Talking points: Which subject would you drop in school, and why?
Hate it when you can't talk back? Well, you can with Young Post. Have your say and share with students around Hong Kong.
Tracy Wong, 16, Carmel Secondary School
While my classmates are busy dropping their electives, I am still enjoying learning new things. I don't feel like dropping any of the electives; I'm passionate about them all.
Yet there's one subject I do hate and long to drop. That is liberal studies. After studying this subject for a year, I've found that it overlaps Chinese and English.
Do we really need liberal studies? As everybody knows, schools force us to read newspapers mainly because of this subject. As a result, we rarely have time to relax. I think it's all a little too much.
Jason Hung, 16, Lai King Catholic Secondary School
I would definitely drop maths in school if this were not strictly forbidden. In spite of being one of the core subjects, maths is not as essential as the other subjects.
Languages are very useful because we can use them to communicate with others; science can help us know more about food and medicine.
But we never use the complex maths formulas in our daily lives. So I don't believe maths is a useful subject.
Odessa Fung, 13, Diocesan Girls' School
I would drop history. Originally I found it was an interesting subject.
However, history textbooks mainly focus on "important events" that happened over a certain period of time. They ignore the relationship between such incidents, and the flow of historical events.
I find it hard to connect the different periods of time; it's all very confusing.
Giselle Chan, 18, City University of Hong Kong
Mathematics should be dropped completely. The things I learned in maths classes make no difference to my everyday life, but only pulled down my overall grades.
I think this subject is "poisonous" for arts students like me. The red "F" on the maths column ruins our report cards, no matter how many A's we've got for languages and history.
And, most importantly, who needs to learn maths when we can simply use a calculator?
Henry Lui, 14, Sha Tin College
I was able to choose most of the subjects I will take for iGCSE, but I'm not a big fan of some of the compulsory ones.
As part of our curriculum, we have a subject called "Global Thinking Skills", where we sit in a classroom, blabber on about things in society and take away nothing from the lesson.
I definitely believe that our time should be used somewhere else.
Tell us if there is a subject in school you’d like to drop in the comment box below.
In the next Talking Points, we’ll be discussing: If you were given 20 hectares of land in the middle of Central, what would you do with it?
Other conversations:
- What don’t we like about Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying?
- If I could change one thing about myself, what would it be?
- What do you think about e-learning?
- How can we eliminate the problem of caged homes and subdivided flats in Hong Kong?
- "If I were gay/lesbian, I would like to tell the world ..."
- Things I wish to know in life that I never learn about in school
- What I wish I could tell my parents
- The school rule I would change if I were the principal
- How should schools start their Monday morning assembly?