Took a geography course on mapping. The prof was old school - very OLD school. We had to get a lovely set of expensive drafting pens - and spend hours and hours drawing maps on paper with various line widths with our lovely pens.
This was when computer tools were really taking off, and we could have made these maps in a fraction of the time using cool software. And we would have learned how to use different software to produce useful and interesting maps.
But no. Hours and hours of drawing on paper like primitive monk scribes in the 8th century.
The most useless one was something I didn’t directly encounter until college as a music major. After half a semester in which I nailed Ear Training, recognizing intervals such as a 4th or a minor 6th or a tritone, we were suddenly forced to start using a bunch of stupid syllables called “solfege”. It’s those “do re mi” syllables except that there a bunch more to handle the notes that aren’t a part of the baseline major scale. Maybe they help some people but I already had my head wrapped around “the interval between this note and that note is a major 7th” so I didn’t get any benefit from the stupid syllables and found them annoying as all hell.
True, but I was an engineer for many years and did do many calculations, none of which required differential equations. Maybe if I had done more high end applied research I would have needed, but for everyday simple BSME type work it wasn’t used.
I do acknowledge that it greatly helped me understand problem solving in general a lot.
I did work with engineers at Bose that performed a lot of high level mathematical work when designing new speaker technology and noise canceling applications, so I do have appreciation for what goes into that type of work. I would read their papers and was fascinated.
Hey, I completely agree! My point was that octal ruled the day when, much like dinosaurs, 12-bit, 18-bit, and 36-bit machines ruled the day in their time. Using hex was a natural transition in the era of machines that had byte addressing and word lengths that were multiples of 8-bit bytes.
The use of octal notation on a PDP-11 or VAX was, I think, both a concession to DEC’s historical customers and, perhaps, a bit of defiance of IBM. Though the PDP-11 and VAX shared some interesting similarities with the System/360 architecture, like byte addressing and variable-length instructions. I regretted the departure from clean single-word instructions and to my mind, the new elaborate architecture was just a lot more messy. The venerable PDP-8 was possibly the ultimate exemplar of how you can do so much with so little – all due to the great Gordon Bell!
I’m also an engineer who never had to use calculus or differential equations in my professional life, but your point is key: understanding and working with calculus and DE’s helped me to understand how natural processes can be expressed and solved in/by mathematical expressions, and that helped me to better understand the world.
Knowing that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. For some reason that was drilled in our heads.
I disagree with the idea that learning algebra and trigonometry is useless, If you go into engineering or physics, you absolutely need to be rock solid in them. You don’t know in high school where you will go with your life and it doesn’t hurt to learn math. In addition, it teaches you to think logically. If more people knew math, perhaps they’d be better citizens.
As it turned out, some years later when I took the MLAT test in Navy boot camp, I scored higher on it than anyone had seen. Sadly, I was already designated to work in another field. As it turns out, I have some aptitude for learning languages, but I found out later in the Foreign Service that there are a lot of people way better at it than I am.
If you don’t know cursive, why don’t sign in print? I mean, I’m old enough to have learned cursive, but I lost that skill after college when I started to do all my handwriting in print. My signature still is cursive (muscle memory), but my writing in print also is quite unique, so why not use that?
I am genuinely surprised that people find cursive writing useless. It’s a much faster way of jotting down information. It’s such a basic skill taught at an early age along with math tables. I’m completely gobsmacked that young people can’t do simple math in their heads. I use that skill constantly. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a young person at a cash register freeze when the register doesn’t provide the change for a transaction. And when I give them the answer they look at me like I’m some kind of magician. It’s 3rd grade math. I calculate the change automatically so I know how much I’m getting back as a way to check the transaction. I once had a kid try to give me back the amount I owed.
It makes me wonder what kids learn during their 12 years of primary education. Seriously. I was learning to read and write in the 1st grade and 2nd grade. 3rd grade was memorizing math tables. I learned basic programming in HS back when it was done on punch tape and had to be run over the phone to a local college with a computer. I also learned mechanical drawing. Shop classes led me to skills in wood and metal that I’ve used all my life for enjoyment and to save money on repairs.
While those skills may seem antiquated, the programming helped me with spreadsheets and databases. Learning drafting skills helped me to read drawings which I used for making stuff. Slide rules lead me to circular flight computers and a fun hobby. History lessons led me to a lifelong hobby of multiple interests. I’ve been passing that knowledge on to people who enjoy learning about it.
The lessons people think are useless in school are the ones that provide a foundation for a more satisfying and productive life.
Meh, they were probably perfectly capable of doing it lot of the time, just when you’ve been using the till all week and then suddenly it stops working, it completely throws you. When I did retail, it was such a boring job most of the time I’d just go on automatic. Brain circuits are planning the weekend or away with the fairies, and then suddenly all the neurons have to scramble back into place and they don’t know what’s going on.
By the end of a long shift, sometimes I’d read a total and just say a completely different number out loud.
Is this really something that happens often? I don’t mean the young person freezing; I mean the cash register not telling how much change is owed. Because this is such a basic function, if I were working a cash register and it didn’t tell me how much change to give back, I’d probably freeze, not because I couldn’t do the math, but because I’d be worried something was wrong with the cash register and the sale wasn’t going to get properly credited or something like that.
I get a 403 on that site for some reason, with or without my VPN, but for all intents and purposes the two are identical in the US. My friend’s “signatures” featured a couple of large stylized letters, each followed by an illegible squiggle that looks like it could be cursive, but isn’t. In other words the sort of thing that looks enough like a signature no one would ever assume it isn’t, but requires zero knowledge of cursive to write.
ETA:
Dunno. I started college taking notes in cursive but fairly quickly switched to a print/cursive hybrid which suited me better. Keeping in mind that I’m a pushing-left hander and part of it was helping with legibility after smears.
Oh, yeah - that one as well. Completely worthless, for me at least. I somehow got that in 7th grade. I’m sure people in my generation did go on to fulfilling careers using a T-square on a drafting board, but I sure didn’t. Never held one since.