The dumbest assignment you've ever been given?

[Fanta Grape]

A small assignment for a Sound Design module - Find a sound or piece music that portrays the following three things:
1. Hope
2. Daylight

These 2 were easy. Then came number 3.

3. Tangerine

I don't think anyone in the class knew what they were doing for that last one.

Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds. DUH!

"Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees, and marmalade skies."

My favourite beatles song, too ...


Oh, and on topic, probably just all of year 12 English. It's made so that as long as you have a "knack" for the subject, you'll always do well. I wrote an assignment based on a movie which I slept through 80% on (got a B), spoke an oral based on a book that I never read (got a B), wrote an essay based on a different book which I never read (got a B), wrote a comparative essay based on the previous two books (got a B) and wrote an essay on the discourses Romeo and Juliet (got a B). To be fair, I actually liked the 10 pages of it I did read of R&J. I bite my thumb at you, Australian school system. How people actually failed at certain assignments baffled me. Didn't get a single A, didn't get a single C.

 

[mcnally86]

The worst would be for my circuits class. We were the test class for online homework. The first assignment had ten questions, 7 of which had errors which could not be fixed, and the right answer would be rejected. Almost every other assignment had at least one problem that was in error. This is worse when you consider that it takes no effort for a computer to solve basic circuits.

we... weren't in the same class were we?

It's possible, this was the Spring 2011 semester in a University of Wisconsin school.

Oh no then I was in a CC. We had teacher who used a speech to text program and never proofread. But it was really bad on tests. In the end he altered the letter grade on the computer tests because it was all wrong.

Anyway did you do your modeling on the computer of did you bread board your circuits?

 

[Loonyyy]

I had one teacher who set us an essay. We asked her what the question was, to which she replied "Nuclear Power". We told her we got that was the topic, but what was the question, what was the issue. She didn't seem to understand that an Essay usually needs a discursive element, and to be directed at a question. Her loss, my 22 page epic on Nuclear Power, the History of Nuclear Power, why Nuclear Power is awesome, came in at almost 5000 words without references, and was not stapleable. I don't think she even read it through before just deciding, screw it, top of the class.

 

[Souldead341]

The worst would be for my circuits class. We were the test class for online homework. The first assignment had ten questions, 7 of which had errors which could not be fixed, and the right answer would be rejected. Almost every other assignment had at least one problem that was in error. This is worse when you consider that it takes no effort for a computer to solve basic circuits.

we... weren't in the same class were we?

It's possible, this was the Spring 2011 semester in a University of Wisconsin school.

Oh no then I was in a CC. We had teacher who used a speech to text program and never proofread. But it was really bad on tests. In the end he altered the letter grade on the computer tests because it was all wrong.

Anyway did you do your modeling on the computer of did you bread board your circuits?

It was an intro course, so we did pretty much everything by hand, we needed to learn the formulas for that class. We did use Spice a couple of times for projects.

The teacher also blamed the first exam's average of 26% on the class, not the difficulty of the test. He didn't want to curve the class either.

 

[Sarah Kerrigan]

I had to write an assingment in Computer class about anything internet related. I ended up doing it on creepypasta and how the stories are made to scare, but are truly fake.

I had to stay up reading different creepypastas, and scared myself silly because of half of them. :/

Interesting topic though. Learned alot XD

 

[Username Redacted]

I was assigned as art project once where the teacher gave each student two contemporary artists at random and the assignment was to create a work that fused their styles together. Such a dumb project.

 

[Kukakkau]

1,200 words isn't all that much. That sounds like a fun assignment to me.

The worst assignment would have to be any time I've ever had to do a randomly assigned group project. I hate working with unreliable people.

It's not the word count that causes the problems it's just the sheer non sensical, counter-intuitive way of getting us to write it. When what we are really doing is designing a bio-weapon to use on another country

Im assuming this assignment used to be design a bio weapon/ design its counter measure. This just seems more politically correct.

That's our assumption as well but when you think of it simply it's a virus to kill humans that are "aliens". Just makes you think it's something that would end up on the Mexican border etc.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

I once forgot to bring my book to a class. So as punishment, I had to write a two page paper on the importance of bringing your book to class. I'm glad the teacher was kind of dense because that was the single most sarcastic thing I'd ever written.

Not quite an assignment, but I still had to write it.

 

[mcnally86]

I saw a dog fight once.

You are assuming aliens are from Mexico? It depends where you live. Aliens are from anywhere you aren't. You could be designing weapons to attack Canada or England or even yes Mexico.It is a bad idea to use a Bio-weapon. It is a worse bad idea to use one against anyone on your own continent though. But hey I don't design them so who am I to judge. If your teacher never says "extraterrestrial aliens" its safe to assume he is collecting data to attack South America.

