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gjm comments on Open thread, Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Basic chemistry. I hated chemistry the first 2-3 of years of high school (UK; I don't know if it's taught differently elsewhere). It was all about laundry lists of chemicals, their apparently random properties, and mixing them according to haphazard instructions with results that very occasionally corresponded approximately with what we were informed they should be. We were sort of shown the periodic table, of course, but not really enlightened as to what it all meant. I found it boring and pointless. I hated memorising the properties and relationships of the chemicals we were supposed to know about.
Then, all of a sudden (I think right at the start of year 10), they told us about electron shells. There was rhyme! There was reason! There were underlying, and actually rather enthralling and beautiful, explanations! The periodic table made SO MUCH SENSE. It was too late for me... I had already pretty much solidified in my dislike of chemistry, and had decided not to take an excessive amount of science at GCSE because similar (though less obvious) things had happened in biology and physics, too. But at least I did get that small set of revelations. Why on earth they didn't explain it to us like that right from the start, I have no idea. I would have loved it.
I took A-level chemistry (= last two years of high school in the UK, ages ~16-18) and while indeed we learned a bit about electron shells and all that, I still found it really frustrating for similar reasons.
The thing I remember hating most was a category of question that was pretty much guaranteed to be in the exams. It went like this: "Describe and explain how property P varies across the elements down column C of the periodic table". And the answer was always this: "As we go down column C of the periodic table, characteristic A increases, which tends to increase property P, while characteristic B decreases, which tends to decrease property P." followed by some explanation of how (e.g.) the effect of A predominates to begin with but B is more important for the later elements, so that property P increases and then decreases. Or B always predominates, so property P just decreases. Or some other arbitrary fact about how A and B interact that you couldn't possibly work out using A-level chemistry.
So it was a big exercise in fake explanations. Really, you just had to learn what property P does as you go down column C of the periodic table, and then to answer these questions you also had to be able to trot out these descriptions of the underlying phenomena that do nothing at all to help you determine the answer to the questions.
The underlying problem here is that chemistry is really quantum mechanics, and figuring out these questions from first principles is way beyond what high-school students can do.
I seem to have had a different A-Level experience from you (1998-2000). There was a certain amount of learn-this-trend-by-rote, but I would easily class A-Level chemistry (which I didn't even do that well in) as one of the most practicably useful subject choices I've taken.
There's a bunch of stuff I know which my other similarly-educated peers don't, and which I attribute to A-Level chemistry. Some of it is everyday stuff about which paint and glue and cleaning products are appropriate for which purpose. Some of it is useful for reasoning about topical scientific claims, such as biofuels, pharmaceuticals or nutrition.
I even have a control case for this, in that my sister and I studied all the same subjects, only she took electronics at A-Level over chemistry. When one of us says something "obvious" which the other person doesn't recognise as such, we have a pretty good idea where it came from.
Just to be clear, I didn't make any comment on how useful A-level chemistry in the UK is (or was in ~1986-1988 when I took it). Only on the annoying pseudo-explanations I had to learn to give. (I expect there are useful things that I know only because I studied chemistry at school, but it's hard to be sure because by now I've learned a lot of other things and forgotten a lot of what I learned at school.)
Yeah, you're never going to get fully to the bottom of things in a high school class. But it really does help when the curriculum at least tries to point you in the right direction!