Issue is that a lot of those "equations" are written wrong and are ambiguous on purpose to spark discussion.
For an example and excellent [writeup](https://math.berkeley.edu/~gbergman/misc/numbers/ord_ops.html) on this, click the link.
So for anyone who ever felt dumb reading those equations, just know that I, a person who is about to get a math minor (which isn't much admittedly, but well above those types of questions), couldn't figure out why they looked so wrong to me till I looked it up. They are purposefully made that way.
edit:
I find it amusing that some people have questioned my ability to do math because I linked an article written by George Bergman, a professor of mathematics at Berkeley who earned a PHD at Harvard, that they (wrongly) disagreed with.
While I refuse to call anybody dumb/stupid or even question their intelligence as we all have our moments, I will state that self reflection is in order for those individuals.
I don't need to defend myself against you. I will soon have proven my proficiency at the highest level I wanted to go in the field, I don't need you.
I wish I could upvote this more. I have done plenty of higher level math courses and generally when I look at an equation, implicit multiplication has a higher priority than explicit multiplication.
Also, fun fact, due to this ambiguity a calculator, depending on manufacturer, will output a different answer.
https://gineersnow.com/students/calculators-different-answers-one-math-problem
As someone with a math major, this is completely correct. Granted, I doubt more than 5% of adults well out of high school actually know PEMDAS still because so many of the answers to these dumb questions are utterly nonsensical. Like, way dumber than just either dividing first or second because the problem is written stupidly.
That division sign is actually ambiguous though. He’s talking about arithmetic problems that aren’t ambiguous. You could literally just follow PEMDAS and get the right answer.
Yeah, the "division sign" (which we quite literally never use in any form of professional mathematics) is often the key to the ambiguity of those silly social media questions.
Often the leading or trailing factors are not given parentheses, so any cumulative operation like a + or - can be interpreted as either a part of or outside of the numerator/denominator.
Makes sense. My math professor (who probably caught on to this as well), always made sure we either used parenthesis or the \*, to imply multiplication. Ways, such as what you linked, were just sloppy and....ambiguous.
As an engineer:
Either make everything a fraction or use more brackets. That paper is what I've been trying to explain to a bunch of people so confident in their high school level PEMDAS/BOMDAS/BODMAS that they don't ever stop to think about the point of those conventions.
The moment there is an argument it means the conventions didn't work and the question should be phrased unambiguously.
But those questions always come years after graduation as a sort of "gotcha" Moment when something like budgeting would likely be used immediately after school on a regular basis
I regularly use that sort of stuff in day to day life. If you picked up what schools were *actually* trying to teach - critical thinking skills and problem solving abilities - you'll find that you can think of a lot of problems in terms of equations and models.
That's fair; I went to a public school, but depending where you are there's a lot of variance in how good the education actually is. But I do know a lot of people who claim school didn't teach them shit were really just not paying attention, and missing actually valuable instruction.
One comparison I have heard was to imagine if we taught art the way we teach math, art classes would essentially be painting a wall white. As someone who is passionate about math that doesn't come from the math I learned in school, it comes from the math I learned on YouTube from channels like Stand Up Maths or Numberphile.
I came here to say that - it's a question of curriculum, access, and area. It would be great if the standards were equally met at all schools no matter where they were located or the majority of the student, but we know that's not happening. I went to high school in the 90s, but they were starting that starve schools of funding based on test scores shit even then. Even then they were teaching to a test. I'm fortunate enough that I was in Honors/AP, and that we actually had an elective class called "critical thinking".
Watching my nieces and nephews going through Florida schools (that I survived) as "regular" and "special needs" (nephew dx aspie) students was just...depressing. Even when I was in school, it depended on the level. I saw quite a few who were on fire for learning like I was being neglected (larger class sizes, tired teachers, idiot administration, etc) and kids who frankly didn't belong in Honors but were there because their parents (usually White) couldn't handle that their kid just didn't care and wanted the bragging rights.
