Raise your hand as soon as you think of something you were taught in high school that has been proven now what you thought then — stuff that has no practical value to your life.

Now that your hand is raised, let’s get more specific. To be fair, as teenagers, we thought pretty much everything we were taught was useless information, and even if we were given a teacher’s credible answer about why we needed to know it for the future, we cocked our heads like puppy dogs because the future for us was the next weekend coming up to hang out with our friends.

So with all due respect for those teachers who tried to explain the importance of their subject matter, I’m still wondering why I needed to learn some of what they tried to teach me.

Let’s begin with any advanced math class that went beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I’m still confused by algebraic formulas. Once you add letters to number equations, I’m lost. Other than the stock reply, “You have to know this for college, (which I found was not true unless you were preparing for a specific math-related career), I was also told, “Algebra is about finding the unknown quantity.” Well, for me, the only unknown quantity I need to know now is balancing my checkbook, which, by the way, I was not taught in school.

I was required to take a geometry class and was challenged to find out the volumes of dimensions and spaces. The wise guy inside my brain raised his hand one day and asked the teacher this question: “Why do I have to learn this?”

“Well, what if you want to a paint a 10-by-12 room and you had to figure out how many gallons of paint you needed for the job. You have to know the volume of the room and to know how many cans to buy.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Then how would you know how much paint you’ll need for a room that size?”

“I’ll go to the hardware store and ask the guy behind the counter.”

My love for history never came from a textbook or a teacher. We had to memorize names of people and dates of events for tests. Who cared what year Lewis and Clark crossed the Louisiana Territory? I wanted to know about the perils they faced on their journey. I wanted to feel like I was with them!

There’s a great scene from the movie “Teachers” that illustrates this point. A man escapes from a mental institution and wanders into an inner city public high school. The secretary presumes he’s the substitute for a history teacher whom the students dislike, so she hands him his class schedule.

So he walks into the assigned history class and finds students throwing their history books out the windows. He laughs, grabs a book and tosses it out the window and he immediately gains their respect.

In the mean time, security guards from the institution arrive at the school and the principal realizes that the substitute teacher is the man who escaped from the facility. They rush to his classroom and find the students had arranged their desks in the shape of a boat. He stood in the middle wearing a three-corner hat and a white wig he had found somewhere. He looked just like George Washington.

“Row, mates, row!” he shouted at the students as they moved their pretend oars through the pretend water. “We must cross the Delaware so we can take up position to stop the British advance!”

As security guards wrapped him in a straitjacket and dragged him toward the door, he saluted the students and they stood up and saluted back to their general.

Now why didn’t I have a “crazy” history teacher like him?

Then again, thinking about useless stuff is still thought-provoking. Science says that if we don’t use our minds, we’ll lose our minds.

To turn the topic question around, what should kids learn that isn’t being taught in most schools? Checkbook balancing, understanding credit card interest might be good. How about knowing how to make minor electrical and plumbing repairs so we don’t have to pay the serviceman $80 before he even says hello. Back in the day, I would add auto repair to the list, but not today. The battery in my 2011 GMC Acadia is under the back seat and I haven’t found the oil filter yet.

I didn’t have much interest in high school curriculum, and as life would shoot an arrow of irony my way, I became a teacher. One day, I was asked this question by a student in my English class.

“Why do I have to know Emily Dickinson’s poems?” I paused, looked down at the textbook at her poem titled “Death came for me, but I wasn’t ready” and I thought of an honest reply.

“I have no idea, but if you ever feel depressed and you want some sad company, read Emily.”

“Why would I want to do that?” he asked.

“Exactly,” I replied. I closed the book and dismissed the class.

Rich Strack can be reached at katehep11@gmail.com.