Reply #43: True, true.

[Jackhammer Jesus]

I thought the same kind of thing when I was in HS. The curriculum is too strict, and kids ought to have more say in what they take. Obviously, we know better than anyone else what our interests are and what we're going to be doing after high school. I think the administrators and such just think that we should be REQUIRED to take certain classes so that we won't avoid courses because we think they're too difficult - not because they're not going to have any significance for us.

If I had a say in it, I would have been done taking math courses as soon as I had a choice. I stuck with it, but I'm sad to say I've yet to have to foil or use Pythagorean Theorem in real life. Who'd have thought?!

And as far as teaching not going far enough, don't even get me into that. I had a few wasted classes in my HS years because the teachers didn't know how to teach and no one cared to make the extra effort to understand what we weren't being taught.