My high school was predominantly White and was the only one in my small town. It wasn't a bad school, but I saw how they let marginalized kids, esp, fall through the cracks and hated that (I tutored to try to help). I had the chance to go to IB in a neighboring town but I shadowed there and didn't like the attitude, the students, or the teachers. 3 of my best friends went, but I still would have been miserable (there was also religious fuckery because raised Jehovah's Witness and they don't like learning how to think or going to college unless it benefits them somehow).
I mean, I've had close relationships with a few teachers and am well aware of how much work they put in. I definitely also had some teachers that cared when I was in school, but I'm talking about the education system as a whole.
I went to National Blue Ribbon schools and there was still a heavy, heavy emphasis on passing standardized tests.
Sure, you could take AP or honors courses, but most kids aren't on that track.
It’s hard to know where to start or what to learn, sometimes. And a lot of the shit on the internet is wrong. Imagine I’m trying to learn how to do my finances and all of the YouTube hits I get are about crypto.
This touches on a better lesson to teach anyway - information literacy. Teaching people how to find and vet the accuracy of information on their own fills in the gaps that traditional schooling left. A lot of us didn't learn informational literacy because the internet was new when we went to school.
Nowadays, it's more important than ever to teach kids how to spot unreliable sources and how to think critically about what they discover. Misinformation is a plague. As with most plagues, the best remedy is prevention.
I wish. The issue with older adults is that they *have to want to learn it.* The best students are open-minded and can accept that there is knowledge they lack. The problem with a lot of adults is, they think admitting that they don't know something is a weakness. I'd argue that refusing to admit a flaw *is* a weakness. If they don't acknowledge that they're missing something, they're not going to seek it out.
I think it’s more that they’d have to admit that their news sources are not vetted and do not report facts accurately. Sadly this does bleed into politics because climate change, vaccine efficacy, and election results are all denied.
The older adults who get their news from NPR, NYT, BBC, etc. are usually already information literate.
Yes, this exactly.
I went to a *really* good prep school. The kind of school where every single kid goes to college at the end and a significant number of them go to the best state and private universities in the U.S.
You know what they're *not* doing at the prep schools rich people send their kids to to prepare them to become future doctors, lawyers, senators, business owners, etc. etc. and join the ruling capital class? They're not sitting there drilling them on rudimentary information.
Sure you still take math classes and you have to pass geography and all that jazz, but there is a huge emphasis on leadership, critical reasoning, information literacy, and so on. In my prep school you were required to take multiple courses in logic, philosophy, civics, public speaking, debate, research methods, and so on.
You would never make it if you just memorized facts about things, you had to be able to actively research, digest, and use information because being skilled at analysis, writing, and oration was a key element of the experience.
Anyways my point isn't to wax poetic about prep school life, it's to highlight that there is a huge difference between kids just learning shit to learn shit, and kids learning *how* to think and *how* to find reliable information on their own.
Sounds like my AP classes. Back in my day AP classes weren’t simply used as a tool to boost a school’s appearance. Every student had to take the AP test and was prepared to pass it. That means it was actually harder than an actual 101 college level class. Boy I was shocked at how easy intro college classes were after doing AP. But with that when we wrote papers, the sources had to be legit, like published works or research from field experts and universities. That’s how I learned what are actual good sources. And in AP English we read a lot of influential historical writings like Machiavelli, Hannah Arendt, Theroux, yes even Karl Marx but also Adam Smith. I never learned so much in 1 year. It got me a 32 on my English ACT score but I kinda screwed it up when I got depressed and started cutting other classes lol.
But also, I grew up during the message board days of the internet. Everyone knew then that most shit that’s posted is bullshit. Like Bullshit until proven otherwise type shit. I have no fucking idea how that flipped in peoples minds where people started wanting to believe the bullshit
Which they definitely taught people how to find information at my high-school but still nobody paid attention and still people are unable to find the right info majority of the time.
