My sister (a now retired high school science teacher) years ago told me of a fellow teacher/friend of hers who was ordering at a fast food restaurant and was just getting checked out when the power failed, registers all dead. She looked up at the big menu display graphics on the wall, opens her purse and hands the high school age cashier some money. “This will cover it.” “How did you do that?!?”
“Math.”
And I just remembered. I struggled with trigonometry quite a bit when learning it in the abstract in high school and the trig parts of calcuseless in college. I was all like so sine 30 degrees is something so what. When I finally took Statics and Dynamics later it clicked as I could see where using the trig functions to break down the force vectors to the X, Y, Z components how it actually worked in my head. I had no problem with it after that. I have found that having good teachers who can give you at least an basic understanding of the what is going on at a level you need to be able to understand and do your classwork are rare and wonderful people.
Like my link about calculus, you don’t need to really grok all the equations in that for Calculus 101 but the fact that sum all the rectangles under the function curve and do it as the width of each rectangle gets to zero gives you the integral function and the area under the curve. Happily I had a good prof who got that across well even at 7am to a barely awake me.
I remember The Mechanical Universe! I’m remembering watching Brian Eno’s name go by in the credits but maybe that was a Nova episode. We also watched Connections in Physics.
Math you can see = easier than math you cannot.
3 times 40 = 110. Answer is 110.
In California, it’s three years of math starting at the most minimum Algebra 1. However, some kids are more math gifted than others and start their frosh year with Geometry or even Algebra 2/Trig. There are even sophomores in an AP Calculus-A/B at one high school that I’m familiar with. In order to graduate, they are now committed to two years of AP Calculus (both A/B and B/C).
It’s scary how driven these wee ones are.
Many political scientists use linear regression in the quantitative area of their discipline; so nope, they’ve got to have a basic understanding of numbers, statistics, and change over time. The pure theorists are becoming a minority in the discipline if one judges academic publishing.
You could argue that maids make more than doctors, because the overall investment in a maid service can be more than the billable time of a doctor who comes in for a matter of minutes.
I understand the frustration she might feel from hearing that someone who didn’t spend 6-figures to go to medical school is getting a nice check for being in the same delivery room as she is, but it’s apples and oranges. In the time the doula spent with one person in labor, the doctor is engaged in billable work for multiple patients both in the delivery room and rounds afterward. And it’s piece-work for a doula, with no guarantee when the next “piece” will be available to be worked on. If a doctor is scheduled to come in on a particular day, they’ll still get paid their base salary even if no patients show up during their shift.
You can’t just look at number of patients in a month. If you add up the time spent actually working with those patients, a doula spends much more time with the 10 patients than the OB does with the 30-50. It’s not wrong that someone with many more years of education and training makes more, obviously, it’s just disingenuous to claim that doctors are seeing 3-5 times as many patients as a way to bemoan the salary of a foot soldier.
How wonderful, though, that doulas there have regular employment with an annual salary. What country is this?
About the general education distribution requirements at liberal arts colleges in the U.S.? There are thousands…how much research do you want me to do for you?
Pick a few names that you know, go to their websites and find the page that explains graduation requirements. Some require a greater diversity of courses than others, but in the U.S. the kind of specialization that happens at the college level in Europe doesn’t happen in the U.S. until the last one or two years of college and then of course in graduate school. It is the norm rather than the exception that college students here take courses in different divisions during their first 1-2 years.
Certain specialty schools will differ, of course, but that’s not the norm.
But if I’ve taken a picture, and you tell me you want it for the web and so you want it at “300 dpi”, you’ve still told me absolutely nothing unless you tell me how big the image is going to be. I can figure out absolutely nothing at all from you telling me “300 dpi.”
If you want to buy some rice from me, and I ask you how much, and you tell me you want 500 grains per cup, you still haven’t told me how much rice you want.
I meant specific liberal arts colleges that require art students to take calc. I couldn’t find any and I would like to have that information for a discussion I’m having with a friend whose daughter is innumerate and artsy and they are like “oh well math doesn’t matter for artists.” I seemed like you knew of specific programs.
No, you said that you’d never used any algebra, not even for 5 seconds. I interpreted it as a boast. Somehow that your chosen life had allowed you transcend the personal need for these sorts of things. That you were a “creative” and other lesser mortals had to do the grunt work.
As an engineering student I had the opposite experience. We were forced into doing a selection of “humanities” to “balance our education”, yet the “arts students” (I use the term quite generally) weren’t conversely required to undertake even basic math nor science. It is one factor that has led to our world being full of easily fooled people.
Unless you are just saying that it is theoretically possible that an art student might chose a minor that requires calc, because that’s not really the same thing as requiring an art student to take calc. They could simply choose a minor that doesn’t require calc.
Right, which is why I usually either say “send it at the size you shot it at” or say 8x10 or whatever; if I need a photo for the web, I’m going to be cropping it, sizing it, changing it, remaking it. The size doesn’t matter as long as it’s pretty large so I can have options. If I need rice, I’ll tell you how much.
And we watched Connections in History. And in my memory I thought of The Mechanical Universe as being as much about calculus as physics. Just goes to show how great, and important, interdisciplinary education is.
My dad taught at an University in the UK-- mostly computing, with some neuroscience. He was a bit miffed that so many Biology types entered in with a statistics “A level”-- or whatever they call it these days. (NEWTS, maybe?), and hadn’t the specific math background to really understand some what he was interested in-- neuroscience, population genetics. And because universities are three year, not four year, it was really hard to remedy this.
I’m not your research assistant. It’s very easy to find the info. An art student (except in specialty programs that are not academic) will have to take some math and science and humanities and social science and foreign language to graduate. They can’t just take art at college.
Even at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is very much studio-based and not considered an academic school at all, still states very clearly:
Liberal arts courses comprise 25 percent of your degree requirements. You will be completing coursework in English, natural science, social science, and the humanities.
I took pre-calc as an option in high school, then went on to attempt an engineering degree. Math itself isn’t the thing that kills a lot of people’s interest, poor teachers and lack of demonstrated practical applications will do that very quickly. Entry level math classes are often taught by grad students who are more interested in getting credit for teaching than imparting a good working knowledge to a class of 500+ students. I was average in calc, squeaked by in differential equations, transferred to a different school, and found their approach completely alien to what I had already learned (math the universal language? Ha!)
Regarding algebra, we had a foster kid stay with us for a half year. Math was hammering him, but he also was part of our RPG group. I got him to understand algebra by putting it in terms of figuring out powers and damage for the RPG system we were using. “You have 20 XP to spend, and want to purchase an Energy Blast. EB starts at 5 XP for 1d6, and each additional die of damage costs 3 XP. For your 20 XP, how many dice of cruel brutal damage can you buy?”
It sounds to me like you’re reading a tremendous amount into my comments that’s not there at all and are extremely oversensitive about people’s use of math. What I meant was that I hadn’t used higher algebra (as opposed to something helpful in everyday life like 5x=20) in my job, not even for 5 seconds, which I’m glad of because I was pretty crap at it. I work with factories every day and am very glad of people I can collaborate with who use it to figure out measurements and allowances needed for different sizes of things. That’s what’s great about education, people can find their strengths and play to them. The factory techs I work with have told me they’re glad there’s folks who enjoy fiddling around with fonts and PMS colors because they find that stuff irritating and dull.
