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> One has to wonder...does it really matter what you learn in school? When I'd just finished high school, I thought it was irrelevant. Now, many years afterwar
by notalaser 11y ago
> One has to wonder...does it really matter what you learn in school?
When I'd just finished high school, I thought it was irrelevant. Now, many years afterwards, I can see the incredible influence it had over me and I can wholeheartedly say that it does, to an incredible extent.
Virtually every single element of the foundation of my profession, views about and understanding of art, science and the human spirit in general have been touched by the interaction I had with my teachers, more often than not mediated by what they taught.
I do not agree with everything I learned in school. Many of the things that I do agree with (because there is no objective disagreeing with e.g. Calculus) I now view in an entirely different light than that in which they were taught to me. I passionately hated (and still hate) the idea of schools -- either state institutions, or for-profit private entities -- having a monopoly over intellectual and often ethical concepts, so I went through school challenging it intensely.
As for this though:
> Do you remember anything you learned in AP Calc or APUSH all those years ago?
Calculus is the mathematical foundation of virtually every engineering profession so yes, not only do I remember everything I was taught in AP Calc, I apply a lot of it every single day.
I didn't go to high school in the US so I didn't go through APUSH, but History is one of the most important subjects that was ever taught to me. It is not a tool with which one is able to predict the future, but it is a large set of lenses through which one can look at the present and understand it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- krinchan 11y agoI don't use Calculus every day, but the whole "stop thinking about specific Y-values and start thinking about how functions behave together and influence each other" is just invaluable in a world ruled by numbers that are in constant flux. To be honest though, I always thought that Linear Algebra would've been a much better AP class than Calculus. Sure Calculus naturally follows Trigonometry, but Linear Algebra has the same sort of "teaches these critical thinking skills" effect and, more importantly to me, was much more visual and easier to get excited about. Especially when our class started futzing about with OpenGL and particle fountains towards the end of the class.
- notalaser 11y agoYeah, I was pretty upset at this, too. In high school, I was taught a very washed-down form of linear algebra (very basic vector and matrix operations), and then in uni, calculus and linear algebra were taught at the same time. I made up for it pretty much by going over a linear algebra textbook all by myself, again, in my 3rd year of university. I get to use Calculus pretty often because I regularly do both hardware and software work (perks of having an EE degree; according to my diploma, I'm an intruder and should not be allowed to touch computers :-) ). Analog systems have continuous-valued inputs and outputs and you can't really describe those without Calc, and in mixed-signal systems you often describe various properties of the discrete signals by starting from their continuous counterpart.