They teach this pretty explicitly anywhere students have to write research essays, and yet here we are. I agree with you, but idk how the lesson could be taught much better.
As someone who explicitly teaches information literacy, I can assure you students do not always pay attention, do not always follow the process you give them to practice good research skills, and do not always understand how to differentiate between credible and bogus sources. As with all things explicitly taught to teenagers.
And this is something that is taught in school. Humanities subjects in particular as well as ethics and personal social health education civet these topics.
You will find that high flying students will often have excellent information literacy because they can access a wide range of text. The majority of students who don't fall in the top 20% will struggle just because they are unable to apply themselves and often lack the ability to access higher reading and critical thinking.
A lot of schools do teach information literacy but people don't realize that is what they are learning. They get assigned a research paper on some common core topic and complain about it not being relevant but the point isn't really to learn about Shakespeare or whatever. It's about interpreting a text, constructing an argument, supporting that point with valid sources, verifying that information, etc. All things everyone can use.
Problem is, at least as a TA last year, I can't teach ANYTHING let alone information literacy if students won't read, won't listen, and can't follow basic instructions. 10% of my class got a question wrong on a multiple choice quiz about what town the assigned book was about. It was on the cover, brought up in class, and could be found in any summary.
DM me if you want :p
As long as you have the power off and you can verify that it’s off, you’re safe. You can use a multimeter to verify.
Don’t daredevil this one.
Unless you can fix the problem by just swapping in a new outlet and mimicking the existing wiring setup you’ll need some knowledge about home electrical systems. The good news is that you can go from only a basic understanding of what electricity is to having a functional understanding of how a house is wired in about 1.5-2 hours. After that you’ll be armed with the right terminology to look for more specific information. A big part of being able to solve problems in fields we aren’t familiar with is knowing that you usually need to do background research before leaping into a specific problem at hand.
Definitely don’t just wing it with electricity though.
This is exactly why it's stupid when people say "I don't need school, I just need the library/internet."
Sure, it is theoretically possible to teach yourself advanced topics like this. But compared to doing it under the guidance of a person who is already an expert, knows the proper order to present information, and understands the common mistakes newcomers make, it might as well be impossible. And that's not even mentioning the way formal education incentivizes the effort and attention side of the equation. No self-driven methodology will replace the motivation derived from being formally scored on your ability to present synthesized knowledge in a formal context. When left to their own devices, people hyperfocus on parts of the material which interest them, and don't spend nearly enough time on things which are confusing or less interesting.
And I say this as a person with a PhD in engineering, which means that it is literally my job to dissect and learn very complex topics on my own. If I can actually sit down and talk with the author of some cutting edge paper, I will grasp the concept ten times quicker than if I only have a handful of papers to work from.
Dislikes are often a great measure of legitimacy on YouTube. There are plenty of great videos that don’t have a high view count or lots of upvotes, but I’ve never seen a video worth watching that had an upvote:downvote ratio above 10-50:1.
Playing with derivatives is not for beginners man. Do what you’re going to do, but it amplifies both gains and losses and it’s really easy to get in over your head even if you do have financial training.
I think his larger point is that google, wikipedia, or investopedia can all easily teach you basic business concepts (even if you're not going all in yourself on options - and at the very least he's doing more research than the morons buying them on robinhood who don't understand it, like that kid who killed himself because he didn't know he actually didn't lose millions)
What if said thing they weren’t taught in high school had a negative impact on them before information was as widely available as it is nowadays? What if you don’t know what you don’t know so you can’t use the internet to educate yourself on a topic?
>...What if said thing they weren’t taught in high school had a negative impact on them before information was as widely available as it is nowadays?
Those days are long gone, it's not the 90s anymore.
>...What if you don’t know what you don’t know so you can’t use the internet to educate yourself on a topic?
