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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.
I only had a Chinese TA for first-year calculus, and she was incomprehensible. Fortunately it wasn’t a required course.
Freshman chem lab. Organic chem lab. Oh, and later on, journal club. There was a postdoc in a lab I worked in. If you knew what he was talking about you could sort of understand it. If not, not so much.
In my advisor’s lab, two post doc biochemists bickered for weeks about whether a residue in some experiment was protein or nucleic acid or somthing like that. It finally dawned on them that they were, you know, biochemists and knew how to find out. One of them was married to a guy who was a freak of nature. He had realized part way through his sophomore year that he really wanted to be a mathematician, so he caught up with his required classes by, among other things, taking and acing all the first year calculus classes at once.
Yeah, that was the TA problem I had too. You could maybe understand what she was saying, if you already didn’t need to take the class.
Oh, and by the way, @percival ;
1) Re logarithm tables… the CRC handbook, in keeping up with modern health tendencies chose some years ago to publish only 100% all natural logarithms. None of that log to the base 10 stuff.
2) The Chemistry data now is 100% organic chemistry. I think that it’s now sponsored by Whole Foods.
I’m not frugal per se. I just like to calculate my gas mileage with each fill up. It’s a exercise I do to relieve tension on the way to work. Maybe that’s why I take it to 3 or 4 significant figures.
Isn’t that kinda tricky, since odometers only go to 10ths?
Probably more significant digits than my gas gauge, though.
That’s why you fill and then fill, so you can use the gas pump which should also have 10ths. And just have to assume that gas pumps are uniform in how closely they fill.
Actually with my 1/10th mile dial I can approximate 100ths. And then I award two bonus significant digits.
By rolling 10-sided dice? :-)
I calculate using the gas pump’s 100ths digital readout. And I refill when the tank is almost empty, in order to lessen the effect of variation in fill volume from one fill to the next. And then every sixth fill up, I don’t even bother, because I’m not going to be compulsive about it.
No, I don’t mess with the dice. I just watch the wheel turn and guesstimate whether it’s 2 & 1/5 tenths or 2 & 1/4 tenths. Something like that. But I’m not compulsive about it.
🤣
Since July 3rd, 1987, I have put 7,632 gallons of fuel in my Toyota MR2, at a total cost of $12,427.37, and driven 235,589 miles. That’s an average gas price of $1.628/gal, and and average MPG of 31.3.
I record the detail data to more significant digits, but the app I use now is rounding the totals. Back when I kept it in a spreadsheet I’d have a few more decimal places.
But I’m not compulsive about it.
Edit: My 2009 Sonata – 8104 gallons, $22,206.53 and 223,012 miles. 27.57 mpg, $2.74 average cost/gallon.
The 2009 Santa Fe: 5,930 gallons, $16,964.31, and 115,101 miles. 18.98 mpg, $2.861 cost/gallon.
the 2020 Santa Fe: 139 gallons, $268.26, and 3542 miles. 25.41 mpg, $1.924 cost/gallon.
And the 2020 Santa Fe is a bigger heavier vehicle than the 2009 model.
I bow to the master.
I started to brag about my similar data back to 1992 this morning but then I saw you had already beat me (in both duration and quality). Then I thought about trying to raise you with the “cost of ownership” spreadsheets I’ve kept for all of my dogs since then also…but I don’t want to come off like a total nerd.
What’s nerdy about that?
Too late for anyone still in this conversation.
One thing I learned in high school that I use still frequently to this day is,
It’s so easy to remember and I don’t to remember “opposite over hypotenuse” is sine and Adjacent over Hypotenuse is cosine.
That math teacher also taught us how to use a slide rule in 1979, for one day. Then he said, you will probably never touch one again in your life. He was right.
Yeah, we learned to do simple single-digit multiplication on a slide rule circa 1978-ish, just ‘cuz. (Like I needed a tool to know that 8×4=32).
Do kids still learn how to do interpolation/extrapolation from the log tables in the back of the math text? Or is that a completely obsolete skill now?
I doubt it, but I used to use interpolation to calculate child support obligations from the table in the Family Code.