What if I Fail 9th Grade Math? (Part 3)

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(Continued from the previous two posts.)

the reader replied to my answer:

thank you, that really help me but all the jobs your listed are basic math i can do that in my head. But the schools are teaching me alot of bullshit which i don’t know alot about i think there lessons are useless.i guess u need math for everything but can’t we just use techonology like a caluator to help us?

Professor Homunculus’s reply:

You keep asking good questions.

Here’ s the deal on technology:
Calculators were invented by vampires to suck your brains out.

If you were a record producer, and you wanted to know your profits from a certain album, you would have to know what formulas to use before you even touched the calculator. Then you would type them in. The calculator isn’t going to tell you that.

On the other hand, there may be computer programs to use for specific things like that. But then again, if you are in a meeting and people ask you the specifics, and you say, “Doh, I don’t know that. I don’t have my computer here,’” you will not exactly be winning employee of the month.

It doesn’t sound like you are going to go for a job which requires heavy math. You sound kind of resistant. That is ok, no one has to major in math or anything. But every human being should at least know algebra. Why? It is the same reason that every human being should at least know how to read and write well.

For one reason, it is a matter of personal pride. It shows that you are not a quitter. An employer (or anyone else) does not want to engage people s/he knows will just do the minimum job and stop there. People do not want to spend their time motivating resistant people to do something that someone else would be happy to do and excel at.

Have you ever been somewhere and people are talking about something and there is one bumpkin who doesn’t have a clue what the others are talking about? People sort of feel that person is a bit of an idiot.

That happens to people who give up on math, too. Same for spelling and social studies.

If I am around an American-born person, who’s English is so bad that he can’t write a sentence without a bunch of misspellings, or speaks with such a heavy accent that no one but his mother can understand him, I feel he is ignorant. (This is not always true, but it is the way to bet.)

And ignorant people seldom get what they want out of life.

On the other hand, if the person is a foreigner, and has only been here a few years, and, although he may have an accent, he speaks better than our ignorant friend, I would hire him quicker than I would the ignorant one.

Same goes for math skills. If someone takes an aptitude test for my company, and he can’t even solve a logic problem, or a simple algebra problem, why should I expect him to solve my company’s problems at his job?

Are you getting it? It is about being a well-rounded, fully enfranchised human.

And my take on technology is this:
If a guy with perfectly good legs comes in for a job in a wheelchair, and says he would rather use it than walk, I would kick his lame ass out the door.
Same goes for a person with a perfectly good brain who would rather have a machine do what he could just as well do in his mind.

Truman, you said you can do the math I mentioned in those jobs in your head. You are under a very false impression, man. You can’t do any of that stuff in your head. I’ll bet you can’t even do any of it on paper, or with a calculator.
That is giving me the impression that it is not just the school that is up to some bullshit. You are fooling yourself if you think you can calculate stress-levels of materials, deal with vectors in 3-d art, calculate odds, or do complex financial calculations in your head.

As far as the math that they are teaching you in school being bullshit, I think you got it wrong. It is not the math that is bullshit. It is probably the teacher’s way of teaching, which makes it boring and uninspiring.

Face it, it is also partly your attitude. The easiest thing to change about the situation is your attitude.

But once you have opened your mind to math, and all you have is your bullshit teacher, what do you do? Well, those books I told you about are good.
I also have a website that has some mental calculating stuff. Go there and click on the lesson for left-to-right subtraction. (Yeah, yeah, I know you can subtract. You can subtract the lame way they taught you in second or third grade. That is my point - the way they teach math is bull. Go to the site and learn a way to do subtraction that is better, and will make you look like a genius if you get decent at it).

Have fun, and let me know how you did.

Professor Homunculus

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