What has been the most important school subject in your adult life?

[OneUmberJoker]

Maths

Don't you ever use a laptop? Write emails?

I take minutes at meetings, and write lots of emails and do a lot of copywritingg at work. I could work much faster if I could touch type.

I use a keyboard every single day. Being able to touch type makes it all a lot quicker and easier. It also meant I didn't have to pay anyone to type up my dissertation or anything.

Apart from English and Maths, French.
Also a secretarial course, after I dropped out of uni, served me very well. Touch typing helpful always, s/hand great for quick notes. It got me my first job in the City.

Maths.
History - learning about source analysis.

Economics

Agree about touch-typing, although for years when I was younger I didn’t admit to it at work, for (the quite realistic in those days) fear of ending up doing everyone’s typing.

Then it’s a toss up between History and Commerce (which I guess is business studies these days).

Well if your job involves that then that makes sense.
I've never had an office type job so I've never had the need.
I was just a bit baffled that so many people on the thread were saying it. It's never been on my radar as something especially vital to learn.
I was just curious.

English, then science.

English. Except for basic adding and subtracting, multiplication and dividing (which can all be done on my phone anyway, I've never needed the majority of the maths I learnt. Especially secondary maths.

Maths

i started out just studying politics. I then realized that the real excitement was decision theory. That meant going back and taking advanced mathematics courses. I now use those studies in my career on a daily basis.

English and Geography

I half taught myself a while back using one of those online courses. Need to go back and finish it!
Touch typing using a keyboard is much much quicker than finger pecking! I use it for emails mostly (some of them quite long!).

Many jobs involve writing up notes or reports and all sorts of other things where 'office work' isn't seen as been a big part of the job.

Many, many people also volunteer or take part in hobbies or activities when things are written up AGMs are held, grant applications need to be completed.

Don't you ever write to companies - more generally now by e-mail rather than printing out as a letter.

I mean, I'm using my laptop now as I MN.

Then everyone who goes to University, or studies anything later in life.

I'd say it was more surprising to find people or working age who never use a keyboard

I'm really disappointed that more of you don't appreciate the importance of biology, (my subject).
Health and disease, fitness and exercise, how your body works, reproduction, sex, pregnancy and birth, food hygiene, vaccinations, recent stem cell developments, the environment and ecology. You may not use it for your jobs but we all need a decent understanding of the living world.

I volunteer with a charity and take the minutes for various meetings. We communicate via WhatsApp and many (too many) emails.

I prefer to use a laptop for MN as well.

😁
I have DD for that.

Maths for me. Although I do remember teachers saying we would need to be able to do mental arithmetic as we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pocket…. How times have changed.

I actually learnt more about grammar when I briefly worked in a primary school than I did when I was a pupil at school myself.

Touch typing and law degree.

Art
Reading
Touch typing
Swimming

Maths - I didn’t pursue a maths-based job initially but a good grounding in maths and logic/ principles of computational thinking has given me so many career opportunities later in life. For enjoyment, English and Music and languages - but that’s not one subject so I’m cheating.

Ancient History

Any emails etc I write I just do on my phone with one finger 😂
I had a laptop but rarely used it.
Luckily I rarely need to write (type) much that involves a high amount of words so the need to touch type has passed me by.
(everything had to be handwritten in my school days)

English lit, history and sociology 😭😭

My a levels

English

While I certainly appreciate the importance of biology I didn’t get the useful parts of my knowledge from school.

Because of my parents’ professions we had textbooks and weekly / monthly magazine subscriptions concerning both physical and mental health - and as an avid reader I was reading these from infant school age. Then I learned a fair bit of quite specific stuff from Jackie, and Cosmopolitan. And in adult life I don’t think a day’s gone by when I haven’t read at least two broadsheet newspaper articles on health, or listened to a radio article on medical science. And my GPs surgery and local health authority are very keen for me to be constantly informed of what I should be doing next, so as not to become a burden on the NHS and the State.

Set beside all that, the dry theory on plants that is all I recall from school Biology was really a very neglible part of my body of knowledge.