Most people I know cannot identify common hardwood species such as maple and oak. All evergreen species are ‘pine trees’.
I am a botany nerd, and I also sell wooden cabinets for a living, so it comes up a lot.
I knew the names of most common plants and trees by early childhood, simply because my dad was also a botany nerd (and a landscape architect) and we lived in the country.
Many, many people have zero interest in the different kinds of plants and animals. This doesn’t mean they can’t be geniuses, even, just that they don’t have basic knowledge in this area.
That’s very true, but there are some subjects that a 15 year loathes so much they will go out of their way to avoid anything to do with it in adult life- in my case, it’s things like algebra and calculus.
So whilst I agree it’s important to at least establish a grounding in many areas, as soon as it becomes apparent that a student is either totally useless at, or absolutely despises, a subject then I think they should be allowed to switch focus to something else.
Then, when I was in my 20s, I found myself having to hire and support sales people and trainers. I needed to arrange territories in a fair and manageable way. I found myself really enjoying figuring out where concentrations of people were, calculating travel times, getting to know the cultures, figuring out where to position the sales people. That subject I hated so much in school became very different when I started dealing with it in real life.
I remember like it was yesterday having a conversation with one of my teachers. I told her I didn’t like a particular subject we were studying, and she said “you don’t know enough yet to decide whether or not you like it.”
I was annoyed and insulted at the time, but in retrospect she was absolutely right.
Diagramming sentences gets you thinking about the *structure *of grammar.
Is learning a foreign language a practical skill? Diagramming will help immensely when you want to learn a foreign language so that you don’t make dumb word-order mistakes. For example, the Spanish sentence for “You gave me it” is “Me lo diste”, which translates word-for-word as “me it you-gave”, for specific grammar reasons that can be seen in a tree. You can’t use English word order; it’s just wrong and makes you sound stupid, so you have to know how to transform the implicit grammar tree that’s in your head from the English shape to the Spanish shape.
It’s also helps a lot if you want to learn programming, because it helps you understand the recursive, nested structure of computer languages… and math too, actually, seeing as how mathematical expressions have a nested structure.
tl;dr version: you’d be surprised what turns out to be useful
“You gave me it” isn’t very normal English, though: “you gave it to me.” Changing from a noun to a pronoun changes the normal order of words.
“You gave the book to me” and “you gave me the book” are both normal. “You gave it to me” is normal. “You gave me it” is eeeeeh… on the edge of normalcy, tops?
This happens in Spanish too: “me diste el libro” becomes “me lo diste.” Understanding the difference between a pronoun and a noun is important, too!
I hated English for the first 5 years. Then I had Micaela for two years. Now I run into people who refuse to believe I’m not American until I show them my passport. What a difference a single superb teacher can make! (My post-Micaela teachers were as bad as the ones before her)
It would also help if someone explained to students, especially those headed for college, that using IM abbreviations like “u,” “ur,” and the like are not appropriate for most forms of writing, including college placement test essays. More of this crap just came across the transom the other day when I was scoring and placing incoming students.
When it came time to learn Arabic, both cursive and diagramming sentences stood me in good stead.
I rarely use any math skills, but this is probably because I never learned them right rather than their not being useful. Who knows how much more efficiently I might be running my life if I’d applied myself when the teacher was teaching math.
Is this whole thread because you’re so defensive about not knowing the name of a particular tree that you must attack education in general and everyone who does know the name of that tree?
Knowing about coniferous and deciduous trees can prevent embarrassing moments.
Like when my newly planted bald cypress trees started turning reddish-brown in fall and dropping their needles, and Mrs. J. was afraid to tell me that the trees were dying. Except they weren’t, since a few coniferous trees like bald cypresses naturally shed needles in fall and regrow them in spring.
You can’t underestimate the value of a good education.
We decided - quietly, and probably without even talking out loud about it - that creative thinking and innovation were not qualities we wanted too much of in our young people. Let a few alpha-competitives rise to the top, but make sure the rest have to accept the status quo to survive. It feels “right,” from a certain perspective, like a natural law.
It’s funny, you know. I never hear anybody suggest we stop teaching gym on the grounds that hardly anybody does push-ups in real life.
A friend of mine has joined a gym recently. He’s lifting weights. I asked him, “What for? You’re just going to put them down again?” Of course, I know it’s a silly comment. I know why he picks up the weights – because each time he does it gets easier to do. It’s boring and repetitive, and since like a growing number of people he works with computers and never really needs the strength he gains. Useless, yet I’ll bet no one here is contemptuous of him for doing it.
Learning is a skill – it requires practice, and that practice is often boring and repetitive. But it gets easier, because we suffer through it. Sure, there are ways to make it fun, stimulating, relevant. But it can’t always be that way, and we must learn to learn on purpose, even when it’s boring and painful. Sometimes, like the weight lifter, we push through “the burn” because we just keep getting better. Learning gets easier because we work to get good at it.
We study the terminology of science instead of jumping directly to abstract critical thinking skills for the same reason we don’t try to build a house without a hammer. You know the saying that if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. What if you have a hammer, a mitre saw, a level, a socket set, a dremel tool, ect? Words are tools. Knowing how to use more tools doesn’t just allow us to do more things – it allows us to conceive of more possibilities, including the making of new tools.
One thought, one piece of knowledge, leads to the next. It’s the lamp in the dark woods, the knife that blazes the path, the machete that hacks away the obstacles. If you never plan to see much of the world, then obviously it’s all “trivia”.
