The thought of internet messaging with one’s thumbs is cracking me up!
They* teach* typos these days?
With me they didn’t have to- I perfected the art? Can I copyright that. Sad isn’t it to be known for your typos.
I agree with what people are saying with respect to trig, algebra, etc. I’ve used all those things since I finished school, and I’m a translator and political hack.
What I had absolutely no use for, on the other hand, was the estimated 500 hours of pre-calculus and calculus I had to take in high school and cégep. I literally have not found a single useful application for any of it in the ten years since I finished my last cal class, which is good because I can’t remember a millisecond of it.
As I pointed out in another thread, what I could really have used instead would have been a decent home ec. class – how to care for a house, cook meals, mend clothing, maintain sound financial health – you know, stuff I’ll have to do literally every day for the rest of my life.
Not much into 6/8 I take it? 
Bad Idea Jeans.
“Well, he’s an ex free-base addict, and he’s trying to turn around, and he needs a place to stay for a couple of months…”
A big benefit of math skills is in making quick decisions about which alternative to take. I truly enjoyed the look on the face of the manager at a car dealer when I proved to him, using some quickl algebra I did in my head, that the great financing alternative he offered me was a ripoff.
The only real use I’ve had for calculus, once I got out of undergrad school, was helping my kids with it. I agree that statistics would be a lot more useful. If news anchors knew statistics, maybe they wouldn’t be able to report the stuff they do with a straight face.
Gladly. All of the following are activities that I or people I know do voluntarily for fun. If you can’t do the math yourself, you are stuck relying on someone who can.
Fantasy Sports or just regular sports projections: To figure out what it takes to be mathematically eliminated you need math, specifically algebra. Stats also gets worked in there too, but for stats you really need algebra. Fantasy sports really makes me laugh because it is so much about the numbers and the kind of people I hear involved in it seem to be the same kind of people who eschewed math in school.
Cooking: I was following a recipe for maple fudge that called for cream with a certain percentage of milkfat. I had two different types of cream, and used algebra to find out how much of each to use.
Woodworking and carpentry: Plumb. Level. Square. and in the same Plane are by words of finish carpentry. I have used trig, algebra and lots of geometry here. Sometimes it is simple stuff from using the 3,4,5 right triangle to make sure a corner is square, but other times it is more complicated like blowing up a design using polar coordinates to project it out a bit. Also, more of the algebra of mixing solutions for solvents and finish components. Recently I designed a mantel and used math quite a bit getting the proportions to work out and keep elements squares and not rectangles. Not to mention measuring diagonals to make sure frames are square.
Gardening: More of the algebra of mixing solutions, this time for fertilizers, trig to find out the height of things I can’t measure directly, geometry to find pleasing proportions.
knitting and crocheting: algebra for lots of things from calculating how much yarn to buy to what numbers of stitches to use in a pattern. A friend used calculus when making a pattern for making knitted fruit. Some people are doing some very interesting knitting and crochet work based on some very complex mathematics indeed.
Aquariums and fishkeeping: Algebra and trig used to figure out solutions and how many fish of what size an aquarium will support what combination of which fish. Once a friend asked about how to adjust the salinity in his aquarium gradually because it measured other than ideal but he did not want to shock the fish with a change. The real answer to that question used calculus, but could be approximated with algebra.
Amateur Radio: This can take algebra, trig, geometry, and even calculus. How long does the antenna need to be? What shape? What direction is the signal coming from? All answered by math.
Sailing: This is one of the reasons we invented trig.
Thank god I don’t do any of those things.
Maths isn’t just taught because factoring a polynomial is fun. The careful, precise reasoning necessary in mathematics is incredibly useful for all sorts of other disciplines (the legal profession, teachers, scientists, engineers, journalists, etc. etc.).
That’s precisely why things like geometry—carefully building an argument, assuming nothing that cannot be inferred from the axioms—are taught.
Anybody who claims that they’ve never used the skills they learned in HS maths class is talking out their rear; you use them every time you enter a debate on these boards.
I think it’s possible to get along quite well in our society without knowing any math.
It’s also possible to get by without knowing how to read. Or speak English. Or know any History. Or Science.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing…
“At last I said,- Lincoln, you never can make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and stayed there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what demonstrate means, and went back to my law studies.” -Abraham Lincoln
Cursive! Man, that’s a good one. Certainly a complete waste of time.
As for math, if you don’t know any math, you won’t recognize all the times when knowing it would have proven useful.
I consider it essential to at least be able to read cursive. And some people (myself included) find that it’s easier or works better, in certain situations, to write in cursive than printing. But yeah, if you’re not one of those people, you shouldn’t have to write in cursive.
You have two choices:
- 2-15" diameter pizzas for $20
or - 1-30" diameter pizza for $30
Which is the best deal?
Which is the cheapest per slice?
Which feeds the most people?
The second deal gets you a pizza twice as big as the first. Though calculating the area of a circle is what people learn before high school. In high school you do the same thing except with more abstract numbers. Numbers you would rarely encounter in real life.
Apparently we didn’t listen to the same grade school bands. 
Price is unimportant. I want the choice which gives me proportionately more crust, so it’s #1.
I predict a hard road ahead for you.
Well then, just forget the pizza altogether and buy breadsticks.
We had this argument a few months ago, which to my surprise revealed that many people have never realized that cursive handwriting is something other than the arduous copying-out of fussy Palmer script – this despite having spent their entire high school and university education taking notes.
I also had to explain the difference between cursive and shorthand.