Although you didn’t ask, Japanese and Taiwanese (and I presume Chinese, etc.) have a “cursive” style of writing that runs strokes together instead of carefully writing each stoke distinctly.
Although there are technical terms for the styles, they are called “broken” and “careful”.
For some reason, my wife seems completely unable to carefully write characters when I need to copy them.
Close- the arches aren’t flexible (once they’re up, they do bend a little when you’re putting the thing up), but the cover is- and it’s big enough to walk in. It’s a lot cheaper than glass and can be put up on ground that isn’t flat. The size you actually end up with depends on how accurate you are building it, so it would be a bit silly giving it in mm size, and a rough guide is fine.
They’re dirt common in this area, lots of commercial growers use them as well as home gardeners, as good ones stand up to strong winds better than glass greenhouses, it didn’t occur to me that it wouldn’t be a readily searchable word.
We were officially taught what we called print and, several years later, joined up writing. I remember it being formally taught as I’d injured my right hand at the time and couldn’t hold a pen. My handwriting is still appalling.
I remember hearing of this mysterious ‘cursive’, and being very disappointed to discover it was just joined up writing. Sounds like a writing style just for swearing.
Business cards are still useful. I still give them out.
As a lawyer who is a sole practitioner (i.e. not affiliated with a firm), I run into a lot of people in places where you don’t expect to meet a lawyer. Sports bars, race track, and similar. These folks would like to speak with a lawyer, but they balk at the suit-and-tie type, who is going to charge them three figures just for a talk to see if their matter has any merit.
That’s not me. First of all, I don’t wear a suit and tie to the sports book or race track. I give my wannabe-clients a free half-hour consult. We can usually do that over the phone, but only during regular business hours, as I insist.
“Yeah, I know that you’ve got questions, but we’re coming up on the third race at Lethbridge, and I want to study my Racing Form. Here’s my card; call me on Monday during business hours; I won’t charge anything for the first thirty minutes.” That usually gets me a “Hey, thanks, talk to you then.”
I couldn’t do that without business cards.
Several years ago, I was acquainted with a woman from London. She talked about having learned “joined-up writing,” but had never encountered “cursive” until she moved to the US. She seemed to understand “cursive” to be the particular kind of joined-up writing used in America. One of the distinguishing features, for her, was the weird capital Q that looks like the number 2.
Username checks out.
As someone who learned to write English in Pakistan in the 1970s in a private school system still very much influenced by the “British” system, here is my experience.
We learned to write letters separately in kindergarten to first grade. But not letters like American “print”. The same letters as we would use in “running hand” (connected letters) from second grade onward. The separated letters were called “broken hand” in our school.
One of my University classmates owns and runs a private school in Pakistan (many schools are unabashedly for profit, even listed on the stock exchange). He says the situation is all over the map now. There are traditional Catholic, Anglican and Public (which means private, non religious) schools who stick to the method and progression we used back then. Others, like his, are more Americanized and have abandoned cursive.
And for pupils in fee-paying schools, tablets (iPads and others) are ubiquitous.
Things go full circle. When I entered pre-K around 1970, I had a “tablet”. It was a piece of wood with a slate insert on which I would write with a hard chalk. I see from googling that this is called a writing slate. But we called it a tablet 50+ years ago.
I think that depends a lot on the field - both my husband and I used business cards a lot . He was a salesman and I worked in a government position that had lots of outside contact. Without business cards, we would have been standing there while people took down some combination of our cell number , office number (to reach someone if we didn’t answer our cell), fax number and email address and in my case , while I took some combination of the other person’s contact info. Way faster to exchange business cards.
As far as doctors go, I’m not entirely sure how much is demand for printed cards from the patients and how much is doctors being a bit behind the times - I’m not exactly young but the only doctors I want cards from are the ones that don’t use any sort of patient portal/notification (which is actually a surprising number of mine) . If I get a text five minutes after I make an appointment or I can look it up in a portal, I don’t need a card.
I’ve never needed chemistry outside of school. I never liked balancing chemical equations.
I had chemistry in high school and a semesrer in college.
I enjoyed Biology but its had no practical use outside school. Jeopardy occasionally asks questions on Biology and Botany.
I was forced to take Statistics in college. Hated it and hope to never suffer through the material again.
Some Computer Analysts use Statistics regularly. They write in SAS. I would never accept that job for any salary.
OK, I can’t argue with calligraphy being offered as an art elective. In fact, there’s very few things I could argue with being offered as electives, just for the students who want to take them.
Oh, and I also learned the capital Q that looks like a 2, and I also thought it was weird, but outside of the worksheets specifically to teach how to write the letters, I think I’ve had occasion to write a cursive capital Q twice in my entire life, so it doesn’t really matter what it looks like.
You didn’t like the subject, sure, that I’ll buy. But statistics is a useful math class for absolutely anyone. Even if you’re not using it professionally, the world is full of people trying to sucker you with numbers. Statistics is the self-defense course of math.
That was one disappointing week of my first drafting class. We spent way too much time working on our lettering, and mine was never good enough. It seemed pointless, but it was the way it was done.
I noticed, with envy, that architectural drawings had a certain flair to the lettering but the machine drawings we were doing always required stogy boxy hand lettering.
