Just out of curiosity, do you get that some of us are just bad at math? I am. I took Math 101 in College - the next to lowest Math class they taught, got a B/C because I had the world’s best TA and stopped there.
It’s not the teachers. It’s me.
I know a math teacher who currently uses a slide rule in her class to teach logb (x,y) = logb x + logb y.
I, too, remember the tedium of using log tables, trig tables. One of my math teachers even had us learn to use the Japanese abacus. A gem for me was he slide rule. I enjoyed it even though I really didn’t do that well in math or science classes, no matter how much I liked those subjects. My father, an engineer, had one of the best slide rules you could ever find, a Keuffel & Esser model with quite the number of scales on both sides. It was a thing of beauty.
Cursive is one of those things I believe should not go the way of all flesh. There is an indredible amount of written material in longhand and when nobody can read it, that information is lost. Along with that is typing, known today as keyboarding. I’m shocked at how horribly people type today even though their interaction with their computer is through the keyboard. My mother insisted her children learn touch typing. I thank her for that.
So many of the things mentioned above still have a place, a purpose, today even if replaced by some modern device.
Math for me is basic arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I’ve never seen the need for anything further. I can calculate sales taxes in my head while I wait my turn at the cashier. That’s useful.
What is not useful, for me anyway, is functions and relations, calculus, and trigonometry. I get basic algebra (X + 2=5, solve for X), but outside of that, I fall back on basic arithmetic. Today, I’m a lawyer, and F&R, Calc, and Trig play no part in my job. Basic arithmetic does, when it comes to monthly billings.
Cursive is something I learned, but my handwriting today is nothing like it. Well, kind of. My handwriting is a mix of cursive and printing. I can read it, as can others, but it’s not the cursive handwriting I learned in Grade 3. But using it, I can take notes fast; and with the abbreviations I use in certain settings, I can take notes with pen and paper quicker than I can with a computer.
My signature is one recognizable letter., one semi-recognizable letter, and the rest is a bunch of squiggles.
It’s the same in Canada, which converted to metric many decades ago. Metric is the standard, but old imperial units are still used in some cases, so that consumers are typically fluent in both. Speed limits and road distances are in fact entirely metric. The one big exception is that oven temperatures are always expressed in Fahrenheit, whereas weather is always Celsius. Recipe quantities can be either, but are often American units along with the Fahrenheit oven temperatures and meat doneness temperatures because so many recipes originate in the US.
Probably no one is more fluent in translating between pounds and ounces and kilograms and grams than deli clerks, where it’s very common to ask for a quarter or half a pound of whatever but the scales measure in grams. Sales of meat products are often advertised as a price per pound, though I don’t know if this is an appeal to familiarity and tradition or because a per-pound price is so much lower than a per-kilogram price. The actual product labeling, however, is always metric.
Which leads to some oddball quantities. Traditionally, for instance, cans and bottles of soft drinks had been standardized at 12 ounces. Now, the same quantity is labeled as “355 ml”. No one questioned that 12 ounces was a reasonable amount for the average human or dog, but now one is tempted to ask, “Why exactly 355 ml? Why not 300 ml? Why not 400?”.
I seem to recall that Labatt introduced its 500 ml beer. At about the same time, Molson introduced its “Pint” at 561 ml, which is actually a Canadian pint, 20 oz. Neither size sold well, so they were discontinued.
I have a lot of comments on the metric system, but they do not belong in this thread. That’s enough said.
You had me going there, until I double-checked that 12 Canadian ounces = 341 ml
Some measurement-related “useless” conversion skills: dimensional lumber (apparently, e.g., 4×8 is 89mm × 184mm, while 8×8 is obviously 191×191, and, similarly, pipe diameter…)
Apparently the standardized 12-ounce containers were American ounces. 355 ml is 12.004 US ounces. I bet the bastards are short-changing me and providing only 12.000 US ounces!
As a former Ontario Beer Store employee, I can assure you that a bottle of Ontario beer contains 341 ml (11.5 oz.). A can of Ontario beer contains 355 ml. (12 oz.). Those proportions may vary across the country, of course, depending on province and container. But there is no “Canadian ounces” about it; an ounce is an ounce. Bottles are 11.5 fl oz (341 ml), cans are 12 fl. oz (355 ml), unless otherwise specified.
Which is why I drink draught beer when I’m out. A proper pint, twenty fluid ounces, as opposed to that paltry American pint of sixteen fluid ounces.
