May 19th, 2008 @ 4:41 pm
Worthless Math
I am back in Rochester now, but I wish I was at home still, or could teleport there at will 
I have a math final tonight @ 6, and I am having a hard time studying. I just don’t care, at all. I do how I do, and since I know enough to pass it doesn’t really concern me more than that. I know that it is kinda bad to be that way, but honestly, its how I am. I care about my ASL final and will be trying to practice sign language tonight / tomorrow before my 1-on-1 with the professor, but math?, who cares.
I am certain that there are plenty some a couple people out there that need to know that the cosecant of 11pi/6 is equal to -2, but I am not one of those people and don’t plan on ever being. I am all for basic math skills, but I already have them. (Yes, I am taking an easy math class. I already took the harder ones, but I still needed to either take this class to fulfill it as a requirement or take a hard math class that would help me even less in life AND require effort to pass)
I don’t know what math is required in the real world, but they should have a class called “Real World Math” that was like all real life problems that are solved with math. I think we spend to much time trying to teach people things for the sake of teaching them things without actually pondering if anything will ever be applicable in their life. I think people are turned off of math just because the math that is taught in schools is useless for most people. Don’t let them fall through the cracks and just say “math is hard and I don’t like it.” I don’t like math that is taught in class rooms because it isn’t really helpful to me outside of the class.
Math can be fun and make complex tasks easier, but it’s just not being taught in a way that shows that. Keep it simple and instead teach how to apply math to real life problems instead of teaching math that is memorized and forgotten for each test.
Solve for X is useful in the real world, I just can’t think of a good example right now. More than that? I don’t really know when I ever needed to know trig functions in life outside of a math class room / playing with a 3-D graphing program to make pretty waves.