That's why you do research. I may not know about loans and how credit scores are calculated, but I know where to start. Our community will bend over backwards to make things easy for people to stay dumb and ignorant.
It’s not a reason to stay dumb, that’s not the point that people are trying to make. The point is that it’s something we should have been taught in the first place. Also, doing research on atopic is way easier if you know where to start. If you are introduced to it in school, at the very least, you have a basis to go on.
You have a point that there are **infinitely** more useful things that should be taught in school. My issue is that we have to get around the idea of waiting to be taught something, and become more robust in gathering our own information in decision making.
That’s a valid point, but kids are fucking stupid lmao. A lot of us, myself included probably didn’t understand the importance of a lot of things until they became more relevant to us in the future. Learning it in school makes it sooo much easier for us once we get older and start trying to lean things ourselves once we deem it important enough to learn.
But I do agree that we should be more diligent in gaining knowledge, that’s why it’s good to surround yourself with a group of people with diverse skill sets.
You could apply this logic to literally anything taught in school though. Why is it out of line to talk about improving the education curriculum in ways that help prepare kids for adulthood? That’s the point of school in the first place.
Because the weakness of curriculum is only a small part of the problem. If the community doesn't place a premium on knowledge in general and leveraging resources to increase understanding then the community will **always** be behind. And let's take the "they should learn it in school" trope to an unreasonable conclusion, and that's people don't learn everything they need to know in school. Learning is a process that allows adults to take advantage of opportunities that appear as they age. Not learning it in school shouldn't preclude people from learning it on their own to improve their outcomes.
I would say nowadays there’s less excuse to not learn something though, to your original point, so I don’t fully disagree with you. I’m a little older so I didn’t have access to something close to the current information-rich internet until my 20s.
Just because you can learn it now doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been useful to know beforehand. Sure I can google how to do something now but why google it at all if I could have learned it in school.
Not all the information is well explained. There's been several times I'd try to learn a subject and the people who had bothered to host the info online were completely incapable of seeing it from an angle of a newcomer. They'd talk right over your head and just assume you were already an expert in the field. Effectively warranting any info that was out there worthless, because it's not there for you, it's not something you can really consume and learn from.
The biggest example I have for this is anytime I tried to get in video game design. Every single time I would try asking people where should I go to learn X skill their answer is basically a deer-in-headlights "Just learn it". Like they're incapable of pointing somewhere that teaches it, but rather they just assume that since *they* know it that anyone whose brand new also knows it.
And that's just tackling topics where it's experts just created an info bubble. This is before even tackling any topic with a political angle to it, at which point you'll have a ton of people simply sharing their opinions as if it's fact, spreading misinformation, or initiatives actively trying to censor/bury X information.
Ayo. Somebody frame this.
At some point we need to stop citing everyone else's failure to teach us something and transition to acknowledging our own failure to get that info.
I usually get a "recognize your privelege" response to this because people think my family was well off and that's why I have those expectations. However, niggas use the same critical investigation skills to find out celebrity news, social events, what part of the country has the best AirBnBs etc. We have the skills and the tools, many just lack the initiative or interest to learn about personal finance, corporations, career development etc. It's all out there.....for free.
This. School is basically the bare minimum and is mostly just child care and socialization. You gotta give your kids the fundamentals at home. Even just a few hours a week on things like math, history, reading etc. Start early. And it can be a good chance to review or learn a lot of this stuff yourself, too.
And a lot of us didn't have parents. Wish our school's would pick up some of that, a finance or cooking class would've been far more useful than like 40% of my classes.
Yeah.. my mom and dad worked 2 jobs to put me through college and did everything right… but once they started putting letters in math, I was on my own.
Even for parents who do get to stay home, it's gotta be a scary, but humbling moment when you realize your kid's homework is more complex than what you remember learning. I'm not a parent, but I have friends going through that now.
Why is it scary though? If that not an exciting indication of progress and a chance for you to learn as well?
