Meme Thread... no politics

ShawnG said:

In reply to johndej :

Times I've used basic trig, geometry and grade 11 math: All the damn time.

Budgeting, mortgage amortization and investing all use less advanced math than the metal fabrication I do at work.

How I wish they had taught the awesome power and danger of compound interest.

Strong agree with that last part.

However, I do use quadratic & higher order polynomials sometimes.

One day, your child will ask you for help on his Calculus homework, and you will wish you had paid attention in class.

tuna55 said:

There's an old Mike Tyson joke in there somewhere.

People ask if our Chiweenie (9lbs all up) is a pit.  Nope.

Toyman01 + Sized and said:

This is a joke. Please don't take it personally. 

My favorite Dilbert cartoon.

Keith Tanner said:

Toyman01 + Sized and said:

This is a joke. Please don't take it personally. 

My favorite Dilbert cartoon.

Old, worth posting again.

ShawnG said:

In reply to johndej :

 

Budgeting, mortgage amortization and investing all use less advanced math than the metal fabrication I do at work.

How I wish they had taught the awesome power and danger of compound interest.

Our Provincial government introduced financial literacy as part of the new math curriculum and the teachers and union fought it with everything they had. Fortunately they lost. Unfortunately teachers are not known for being financially literate.

Dusterbd13-michael said:

Wally (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to johndej :

Last year of my high school I got put into a MMA(math models and associations) class instead of algebra 2, mainly because I was stupid and poor, schools way of getting the lower class people to pass school, and we all passed for some reason...

Over the  semester  we were taught how to balance checking account, figure interest rates on loans/credit cards,  weekly/monthly prioritizing bills to pay. Good basic guidelines on how to live in life responsible, funny they don't teach middle/upper class these things...

Mr. Peabody said: Unfortunately teachers are not known for being financially literate.

As a shop teacher (I teach Math as well), I fight for the importance of "employability skills." I am viewed by both colleagues, as well as the local university's Faculty of Education, as a grizzly old curmudgeon of a teacher, with his head in the sand, unable to learn new things.

I'm fine with that.

1988RedT2 said:

One day, your child will ask you for help on his Calculus homework......

My mom was a high school algebra teacher and would rag at me on my Algebra grades so I would ask her for help.   She'd tell me she forgot how after having 6 kids.   

In reply to Chesterfield :

That's some Roadkill-level E36 M3 right there!!!

SkinnyG (Forum Supporter) said:

Mr. Peabody said: Unfortunately teachers are not known for being financially literate.

As a shop teacher (I teach Math as well), I fight for the importance of "employability skills." I am viewed by both colleagues, as well as the local university's Faculty of Education, as a grizzly old curmudgeon of a teacher, with his head in the sand, unable to learn new things.

I'm fine with that.

Thank you for being an old curmudgeon.

In all fairness, I'm a bit jaded when it comes to math.

I had the same math teacher two years in a row and his teaching style was "Copy these notes from the overhead projector and do the work on pages ---".

When I didn't understand how to solve the problem, the answer was "Read the notes, it's all in there".

Thanks to all that wonderful help, I failed math 11 and then ended up in "stupid math 11" which was just enough to pass. If I was too stupid for "stupid math" They had "trades math" which was a last resort.

Thank god for Geometry and Trig, that made sense to me.

My first 2-1/2 years in college it took me 5 semesters to barely pass 2 required calculus courses. This was partly due to the sheer volume of rote formula memorization required, but that's another story. Rote memorization sucks.

My first year of grad school I had to take 2 structural engineering courses, which I was dreading because of the calculus involved.

But as soon as I had something understandable to relate it to, the calculus made sense and I aced both structures classes.