 

[Kukakkau]

I saw a dog fight once.

You are assuming aliens are from Mexico? It depends where you live. Aliens are from anywhere you aren't. You could be designing weapons to attack Canada or England or even yes Mexico.It is a bad idea to use a Bio-weapon. It is a worse bad idea to use one against anyone on your own continent though. But hey I don't design them so who am I to judge. If your teacher never says "extraterrestrial aliens" its safe to assume he is collecting data to attack South America.

Uh, no I was just using an example of an area where that kind of "aliens" are known to be prominent. I was just saying with the human characteristics and using the word alien in the essay is what sprang to mind.

I'm not even from the US and yes I do know there are many kinds of immigrant aliens from all over.

But on topic yeah it's definetly not a good idea to use a bio-weapon in that senario. Or against people at all really.

 

[JaceArveduin]

That's not too hard. In 9th grade, the English teacher put us in groups and told us to write a love/hate letter between a famous celebrity couple. There was also another one from her that had something to do with singing or something... Needless to say, my egotistical and pissed self got an F on both of those assignments.

 

[TehXenos]

Our Year 10 English teacher had us write biographical essays on HER life, so she spent 6-7 lessons just telling us "interesting" things in our life, and if we did badly she took it super personal...
I wouldn't let her ego get the boost she wanted, so I made her sound impossibly boring. Just passed by the skin of my teeth, but I didn't give a f***.

 

[JasonBurnout16]

I remember reading a book called Moonfleet in Y7 at school. While the book was a popular book back in it's day, there was no way any teacher could get a bunch of kids to sit down and read it AS A GROUP for an hour a day. Then in Y9 we had to read 'Holes' - a good book, but not a Literary great. Yet once again this book was read IN CLASS AS A GROUP. I remember skipping ahead of everyone else, ignoring them and finishing the book by the time they had gotten about 1/3 through. Frustrated me that my time was pretty much wasted.

Funniest thing at the moment? Well I'm doing quite a serious Theology and Religion Course. Yet my housemates are doing (BA) Music at University and is in their second year. Yet I saw them coloring in with crayon and cutting pictures out of an Argos catologue the other day; I asked them what they were doing/what grade they expected and apparently that's "Taking an innitiative and I'll be really annoyed if I don't get at least a 2:1".

Pfft. Good luck with that...

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

Easily the stupidest assignment I ever received was everything involving "The House on Mango Street"
It's a shitty little book with no merits whatsoever, but we have to pretend it's big and important because a mexican woman wrote it about a mexican girl and her family in a hispanic-populated slum going to a predominantly mexican catholic school. in america.

I get it, folks. Different cultures exist. poverty exists. Poverty and nonwhites in america often can be found together. That sucks. But can we please get over it long enough to realize that this shitty little book is in fact a shitty little book and not high literature deserving praise? No? We can just move it down a few grades where the kids are less liable to realize how shitty it is, or make waves about the rape/sex references? Whatever

This is about my thoughts about being forced to read Catcher in the Rye. Poorly written book about a guy who can't spell flunking out of school and wandering New York aimlessly cussing at everything and dreaming of being a dude who keeps dumbass kids from running off a cliff. I asked my teacher what's supposed to be so special about it and she told me that it's because the main character is relatable. How the FUCK am I, an upper-middle class high school student having no problems in school, supposed to relate to some deadbeat moron whose idea of a good time is ranting to himself about how people in hotel windows are disgusting perverts? Hate that damn book.

And group reading in class was always aggravating, waiting for most of the students to stumble through their paragraphs at 15 words a minute. Let's teach them to read at their grade level before making them the bottleneck, no?

This this a thousand times this. What is it with people reading so goddamn slowly?

I'm glad someone else had trouble with slow-reading classmates.
Some other books to include in the list-o-hate are The Great Gatsby (mancrushes are not interesting, deep, or thought provoking. fuck nick, gatsby, and all their drunk friends) and "their eyes were watching god", a book that, while better than Mango Street, still shamelessly relies on RACISM! as opposed to quality writing or mildly interesting characters, and was selected by the girls in my class because "OMG oprah said to read it!". The other choice was Lord of the Flies.

I HATE lord of the flies.

it is an EXCELLENT book.

some of my hate for TEWWG may be colored by my hatred for that year's teacher, who literally, no exaggeration, did not understand personification, a literary tool that is taught AND MASTERED in second or third grade. Woman had no business teaching english, because she knew NOTHING ABOUT THE SUBJECT

 

[Tanis]

High School (around mid/early 2000s) - Speech n' Debate:
Support the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. A.C.T. 2...defend it.

I couldn't do it.