

my music theory class may have been a 2nd-level class (or maybe i took 2?). i know there was 'composition' involved.