Among all the scientific subjects, chemistry is the worst

The only science we did at my all girls school was Biology, ("This is the last time you will get marks for beautiful drawings. If there was sufficient time to do this in exams, all well and good, but there isn't. Your time would be better spent revising." Needless to say I failed!) although you could do Zoology at A level!
Another Maths dunce here - although I did love Geometry, working out what all the different angles were from one given. All that Sines and Cosines etc and log tables - nobody every explained what they actually were!
Years later I did GCSE maths as an adult and the tutor actually made things make sense!
I think a lot of our problems at school were that you didn't want to put up your hand and admit you didn't understand something for fear of peer ridicule, whereas as an adult I wouldn't care.
Even more years later working as a TA in a primary school I realised I was learning along with the kids in science lessons and decided to take GCSE Science, for which I got an overall A. There were 3 papers, Chemistry, Physics and Biology I think. I got A* for 2 of them but I can't now remember which.
At least at our school you didn't have to choose between Science and Arts although I always found it baffling that our 4 compulsory O levels were English Lit, English Lang, French and History, not Maths!

Being a girl in one of the first secondary modern schools in the country, science was deemed only for boys. The only science we were taught was biology, mainly gardening.

In my last year, we were taught human biology, all about periods. The poor teacher attempted to teach us about the facts of life but that was a step too far for the schools oldest female spinster coping with giggling 14 year girls.

The first time I had even heard of periodic tables, physics or chemistry was when my children did in their comphrehensive school.

I still don't understand chemistry especially the diagrams but have managed 60 years without it, so I am ok.

The semi selective school I attended announced at the start of the fifth form it was merging with two other secondary schools to form a single comprehensive for the town. My English, geography and maths teachers were all senior teachers involved in the merger, so we ended up with really poor stand ins. Everyone's grades suffered and sad to say the final year of the school's existence saw its worst results ever. I retook 3 O levels as my results were well below par and even the most intelligent boy in my form passed 6 O levels.

I loved all subjects at school and was frustrated that we had to whittle it down to 3 subjects for A level. I chose English French and maths, but got lost in maths. I would have loved to do more history, particularly European, and chemistry, particularly organic chemistry, and geography, particularly geology. These are some of the areas that have fascinated me later in life, some of which have been involved in jobs I have done.

Here in Germany you keep doing most subjects right up to Abitur at 18/19. English, maths, German are compulsory but you can "major" in social sciences, arts or science subjects.

Our grammar school only merged into a comprehensive with the secondary modern next door after I had left in 1972.

Some schools here do offer the International Baccalaureate instead of A levels. One of my family chose that as an alternative.