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.
A = pi*r2*h/3
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
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.
Working in agriculture and you’ll find the need to calculate the area or volume or something very often.
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.
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.
When I’m in a complaining about things that are actually good competition and my opponent is crankyrebel
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.
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.
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.
‘useful,’ I doubt it for most people. Informative, like watching how to build a turbine engine, which you would probably never do in your lifetime unless you were an Aerospace engineer.
People thinking knowledge outside their career is useless is how we ended up with flat earthers, climate change deniers, anti vaxxers, anti maskers, and 5G conspiracy theorists. Most of those people are not objectively stupid, but they work in industries not closely related to science and instead of trying to learn how science actually works, they just blindly go with their assumptions and post their own opinions online thinking they’re just as much an authority on it as the actual experts. And then more people ignorant of science end up thinking their intuition makes more sense than the published knowledge so they start denying science too.
So i agree that learning things like this is important but feel the need to point out the reason we have flat earthers and other nonsense is because the capitalist ruling classes benefit from an uneducated populace and purposefully push nonsense conspiracies in the media to divide and confuse the working class. Yes education can help with these things, but plenty of highly educated people believe in this stuff too.
IMO all people should receive a broad general education. It’s good for the individual and for society. Even a poet should have at least a basic understanding of how an engine works and have some exposure to mathematics or whatever.
Even a poet should have at least a basic understanding of how an engine works
On the other hand, writers/artists trying to incorporate science and technology into their art while not actually understanding how the science/technology works are hilarious to the people that do.
(And I say this both as someone who somewhat knows technology and as an amateur sci-fi writer who definitely gets a ton of stuff wrong.)
Nowhere in the meme did it suggest removing it from the education system. It still doesn’t mean it is useful for most people, outside of niche fields. The two things can both be true.
I’ll disagree. It is useful. You benefit from going through learning this stuff regardless.
You forget most of what you learn if your memory muscle is not flexed regularly, especially on complex math equations and the like, so I would say it is useless for those that fall into this category.
You’ll forget “exactly” how you did it. Sure.
But you’ll remember that you solved something “similar” before and know that you can trace back or use some keywords in google/bing/ddg/etc to find a blog or something that goes over it in detail. Helping you solve the issue.
If you never learn it in the first place. You’ll never know it’s there.
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.
Everything is like… connected, man.
I am telling you the importance of learning and you call me a pothead.
No, I’m actually agreeing with you completely. I can see why you took it that way though. My fault.
i know several things that are actively detrimental to my own wellbeing
