Last week, a meme surfaced that was new to me. There was no image. Just a statement: “Well, another day I made it through without applying the Pythagorean Theorem.”
For some reason, I launched into laughter. It was so perfect. All the things we are taught growing up that we never use as adults. The meme caught this sentiment so off-handedly that it instantaneously cracked me.
It also got me thinking about all those other educational requirements that serve no function when you leave school. This could be something from third grade, something from high school or perhaps college. We are taught useless information that has no connection to your job, career and just generally becoming an intelligent human being.
For example, when was the last time you applied any concepts from your high school sophomore geometry class? The only thing I remember from that class was one of my good friends stealing my mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies from my sack lunch. She liked my mom for those cookies without even knowing her in person.
Similarly, in college, as a business major, I had to take a calculus class. Yup. Figure out those differential equations, dude. Here’s what old Google has to say about that, “A differential equation is an equation that provides a description of a function's derivative, which means that it tells us the function's rate of change.” Sure thing. Got it. Let’s move on.
What I REMEMBER from that class was our corny professor (or perhaps he was just a teaching assistant) and how passionate he was. He would write so hard on the blackboard that he frequently would snap the chalk and toss it in the waste basket while making moaning sounds. Quite strange.
One day, during homecoming week, there was a fire engine outside on the quad and it kept clanging its bell. He got increasingly frustrated, squealing and yelling towards the window. Finally, he propelled the chalk at the window, where it shattered into multiple pieces.
Silence descended on the room as he looked at the glass with glazed eyes behind his brown horn-rimmed glasses. Then one of the guys from our dorm floor who came to class stoned every day started laughing uproariously. That broke the tension and gives me one of the few useful lasting memories of that college calculus course. Memories aside, I’ve still never used anything from that class since the day I left it with a C-.
That Pythagorean Theorem meme sets off amusing memories, and also gets you thinking “what if?” What if we were schooled with more useful classes, ones that applied to our daily lives and helped us become better human beings and able to manage our personal affairs?
Why, for example, aren’t we taught anger management? With all the shootings across the U.S. since the late-1990s, why don’t we mandate a class that teaches us how to handle anger (our own and that of others), to dial back our emotions, listen to others, show empathy, handle crazy people?
We need English, arithmetic, biology, astronomy, earth science, history, basic math. We use all of those classes when we get fully immersed in the world.
Yet many more classes could help many of us: financial planning, cooking, understanding the different world religions. We’d lead fuller lives, more intelligently, more connected, more understanding. Hopefully, anyway. There are probably some more funny memes out there we can use to poke fun at what we’re taught that prove useless as we move through life. Maybe that can lead us towards classes that make sense and help us to survive and thrive in this complicated and highly technical world.
For some reason, I launched into laughter. It was so perfect. All the things we are taught growing up that we never use as adults. The meme caught this sentiment so off-handedly that it instantaneously cracked me.
It also got me thinking about all those other educational requirements that serve no function when you leave school. This could be something from third grade, something from high school or perhaps college. We are taught useless information that has no connection to your job, career and just generally becoming an intelligent human being.
For example, when was the last time you applied any concepts from your high school sophomore geometry class? The only thing I remember from that class was one of my good friends stealing my mom’s homemade chocolate chip cookies from my sack lunch. She liked my mom for those cookies without even knowing her in person.
Similarly, in college, as a business major, I had to take a calculus class. Yup. Figure out those differential equations, dude. Here’s what old Google has to say about that, “A differential equation is an equation that provides a description of a function's derivative, which means that it tells us the function's rate of change.” Sure thing. Got it. Let’s move on.
What I REMEMBER from that class was our corny professor (or perhaps he was just a teaching assistant) and how passionate he was. He would write so hard on the blackboard that he frequently would snap the chalk and toss it in the waste basket while making moaning sounds. Quite strange.
One day, during homecoming week, there was a fire engine outside on the quad and it kept clanging its bell. He got increasingly frustrated, squealing and yelling towards the window. Finally, he propelled the chalk at the window, where it shattered into multiple pieces.
Silence descended on the room as he looked at the glass with glazed eyes behind his brown horn-rimmed glasses. Then one of the guys from our dorm floor who came to class stoned every day started laughing uproariously. That broke the tension and gives me one of the few useful lasting memories of that college calculus course. Memories aside, I’ve still never used anything from that class since the day I left it with a C-.
That Pythagorean Theorem meme sets off amusing memories, and also gets you thinking “what if?” What if we were schooled with more useful classes, ones that applied to our daily lives and helped us become better human beings and able to manage our personal affairs?
Why, for example, aren’t we taught anger management? With all the shootings across the U.S. since the late-1990s, why don’t we mandate a class that teaches us how to handle anger (our own and that of others), to dial back our emotions, listen to others, show empathy, handle crazy people?
We need English, arithmetic, biology, astronomy, earth science, history, basic math. We use all of those classes when we get fully immersed in the world.
Yet many more classes could help many of us: financial planning, cooking, understanding the different world religions. We’d lead fuller lives, more intelligently, more connected, more understanding. Hopefully, anyway. There are probably some more funny memes out there we can use to poke fun at what we’re taught that prove useless as we move through life. Maybe that can lead us towards classes that make sense and help us to survive and thrive in this complicated and highly technical world.