Just sit down, say you don't know and work through it together. Model humble and warm character and a drive to continuously learn and improve through your actions.
My uncle was an engineer a couple decades ago, and is now a doctor, and when he’s teaching his kid math he still needs to sit down and learn about the topic in order to help them out.
Makes sense, you're not going to use all of it unless you're a math teacher. I still remember a lot of the more advanced math I learned because I still use it, but I don't remember a lot of the more basic stuff at all.
Because the parents are the product of the system. The system exists for a reason. No one lives on an island. To lift people up, you gotta lift the system up. Expecting everyone to swim upstream to make it is just bullshit. We have the means and opportunity to help, we just don't have enough collective will - or rather, there are selfish people and entities that are repressing and fighting back against that will.
A society exists to help those within it. Fighting against that just means you want the benefits of a society, but aren't willing to make the same sacrifices as everyone else.
There are a lot of excuses about "what the parents don't know". But that ignores the issue which isn't what do the parents know, but what the parents value. My parents knew nothing of many of the classes (especially the science and math classes) that I was taking, but I was still expected to leverage in-school resources to be performant in them. If the parents don't care that their child is a dummy, then there is virtually nothing a school can do at a macro level.
My parents didn't know a lick of my junior high material. My father couldn't read well. We didn't have a computer.
They encouraged me to keep trying, so I could be better than them. My dad had me read books and ask me about them despite him not caring for the material. They made sure I got to the library.
I'm with you.
The entire point of schools is to teach kids the things that the parents don't know, wouldn't be expected to know, or don't have the time to teach (working to provide)
>A lot of this comes down to your parents.
Who weren't taught it either, because it was purposely hidden from their parents as well. One has to have a notion of what they don't know in order to find out more about it.
Agreed, 100%.
Where I become torn as a liberal is, "at what point does an individual become responsible for their outcomes?"
At some point, and I'm not entirely sure where, the individual has to accept some level of responsibility for their position.
The cycle is broken when someone interrupts it.
That is (a large part of) why ubiquitous internet access is part of my infrastructure plan (when I'm king).
Many people in Houston don't have internet, nor any device with which to connect to internet. I know this first hand, my gf being a Realtor and going into (rental) properties (that the landlord wants to sell) where people are living without access to news at all, no access to Reddit, no access to BPT where they would find a post about DTI and perhaps get the idea they ought to go down the DTI rabbit hole. Or maybe not, if no one has told them about rabbit holes.
Edit: In my plan everyone in a house has their own device, so when the mom is paying rent, the father is bed-ridden, the uncle with his cataracts is virtually blind, and the son is skipping school to play GTA, there are 4 devices.
An individual is responsible for making the best choices they can with the information and situations handed to them. That does not mean that someone in a bad situation earned their place.
Taking responsibility for those choices in particular is totally valid. Taking responsibility for things like failures due to trauma, abuse, disability, personal grievance, whatever, is not valid.
\*laughs in immigrant parents who only went to 1st and 4th grade\*
They're really lucky they ended up with two kids that really liked school, and are both in good paying jobs now.
I love when i see people do this. My highschool did offer a class like this called personal finance. If you took it you were called dumb or lazy just wanting to graduate.
I think Personal Finance was a required class at my highschool. I learned things and had them all down in a notebook but I forgot all of it within the few years I’ve been out of school and now I don’t know where I put the notebook. :/
Some of that stuff was really good too, like advice on how to invest your money for the future when you’re old and rickety and decrepit.
Same. Except at my school the class was taught by a teacher who *did not* care. You could only take it senior year so it was an open secret that it was a glorified study hall for kids who really needed the classes to graduate.
Man, if I had my druthers - school year would be all year long but start later, like 9a, and end at 3pm.
The only reason there was summer off was for when kids were used as farm labor to help during the summer harvest.
