There are things you learn in school that are of the utmost importance—and then there are those things you learn that just take up room in your brain for no apparent reason.

In a recent Reddit thread, people shared the most useless pieces of information they learned in school. These are so useless that the only time they ever used it was right now—to talk about how useless they really are!

1. A Random Animal Fact

   “Badgers will bite your legs until they hear a crack, so put pine cones in your boots.I was told this almost every time we had a field trip to the woods. I was convinced badgers would be a constant danger my whole life. To this day, I’ve only ever seen a single badger and he kept his distance.”

2. MLA Format

   “You’ll write all of your college papers in MLA format so learn it and learn it well…get to college and it’s APA format or GTFO.”

3. How to Type on a Flip Phone

   “In 1st grade we had to learn how to type on a flip phone (on a dialpad instead of a QWERTY layout). My teacher said, ‘You’ll need to know this to use a cell phone’ and made us spend a whole day learning it. The first cellphone I got (ini 7th grade) was a smartphone with a touchscreen.”

4. Cursive

   “How to write in cursive, my class had hours of lessons through a few weeks of school. It slowed down my writing so much and I just ditched it realizing how little people actually care about it.”

5. Nutrition

   “When I started elementary school it was the four food groups. By high school it was the food pyramid, and by college it was myplate. They have absolutely no idea about nutritional guidelines, they constantly change them and can’t make up their minds. It’s way too dizzying to try to keep up. Who knows what it’ll become next?”

6. Giving a Proper Handshake

   “I had a class in HANDSHAKES. Apparently because giving a good handshake was ‘respectable’ we were shown a PowerPoint on how to do it and were given ‘homework’ to PRACTICE it on others because we couldn’t practice it among ourselves. All of this was of course in the height of the pandemic and, obviously, no handshakes are allowed. Wtf school.”

7. Calculus

   “Recently I was in college calculus class. My instructor (math PhD student) looked at a lesson. He said, ‘you will never use this, but I’m required to teach it so we will do the homework in class and I will make sure it’s not on the test.’”

8. Facts From a Literature Book

   “EVERYTHING. Poems. Stories. Summaries. Answers of questions in the books. And so on. How are these supposed to help in life?”

9. How to Play Hot Cross Buns on the Recorder

   “I think they still teach this because teachers were driven insane by this by their children and now want all future generations to drive their parents to insanity.”

10. The Tongue Map

    “It’s false, and they still teach it after more than 20 years.”

11. Citing Sources By Hand

    “There are tons of websites where you can do it for free. Also, a year after we learned to do it by hand they made us learn how to use this online program that did it for us anyway.”

12. The Format of an Informal Letter

    “Why. Just why.”

13. How to Balance a Checkbook

    “I’ve written checks, but have never had to balance it. Everything is electronic now.”

What’s the most useless piece of information you ever learned?