It was a skill I used for a year when I was working at a job at a mom & pop electronics drafting business arranged by my school co-op guy. My boss was never particularly happy with my lettering.
Good riddance to that part of technical drawing. I still do miss the rest of the work though.
Did you mean, why they had to be so similar (to one another)? Or why they had to be so different from their upper case forms?
Either way, the answer is that that’s how the letterforms evolved in Roman cursive in late antiquity. Think yourself lucky that lower case “b” and “d” are no longer damn near identical, with the loop on the left for both of them! 
My kids are both pre-teens and they had a chart like that in pre-school and elementary school in the 2010s. Print is the first form of writing you’re taught in the US. They learned a very small smattering of cursive maybe in second grade. I don’t remember it being a full course, but it familiarized them enough that they can read my mother-in-law’s cursive with minimal help and they occasionally, on their own accord, attempt to write in it. I’m Gen X and went to elementary school in the 80s, and we learned Palmer Method cursive. I can’t say I hated it then, but I don’t use it now as I consider it inefficient and I just don’t like its frilly loopiness, ornamentation, and weird letterforms like the capital-G, capital-Q, lowercase-s, the capital-I (why in the hell is so bloated and loopy when it could just be a straight line going down? How is this faster than printing?) So I do a hybrid of printing and then some cursive joining of letters where that feels to be the most efficient way of writing. I also dot and cross my t’s and i’s as I go along, I have some ligatures, and I don’t circle back at the end of a word as Palmer Method urges you to. Of course, this means if ever someone finds my handwritten notes about something legally questionable, I will be pretty easily identifiable, as I have some quite obvious tells.
My kids typically write in pure print, no joined letters, unless they’re fooling around with cursive for fun. Even people my generation, I would say that if it’s not a majority of them, it’s a sizeable minority that write in pure disconnected printing, using no joined letters, and this minority grows the younger my friends are.
Yeah, I found stats to be just about my most-useful-to-have-a-basic-grasp-of branch of math in everyday life, helping me understand and interpret the data around me. Just understanding basic stuff like median, mode, standard deviation, various types of distributions, confidence intervals, sample sizes, sample bias, law of large numbers, correlation vs causation, etc., helps me visualize a data set and better get an idea of what inferences could/should be drawn.
Meanwhile, I’ve never used calculus in my daily life. (And I was better at Calculus 2 - integration - than Calculus 1, for some reason. It appears this is not the usual pattern. Maybe it’s because my brain seems to intuit areas under a curve better over rates of change. Maybe that’s why stats appealed to me more, as well.) Trig I’ll occasionally use, as well as algebra and arithmetic, of course.
Yeah, I’m never surprised to hear that someone doesn’t use calculus. The only thing that I can think of that someone in a non-STEM field might use calculus for is min/max problems, and even there, calculus only helps if you have a formula for your functions, rather than just a graph or a sampling of data points (both of which are much more common for real applications).
Take calculus if you want to, take it if you’re planning on a STEM career, but don’t take it just because. If you don’t know why you would want to take calculus, there’s bound to be some other course that would fit in that slot in your schedule that would serve you better.
I remember learning how to write letters in Old English in 3rd or 4th grade. Was kinda fun, but obviously useless.
Looks like Long Division hasn’t been mentioned. I’m on the fence. I can’t remember the last time I used it, but I think there’s value in showing students that all the basic operations of arithmetic can be done by hand, and we only use calculators as a tool.
There must be some schools somewhere that are sensible enough to offer a math survey course for non-tech students, explaining and demonstrating what calculus is and what it does without having to master the mechanics of doing the calculations. That level of understanding would be very mind-opening for folks in general.
I’ll also agree with sentence diagramming. I was naturally good at it, but I have no idea what it taught me that I didn’t already kind of know. Maybe my mind just naturally breaks down sentences into chunks, so it wasn’t as useful to me. But I ended up with an English degree (in literature, but plenty of creative and journalistic writing courses in there), and never once did sentence diagramming prove to be useful for anything. Looking back at it at the age of 50, I still don’t know what it taught me. I also think I was on the tail end of when diagramming sentences was fashionable. My kids certainly never had to do it, and I don’t even think my 6-years-my-junior brother had to do it when he went through elementary school.
That’s an interesting one, because on the one hand, long division of numbers really is an obsolete skill: You can just use a calculator for that. But on the other hand, almost the exact same technique can be used with polynomials, and that is actually a useful skill (for some people, in some contexts). In fact, long division of polynomials is actually simpler than for numbers, because you don’t have to worry about “carrying” or “borrowing” or whatever you call it. And on the other other hand, some polynomial divisions (not all of them, but the ones most commonly encountered) can instead be done using something called synthetic division, which is even easier yet, and much more efficient.
Yes, this. The time I learned polynomial division (I don’t remember if it was at school or college), I still remembered the algorithm for long division, so I easily learned and understood it. But a few years ago, I was asked to help my nephew with his math homework, and it involved polynomial division. For the life of me, I couldn’t do it anymore on the spot, and when I tried to revive my memory of long division, I realized that this had also faded. So I had to look up how to do polynomial division on the net.
Isaac Asimov wrote The Feeling of Power about that exact subject.