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Good thing they didn't teach me how to think in school, who needs that with AIs anyway? /s
Good luck on your next painting project. If you make things, areas become very important.
Advanced calculus is mandatory, eg. for your income statement.
The contempt for education is mind-boggling even on Lemmy.
There's a weird anti-intellectual contingent on Lemmy. I saw a dude the other day who was going on about how debt was the ultimate evil and then when questioned on it said that the entire study of economics was a conspiracy to make people want debt. Now there are kooky people on all platforms but this guy was getting upvoted a decent amount. I have also been downvoted a few times for pointing out flat out inaccuracies people have said about various religions and their beliefs because "religion bad" outweighs all logic.
The literal Science Memes community was mocking higher education and the thread was full of people trying to convince others to never go to college. It's bizarre how strong the anti-education sentiment is around here.
Critical thinking is important, y'all.
It’s not about the area of the cone. It’s about dissecting a problem to find that it is composed of smaller problems that you can solve more easily. It’s about recognizing the similarities to what you know in something you haven’t seen before.
Unfortunately that isn’t something you can teach without lots of arbitrary and pointless examples.
Also as a joke, it’s so unoriginal. I’ve seen a million of these same jokes about ‘useless stuff they taught you in school’ and they’re all so unfunny and tired—especially after the first time. Say something new.
All of these people who don’t apply the things they learn in school just don’t really think that much in my opinion.
When I was in the military in a leadership class, we had to use a protractor to calculate angles and distances on the map given a bunch of coordinates. I realized these were all right triangles, said fuck the protractor, and used trigonometry to get exact answers. I earned distinguished honor graduate, ie top of the class, despite my lab nerd POG ass being mixed in with a ton of infantry and ranger battalion guys.
I use dimensional analysis on a near daily basis because it’s just so damn handy. You can convert anything to nearly anything else as long as you have some numbers with the appropriate units in between.
Dimensional analysis needs to be taught way sooner (referring to USA education here). I'm sure I had some sense of it earlier, but it wasn't explicitly spelled out to me until college engineering courses. That's despite taking a significant number of AP and community college math and science courses in highschool. It seems like it should be part of middle school.
Working in agriculture and you'll find the need to calculate the area or volume or something very often.
one time the state of Indiana almost made pi equal to 3.2. This is the dumb shit that happens when you aren't introduced to these topics in school. Please don't return us to dark times.
All of these things were useful to be taught. Just because you never needed to dissect a frog again in your life doesn't mean you shouldn't have an understanding of biology that these types of exercises provide.
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Except special needs, in our daily life is often needed geometry, trigonometry and algebra more than we think, but in the professional use it's more like this:
I don't need to find the surface area of a cone to smoke it
Useless to you. I extremely need to know the Pythagorean Theorem for my work. Actually, absolutely everything I have ever been taught in math class ever, literally all of it and so much more, I have used. But I'm starting a PhD in electrical engineering in the fall, so I'm a bit biased 😆.
For me personally, dissecting frogs (well actually I dissected a clam) was probably a waste of time, but for at least some of my classmates it was probably helpful. Long division is important because it stimulates algorithmic thinking, which is important for living in a computerized world. Area of a trapezoid is important because... sometimes trapezoids show up, or you can approximate a more complicated shape with a trapezoid whose properties are well understood.
Honestly I think engineers of all kinds can benefit from more study of biological systems. As an engineer myself, I find there's a lot of inspiration to be gained by looking at life and understanding how it works. My primary work is controls and learning that biological muscle operates as bang bang control was mindblowing. Like look at the agility and complexity achieved by essentially a fuck load of on off actuators. It shows how far you can go with extremely simple methods and honestly helped me chill the fuck out about making everything perfect.
Honestly I think engineers of all kinds can benefit from more study of biological systems.
Agreed. My point was more that I didn't really learn much from actually dissecting a real animal. Like I probably would have learned more from reading a book or watching someone else do the dissection.
It's also important for people who will never use it again. Learning algebra and geometry teaches you how to think critically and logically. So yeah, the gas station attendant over here may never use the cone area formula ever again, but at least it's not magic to them.
Another important thing is that there's no such thing as knowledge that you won't need or won't use.
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Sometimes what they're teaching you isn't what they're teaching you.
