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Nobody starts with calculus. In HS for me it was geo-trig-calc 1+2. Probably had some probability in there but not an entire class.
Thought I wanted to be a math or science major but Calc3 I got a gentleman's C and diff eq lasted a week before I cried uncle.
But probably 4 or 5 courses in college and beyond were made more easily possible by having a firm high-school-level calc background. Others had to take basic calc concurrently or prior to these courses.
Brilliant mathematical minds fascinate me ... it all goes right over my head.
You may be right. A frequent theme emerging from the thread is that any given subject can be useful or useless, depending on how it's taught. Though I still don't see the use in algebra or trigonometry, in everyday life.
The skills learned in algebra are based on the idea that you can manipulate an equation by doing the same thing to both sides to create another equation that's the same value, but written differently. When I teach algebra, I talk about the idea that solving equations is all about rewriting the same thing differently, turning it around in your head and on paper until you get it into a form that tells you what you want to know.
In that sense, you use algebra all the time in real life. It might not happen to involve numbers, but the skills are still there. Say you get home from school one day and you can't find your key. How would you get into your house? You'd probably do some version of turning the problem around, maybe check the windows to see if you could get in that way, maybe retrace your steps to see if you dropped your keys somewhere. Eventually, something would work out, and you'd figure out a way to get into your house. Or, say you're having trouble figuring out why your significant other is mad at you. You'd again be turning the problem around in your head, working one step at a time and going over what you know, until you find the angle that makes the reason for his/her anger clear.
Trigonometry is anything you calculate using triangles.
In construction we need trigonometry to calculate the following:
Measuring fields, lots and areas;
Making walls parallel and perpendicular;
Installing ceramic tiles;
Roof inclination;
The height of the building, the width length etc. and the many other such things where it becomes necessary to use trigonometry.
Its also very telling given the horrifying decline in reading comprehension!
I think some of us in the thread replied to the highlighted part, you know, the stuff we apply in real life lol
Originally Posted by kletter1mann It's quite astonishing how many posters in this thread apparently value only that from which they can draw a straight line to some kind of vocation. Apparently the "soft" stuff isn't valued greatly, though that's the same stuff that teaches you how to think, to reason, to make decisions or to expand one's modes of thought. IOW, how to be a better human being. This outlook is actually very telling given the horrifying decline in the national discourse.
It seems the lack of reading comprehension is your own.
Or are we to conclude that those items I mentioned aren't things you apply in real life?
The problem is (and I'll admit I'm talking more about college than high school here), taking a few token classes outside your major does not make you well-rounded. When I was an undergrad (not at MIT, despite what another poster said in a locked thread), STEM majors would take Music 101 to meet our fine arts requirement. That class was an total joke, easy A. Liberal arts majors would take Animal Science 101 to meet their science requirement. Part of the problem is, if you need a certain GPA to keep a scholarship, you are forced to take the easiest classes possible, especially outside of your major. A few joke classes outside your major does not make you well rounded.
I didn't need a particular GPA to keep scholarships, but, I definitely wanted to keep that GPA up. A Physics degree, just a BS, but with a 3.75 GPA helped me get the first few jobs, and may have been helpful even 10 years out of school. So I was eager to minimize my exposure on non-STEM classes, I'm not saying they were trivial or of no use to me, but I wanted to save most of my energy for the "main event" stuff.
History classes were so boring I never really learn anything except bit and pieces of history. The only history class I really like was about Egypt and the pyramid. It was so boring I sleep in class all the time that I got the name as "Sleeping Beauty" and got a certificate.
You may be right. A frequent theme emerging from the thread is that any given subject can be useful or useless, depending on how it's taught. Though I still don't see the use in algebra or trigonometry, in everyday life.
What I discovered, once I really thought about it, was that math was so pure and logical, that it taught me how to reason: inductively, deductively, etc. It also taught me how to see things in groups, in relationships, and in possible outcomes.
It's hard for me to say what was useful or not in high school. I was having so many problems at home, I didn't learn anything in any of my classes. I flunked all my math classes but when I went to community college and had to start math classes all over again, I found I liked math and was also good with numbers. Plus, I use algebra and trig an awful lot today, almost 30 years later.
I also had a lot more interest in history when I took it in college. Ditto chemistry, social studies, and psychology. I think what happened to me is I found out that if I had a halfway decent teacher, I could be interested in just about any subject and then do well in it. Subjects didn't necessarily have to be useful for me to be interested in them. Once I was away from my parents, I really found I liked learning new things.
But when it came to high school, at the time I wasn't interested in any of my subjects and so generally, they were all useless to me then.
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