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School Stuff You Still Use
Tonight, I had to log onto a career resource and resume template website. I made an account my freshman year of high school; the teacher warned us to create a username and password we could remember because we would be using this website for a long time. The student teacher mentioned he was using it.
I was skeptical. There are many things teachers will tell you will be long-term things that you will use later in your education, or perhaps into your career. As it turned out, a few of these predictions were right, and many were wrong. Not that I think the teachers were universally wrong: Some students probably did go on to use those things, but not me.
I now have three mental lists.
- Things teachers told me I would use that I have yet to use
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- My trigonometry reference table. I understand that anybody who went on into calculus classes used this. I went into statistics classes and did not.
- My “prime after prime” prime number reference sheet from seventh or eighth grade. I was told to hang onto it but lost it within a year. I never needed a prime number reference sheet after eighth grade.
- The “Hand over hand” steering technique that they tried to teach me in driver’s ed. (Maybe I do use this sometimes, but I never think about the way I steer…I just drive!)
- MLA stuff. This one isn’t exactly true, because I did continue to use it during my first few semesters of college. However, upon getting into my major, I switched to APA, which I like better. When you are writing quickly, it’s so much easier to remember that Allen (2013) said something, rather than remember that this thing was said by Allen on page 11. I thought it was odd that they did not endeavor to teach us both systems in high school. English class focused on MLA, which made sense, but so did all the other teachers, with the exception of one science teacher my freshman year who requested APA formatting.
- Factoring and the quadratic equation. Again, people who had to take more than two math courses in college probably use this. I do not.
- Strategies to say “no” to drugs. I do not believe I have ever been offered drugs. Where are all these people that were supposed to be offering kids drugs all the time?
2. Things teachers told me I would use that I did use
- The aforementioned resume formatting site
- Library research skills, especially the online databases
- Typing (Although I didn’t learn it when I took the class, I just kind of picked up on it later, and my form is terrible.)
- Writing a business letter. (And a resume!)
- The metric system. I don’t remember if I was explicitly told “You will use this” or not, but every science class uses it, and it’s just good to be familiar with the system. I know I have needed to convert metric units a lot more than I have needed to convert customary units.
- A number of writing strategies. Tenth and eleventh grade were especially productive years because I was required to write a rough draft in 40 minutes.
3. Things nobody expected me to use that I used anyway
- Chemistry splash goggles. I bought a pair for a class and keep them around now in case I need to deal with cleaning chemicals that sting my eyes or such things.
- Standardized test skills. Dealing with computer screens or bubble sheets for a long time is a skill, as is the particular style of question that shows up on the tests.
Hm. Prosser on Torts.
Yum! Apple for me, please!
And to think, based on the revelations I get from the far end of the cubicle farm, such a hefty volume has now been completely replaced by MS Excel.
I still remember how to turn a Bic pen into a pretend light saber to fight with the kid at the desk next to me…and how to turn a Bic pen and a rubber band into a bow and arrow to fight with kids across the room from me…and may have recently passed these life skills on to my children.
My favorite t-shirt:
There are two types of people:
1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
That’s good too.
They are lettering stencils for putting revised notes on plans. Not at all like French curves.
I just remember something I learned from my elementary school music teacher and still use almost every day. the mnemonic for notes on the musical staff:
Only difference here was I remembered the lines on the bass cleff staff by Great Big Dogs Fight Animals. We gringos did not know what a burrito was back then
Good Boys Do Fine Always.
Chicago is used for Theology and history. It is by far the more complicated and demanding style. I would never teach high school students (or college!) two styles at once–it is hard enough for them to learn just one. I have found if you know one style well, it is easier to learn another.
I’ve not seen that.
All cows eat grass.
@percival Avogadro has a mobile number now. The old Avogadro number was for his landline..
And for many academic journals.
At this time of night, it might be the alcohol. But that got a triple giggle out of me.
Me: I repeat the above lines to wife.
Wife: Is he still alive?
Me: No.
Wife: So somebody wrote a joke, right?
Me: Yes.
The first time I was offered drugs drastically changed my life, and not for the betterment. Sure wish I had said “No”.
I was in Engineering school during the transition from slide rules to calculators. I think a lot was lost. With a slide rule, you had to keep track of the magnitude of the answer, but with a calculator or a spread-sheet, I think the response is to just accept the answer, missing finding any typos.
In about 6th grade, I learned Pi to 20 decimals* or so and waited for some teacher to ask the class if anyone knew what Pi was. To my great sadness, I was never asked.
*P.S. add 323846 to your memory and see if anyone asks you.
And don’t get me started on significant digits.
The ratio of a circle’s circumference with its diameter.
When multi-function HP calculators were introduced, my company had a deal that they would pay half for the cost for anyone in Engineering. They didn’t specify an upper bound, so I got the highest level HP that I could afford half of.
That turned my old Bowmar into a spare. We would put it into my sons crib at night and get an extra hour or so of sleep while we heard him ‘click-clacking’ away in his room.
I think mine is the 52nd edition.
Not appreciating magnitude and significant digits were two of my father’s pet peeves as he was teaching engineering during the slide rule to calculator transition.
He also still found his 1944 edition of the CRC Handbook useful. F still equaled m*a in 1985.
Although I spent a career in Engineering/Programming, I only used calculus once. I was doing consulting on a project to take an existing photogrammetry system (the kind that was used to look at reconnaissance films) and modify it to find a specific place in the film.
The company was too cheap to put in a footage counter, but the software could count rotations of the take-up real. The problem is that each rotation makes the take-up thicker by the thickness of the film, making the next rotation pull a little more film and so on. It could be approximated as a calculus problem and after a lot of work, I sorted it out.
Maybe the most useful skill was reading upside down. I have written about this before, but to make a long story short, I was doing a science project to investigate the rate of learning. I was the only subject I had, so I had to pick something that I didn’t know which could be quantified. Obviously, I should spend time in Shop Class reading children’s books (gotta start somewhere) upside down with a stopwatch in my hand. I have to admit that that skill was useful for a long time.
Yes, I knew that one too. Probably in vogue before there were cars.
I memorized out to where I figured was a good point and that wouldn’t need to be rounded up.
One reason some engineers used Curta calculators was because if you were building a long bridge or stretch of highway etc, 2 or maybe 3 digits of precision wasn’t enough.
Just end the recitation with “and so on…”
Why it was better for some engineers to use Curta calculators instead of slide rules: