Re:A math tutor teaching calculus on Pornhub
by tombert on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @03:52PM
(#28935410)
Ok, I'll bite.
I find these questions a bit strange, because it sort of misses the point of learning as a whole. Do I use Civil War history every day? No, probably not, but I also don't regret being taught it at school. Am I conducting a lot of chemical experiments? No, but I think it's valid for me to have learned chemistry in high school. Am I performing literary analysis on everything I consume? Well, yes, but that's just something I do for fun, it's not like people are paying me for it.
The reason that they teach calculus is two fold. First, most of this stuff is somewhat additive. Do you use "calculus" every day? Probably not, but having learned calculus might make other aspects of math or programming easier, stuff that you might end up using full time.
Second, the people designing programs for Computer Science degrees (and probably others as well) at some level need to have a "one size fits all" for their students. My professor doesn't know if I'm going to get a job doing video game physics, if I'm going to designing video compression filters, or if I'm going to be a web developer, but they want to make sure that if I graduate with a CS degree, I am more or less qualified for most reasonable software engineering positions, or least given the tools to become qualified.
We could extrapolate this logic further: how many people here are realistically writing low-level C code? I know I'm not, but I don't regret them teaching me how it's done, it informs my high-level code writing.
I find these questions a bit strange, because it sort of misses the point of learning as a whole. Do I use Civil War history every day? No, probably not, but I also don't regret being taught it at school. Am I conducting a lot of chemical experiments? No, but I think it's valid for me to have learned chemistry in high school. Am I performing literary analysis on everything I consume? Well, yes, but that's just something I do for fun, it's not like people are paying me for it.
The reason that they teach calculus is two fold. First, most of this stuff is somewhat additive. Do you use "calculus" every day? Probably not, but having learned calculus might make other aspects of math or programming easier, stuff that you might end up using full time.
Second, the people designing programs for Computer Science degrees (and probably others as well) at some level need to have a "one size fits all" for their students. My professor doesn't know if I'm going to get a job doing video game physics, if I'm going to designing video compression filters, or if I'm going to be a web developer, but they want to make sure that if I graduate with a CS degree, I am more or less qualified for most reasonable software engineering positions, or least given the tools to become qualified.
We could extrapolate this logic further: how many people here are realistically writing low-level C code? I know I'm not, but I don't regret them teaching me how it's done, it informs my high-level code writing.