What I learned in school and actually needed in life!
Picture by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash
I’m certain that either you or someone you know has already said the following:
Why am I learning this in school/university? I will never have to use it ‘in real life’🙄. 1
I’ll be honest, I did not say this frequently, even so life has lately got a way to prove to me this phrase was incorrect, including twice in the course of a single month!
The first of which was very practical: Leticia and I started the year motivated to stop postponing and finish our apartment’s decoration, which involved, among other things, buying and installing a full-body mirror. We did not have a lot of suitable places to install it and I was hoping to stick it on the back of the master bedroom door, but then I was wondering:
How tall does the mirror have to be, and at which height, for us to see our full body?
It is a simple question with a seemingly easy answer: “make the mirror at least your height”, but bigger mirrors are harder to install and more expensive, so I set sail to look for the actual answer and, to my surprise, it is a common physics question of high school exams. I was bedazzled, as I probably solved some of these in the past, but couldn’t remember a thing about ratio of triangles and light reflection2. I made the calculations according to the explanation of a video3 and ordered the mirror. The glazier challenged me that it would be too small to see the full body, but being a man of science4, I stood my ground and it worked!
Not long after that, I was working and needed to draw a scatter plot which contained a curve following a decreasing exponential function5. I knew it had to connect two given coordinates and I remember that knowledge once lived inside of me, but couldn’t get started, so once again a quick web search helped me get going and I was off to the next challenge6 7.
All of this made me wonder: am I accomplishing these easily because I know what to search and just have to revive the knowledge inside of me, or could I have been totally unaware and just learned this when I needed it? I don’t have an answer, but it was amusing to think about it.
PS: Let me know if you’ve also encountered examples of knowledge you thought would be useless and wasn’t, I’d be happy to hear!
I actually do not know if this thought is common outside of Brazil, but it is a given here. Maybe it stems from an aversion to school? ↩︎
Sorry to disappoint you, Pierre. ↩︎
As many of the videos explaining school subjects this day, it was from an Indian teacher. Thank you, folks! ↩︎
And a very stubborn one. ↩︎
If you’re very confused by this sentence, think of a graph with multiple unconnected dots and then a curve that starts with a high value and then rapidly decreases to a small one. ↩︎
I actually spent some time tuning the constants to get the shape of the function right where I wanted, but it was fun! ↩︎
The graph turned out very pretty, because I had chosen to do it using matplotlib, though it had zero need for mathematical precision and I could have gotten away drawing it in PowerPoint 🤐. ↩︎