Maybe you don't need to know how to find the exact surface area of a cone ever again, but the idea of unwrapping a cone to measure the surface area leaves an impression of a technique for deconstructing a problem, or that problems can be deconstructed into simpler parts at all. It also leaves you with a feel for roughly what the surface area of different shapes would be.
Using a protractor teaches you how to measure accurately and use tools.
Cursive and recorder teaches hand eye coordination, and music is just fundamental to human beings.
Then again maybe you do need to find the surface area of a cone one day, and you could probably go ahead and work out how that would be done even if you don't remember exactly.
What's the counterproposal for a curriculum? I'm genuinely curious here, not trying to jump down anyone's throat. What would school look like without these things?
Well, concepts come to me easy and then stick with me forever. But memorization? Not at all, thus i'm not fit for the science route.
That's why in ny opinion it's criminal that for most high school math stops before calculus. Calculus wraps up so many loose ends and replaces rote memorization techniques with understanding. Why exactly is the area of a ___ = (formula)? Calculus answers that.
The quadratic formula too, calc replaces it. In fact if I had my way with the curriculum we would skip that one entirety in algebra. I'd also throw in a statistics class, which would directly impact just about everyone's lives, but that's another matter.
I never learned my times tables either. We don't teach them anymore anyway.
A = pi*r^2^*h/3
That listicle in the link includes as 2 of the 13 items using a protractor and knowing the pythagorean theorem.
I have needed both of those things just this summer, and just as part of a hobby! When building things even just knowing the 3-4-5 shortcut for the pythagorean theorem is incredibly handy.
Yeah this seems generally opposed to the concept of a general education. I get that many people don't like that they had to learn all these things in an environment that generally sucked to be in, but also basic understanding of math, science, language, music, etc is just a nice thing for everyone to possess.
Like several of these things will be tangentially encountered at various points in your life. Yeah I've never had to write in cursive, but I've had to read it. I haven't done much chemistry since college, but carbon sure comes into the news a whole lot. I don't use a protractor much, but I've had to imagine them for various uses of space. I don't diagram sentences often, but it's really useful when learning a foreign language, and also way too much of the country thinks pronouns were invented in the 21st century. Communal making of music is something that used to be normal as a fun way to pass an evening and recorders are cheap and easy for children to learn.
also basic understanding of math, science, language, music, etc is just a nice thing for everyone to possess
Hear, hear!
You know, it also kind of sucks to live among a bunch of ignoramuses that don't know how anything works, who fear and hate people who look and act different, and who fall for the most low-effort lies and propaganda out there.
And yeah, since my experience is that I enjoy and appreciate life more as I learn more about the universe, and I would like others to enjoy existence, it IS a nice thing for everyone to possess!
When I'm in a complaining about things that are actually good competition and my opponent is crankyrebel
I’m always sad for people who never have to use their math skills again. I love figuring things like that out, even if it’s for some dumb idea I’m drawing.
School is meant to introduce you to a wide variety of fields and disciplines to help you choose a career. You might not have had any interest in geometry, but at least some of your classmates did and they may well be architects or engineers by now. Meanwhile, you probably had other things in school you liked but the other kids didn't, which almost certainly influenced the kinds of jobs you want as an adult.
You can lead a horse to water ... I get the sentiment though. Schooling is a great idea that is too often poorly executed. I've found that educational materials for math and science sometimes have a circlejerk kind of attitude, like the authors are laughing at the thought of students struggling with a problem "left as an exercise to the reader" immediately following a wall of dense, incomprehensible text.
Where can I find examples of otherwise dry subjects taught well? Is there an educational system that's praised in the same way they praise Scandinavian prisons? Or is the pain of learning just a necessary evil?
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Some people can absently smoke a cigarette by the river, fully unaware of the fact that the volume of their tits has changed by .17% in the last 24 hours.
Honestly, i've had the need to use half of these things in my work. Of course, if you have a bs job, you dont require to know anything.
I guess if you're an ape-man living alone in the woods, a broad education is pretty useless. ;)
I just can’t believe they found a practical use for geometry.
Have you already heard about a thing called "carpentry" ?
Non science guy. More interested in an original source of that picture: Harry Henderson smoking a cig.
Though, I wish I had at least a broad comprehension of the maths involved. Would be neat while watching the new age of rockets flying into the abyss.
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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