That was true. There was a lot of resistance to the switch to metric in the UK, and the press soon found housewives who professed to be unable to cope with buying vegetables in grams rather than pounds. Hardly surprising, since they were being forced to change a system they had used all their lives.
Market traders were at the forefront since they only sold loose fruit and vegetables. I guess that most learned to quickly make the conversion when Mrs Smith asked for a pound of apples, and many of us started to use quantity rather than weight.
I recall that there were some die-hards that were at least threatened with prosecution if they didn’t convert to metric, but they were a small minority. There was also a widespread belief, not entirely false, that many manufacturers and shopkeepers used the changeover to increase profits.
More pertinent to the OP, learning to add, subtract and multiply Pounds, Shillings and Pence was essential at the time, but is now almost useless. Coincedantally, the USD/GBP exchange rate was for a long time $2.40 to the £1.00. Interesting, because there were 240 pennies in a pound.
History in general and dates in particular can be a tough sell to kids (or to anyone who doesn’t know much already) because they become a lot more meaningful once you have a context to fit them into and other dates to compare them to.
For example, if you tell someone familiar with U.S. History that something happened in 1867, they’ll immediately know that that’s shortly after the Civil War, and they’ll probably know something about the levels of technology and culture and social attitudes of the time. To a kid, it’s just a meaningless number.
When I entered the machine shop at Flight Refuelling Ltd everything was still made in inches, and that’s the way I’ve stayed. My lathe and my measuring instruments are in inches. My hobby activity still works in inches, and grains, and that’s the way it’s going stay, because all the data books are American. The filthy metric system has no place in it, and is hopelessly impractical anyway
The skill of unit conversion is definitely valuable. But memorization of the specific conversion factors between American or Imperial units and metric should be useless. Even if we did all convert fully, such conversions would still occasionally be needed, such as when one is reading old archived charts, but in such a case, one can and should just look up the conversion factors as needed.
It boilds down to this:
I am very sorry for you all for the traumatic experiences you seem to share in the USA with writing by hand, which you call cursive (is that where the word cursing comes from?). I think writing is a fine art, and calligraphy is cool. Comics would not be the same without hand lettering.
I am not claiming to have liked all subjects. Latin was a PITA (bad teacher). Chemistry was dumb memorizing of nomenclature rules (bad curriculum in '70s Spain), gimnastics was never for me (but good teacher, very understanding). History was badly conceived (battles, battles, battles…).
The only really useless thing they tried to teach me was obedience. Thank god they did not succeed. Poor priests, they had no chance.
That’ll never happen, any more than old information written in Latin is now lost. There will always be someone who can read cursive. But it doesn’t need to be everyone reading cursive, or Latin.
The only thing impractical about it is that it’s not what your books use. Anything that can be done practically in American can be done practically in metric. Lots of things that can’t be done practically in American can also be done practically in metric.
Lots of people complain that they can’t understand metric, but the vast majority of the people making that complaint can’t understand American units, either.
Heck, you can machine-transpose cursive texts to print these days. I don’t know how well it already works, but the technology is there.
Yeah, this, they could never take the rebel out of me. 
On Reddit, I’ve subscribed to a sub called r/Cursive , where people ask the Internet to decipher documents written in cursive. Most often, documents from the early 20th century: great-grandma’s maiden name… or the “cause of death” part of death certificates. Some are trivial and show the asker’s inability to read basic cursive.
Calculus was the default branch of mathematics to study in college. When I was considering a scientific career, it was one of the building blocks that I needed. I did well in Calc 1, but I found Calc 2 to be insurmountable.
I have posted elsewhere about being the bottom of an extremely gifted year of math students (I was regularly bottom of class) but because (to mix syllabuses with yours) we did GCSE ‘A’ level in one year (instead of two) and GCSE ‘A’ level further maths in one year. (instead of two. Both, involving advanced calculus)
Amazingly I passed; not through skill, but sure and certain perseverance on the part of my teacher.
I could propably solve a quadratic equation today, but anthing more than that is lost to time.
(GCSE is an examination certified by Cambridge University)
I might have mentioned it here, but I always say that if you woke me up in the middle of the night, after a whole day bender, I still could instantly recite the formula for solving quadratic equations, although I never had to in over 30 years. But I’m an engineer. Same with binomial formulas. They’re all edged into my brain.