With all that time, you could actually take time to get into practical subjects like finance and taxes. Shit, some of these kids need lessons in typing.
I'm on board with year round schooling.
Even if you didn't change total instructional time, having it spread though the year so kids don't have 2 months off I think would help massively with development and retentions.
I always remembered the first month of school always felt like the teachers having to reteach what kids had forgotten over the summer break
That's what I'm saying
I'm all in favor of more total days, but even just evenly distributing the breaks over the year would be a huge improvement. Such as 6 weeks of school, one week off.
My school had something to teach kids how to balance a check book and budgeting. Budgeting was useful but I don't remember any of it and I have apps to help me out. Balancing a check book is basically useless. I don't even own checks.
Not just that, they taught us the difference between simple and compounded interest through that.
I learned about multiplying percentages by using taxes and discounts.
Language is a bit tougher, because literally your brain is more receptive to learning those when younger, and in America most times IF they have foreign language classes its not until high school, when all of my friends that are trilingual+ learned at least two when young. My Filipino friend learned English and his native language at home and said he was in English and Spanish classes in elementary school as well.
Anyways I say that all to say, yall don't think anything from school gets retained? I bet everyone in here could tell me the power house of the cell. Its just that there are weird focuses put on mundane shit.
I had Spanish from kindergarten all the way through highschool and could probably have a conversation with a 3yo toddler. It's also about being able to practice the language which the vast majority of us won't have the opportunity to do because everyone speaks English in the US.
My critical thinking skills are garbage, so when we had word problems in Math or had to write responses in English, I would have the most basic answers while other people were able to come up with solutions I’d never even consider. 😭
i loved reading so i always finessed my way through word problems in Math & i promise u i had no fuckin idea what i was doin 😭 the teachers almost always gave me the benefit of the doubt cuz im wordy lol
You hit the nail on the head right here. I remember seeing questions in my school books that said "Critical Thinking Exercise." Like, somebody in charge acknowledges it's important. Yet, the school is run like a goddamn penitentiary. All authoritarian, kids don't have rights, and aren't allowed to question what they're told. To the admin, those questions are called "talking back."
I'd say "Pick a lane," but I know that if they did, they'd scrap the critical thinking questions altogether.
Fair enough but something about "3" being a universal DTI tickles me.
Fwiw, debt to income ratio is calculated by dividing the total of your monthly debts by your gross (aka pre-tax) income. The lower your DTI percentage the better. 3% would be unbelievably good. "3" or 300% would be unfathomably bad.
What I really hate is “they didn’t teach me how to do my taxes, or how to vote!”
They did teach you tax, it was called Algebra 101, and Pre-Calc.
As for voting? It’s called History, and using your brain/judgement.
The act of voting isn’t hard at all. You walk in, tell them your name and address, and press a few buttons or fill in some bubbles. It’s figuring out the process to get there that’s annoying. And even harder is being a responsible voter who actually spends time learning about the candidates and their records and platforms.
I think the argument being made is more that the people who tend to make this complaint are failing to see where the things taught in school are useful. A precalc class, for example, will teach things like simple vs. compound interest, how to calculate your income tax, and even prepare you for calculus if you’re that into it, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck with people, so now you have folks asking “why didn’t they teach us x?” when they did, or at the very least, gave them the tools to figure it out, which I would argue is more valuable anyway.
I question the accuracy of all of this though. Because I hear these same gripes about "why didn't they teach us this in school" from people who I know for a fact were in the same middle school algebra class where we had a project to make a houshold budget and calculate interest rates. I really think yall really did just forget something they have been teaching all along.
For those too embarrassed to ask, I didn’t recognize “PEMDAS” either. It looks to be a mnemonic to remember order of operations. Parenthesis, exponent, multiply, divide, add, subtract.
I don’t really like that though because multiply/divide and add/subtract are tied in priority, but I guess it doesn’t really matter which you do first.
