Basic trigonometry is super useful and not that hard to understand or memorize.
I don’t understand, out of all of the things that we teach students in schools, out of all of the things that people don’t demand justification for learning, why Maths gets all of the flak. It’s the foundation on which the universe exists. If people don’t understand that they’re not just learning trigonometry “just cuz” then they probably don’t have much of a career in STEM planned for themselves. Which is fine, but western society’s blindspot for STEM is 100% attributed to the intentional undermining and dumbing-down of the education system.
We regularly don’t give students justification for why they learn grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, visual art, and music. But as soon as you show someone a standard polynomial, they lose their fucking minds.
For me, my “education” with math was "when you see this: 5/73¥π7^t then you use 5-8(25&6)_9gh8/6 not 5&6(9!4_89) ok memorize it for the test.
Oh you want to know why or what it does or what it even is? No that’s college work. You’re in highschool, memorize it because reasons.
Yeah… That’s not how my brain works no matter how badly I wish I did. I need to UNDERSTAND not memorize! I can’t memorize seemingly arbitrary bullshit that has no explained meaning. My brain instantly tosses it as irrelevant information.
I dunno, I see people complain about “why do we have to read books that are hundreds of years old?” too pretty frequently. Some people are just hostile to education. Honestly, cost aside, I’m a little disappointed in the number of people who complain about college as if the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper.
I feel like similar issues are also present in humanities , but they are less visible .
I enjoy doing recreational linguistics , writhing poems , stories and argumentative texts , yet I always sucked at humanities at school . I learned a lot of what school tried to teach me on my own , often after failing to fully grasp it at school . On the flip side , a lot of time was spent learning about things I still do not know the use of , that I , with some difficulty , crammed for tests and forgotten .
Even with maths which I am quite good at , I often entered new topics with some knowledge of them from doing maths recreationally , which was not that great for me , both as I did not have enough resources to find the gaps in my knowledge and as I spent time not building on the knowledge I already had .
I think this is an issue of how little we focus on individuals in our schools , though this is not something I blame teachers for , to be clear , they have no option to do so , especially as being a teacher not rewarded enough , ignoring both the extra workload outside of school and with generally shitty pay .
I often find that the best way for me to learn is via exploration , trying to do something and researching ways how to do things needed to reach the goal . This is unfortunately something school doesn’t have space for and I suspect it is one of the factors behind this misunderstanding .
The reason I feel like maths gets more heat for not having a use is because its harder to convey meaning of abstract equations , as someone else in this thread put better then I can , many students , I feel like , miss a deeper understanding , being left with only what is needed to pass the test , forgetting even that soon after …
Ah yes, because plumbers, electricians, and brick layers never have to deal with geometry. That being said, none of my geometry education was taught with a practical motivation. But that being said, I was in the advanced track classes, so none of us were becoming professional carpenters. I’m actually probably one of the most “hands-on” people from that class, both in my job and in my life. I build scientific instruments and enjoy fixing things around the house.