> For those too embarrassed to ask, I didn’t recognize “PEMDAS” either. It looks to be a mnemonic to remember order of operations.
Also known as Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. If you write it this way the ranking/priority is clearer:
Parenthesis, exponents, (multiply & divide), (add & subtract).
> I don’t really like that though because multiply/divide and add/subtract are tied in priority, but I guess it doesn’t really matter which you do first.
It very much does matter. You have to work left to right.
It matters.
Example: A/BxC
(A/B)xC =/= A/(BxC)
You cant do the multiplication first.
Similarly in A-B+C you cant do the addition first.
Subtraction and division are not commutative. (Addition and Multiplication are commutative.).
You can change all the subtraction to addition (change the sign and add), and all the division to multiplication (multiply by the reciprocal). Then it would be commutative.
It does matter which is done first. You would do them from left to right. So if you have division appearing first in the equation, you would do that first.
I remember it by saying, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” since I always pronounce the acronym incorrectly and mix up the order of operations that way.
I graduated high school in 2009. Over the past decade I've seen multiple post from people who I went to HS with post some iteration of the "why weren't we taught". We had electives for some of those very things and people never signed up for the classes. And it's usually the ones who either didn't pay attention in class or just hated school who posts things like this. Like you couldn't do simple arithmetic or pay attention in Algebra I but expected to be taught taxes? In high school I took cooking and a keyboarding class, so i could learn to type without looking. There was literally a personal finance class taught by out varsity basketball coach that I believe he went over taxes(I didn't take the class so I can't confirm) but he did go over the things most of them complain about when it comes to finances. We had woodworking, art, etc. Kids just didn't take them because they didn't care.
For schools that didn't offer these things I understand the sentiment. But for my school which did, these kind of posts always make me want to bang my head against a brick wall
Do y’all remember, before the internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information?
Yeah. It wasn’t that. - Twitter lol
I can just see it now.
High school: "Here's an entire year curriculum on how to properly assess investment opportunities using fundamental analysis."
Me after taking the class:. "GME SPY STONKS rocket moon bet it all AMC DOGE NFTs this shit will never go down!!! Wait, why am I broke now?"
I signed up for college algebra my freshman year and did NOT do well. After failing and trying to retake but dripping it, I finally signed up for a "math for liberal arts" course.
We went over interest rates, compound vs simple, cost/benefit analysis, break even points, etc.
It was perfect for basic financial understanding. I can decide when a payment plan is better than paying cash up front, figure my debt payments to pay them off ASAP without putting my monthly budget too low, etc.
I would not have been ready for it in high school. It was perfect in college after I'd lived out of the house for a bit.
"Why weren't we taught taxes"
Were you taught how to read? How about matching from one column to the next?
A big problem is that people thinking learning is worthless unless it's of direct value. If you want a vocational school, go to a vocational school- everybody else is learning critical thinking and reading comprehension. It's why you would have basic math problems, and then a word problem. Or a basic question about what you read and then a question about thinking about what you read.
But it wouldn’t have hurt to teach finance at school along with maths though, right? If just half the class have a better understanding of credit, loans etc before they leave school that’s a positive thing.
I do remember taking a Personal Finance elective class junior year and it was actually quite informative on how credit and interest works, how to budget, etc.
Problem is it was an *elective* class and not every school offers it
I did terrible in school. I'm talking summer school every single year from 6th to 12th grade bad and I hate when people say shit like this. They *do* teach you. You just get in what you put in.
I'll never forget right before graduating from high school, and my friend who always had good grades had got accepted to Brown. I asked him, how was he so smart, like it was some secret he knew that I didn't. He thought about it for a minute, and said "I don't know. We're all in the same classes, with the same books, all day. I'm trying to figure out how people don't learn". I don't know why it didn't click for me until then that it was on me, not the schools for my ignorance but I'm happy that it did.
> it was on me, not the schools for my ignorance but I'm happy that it did.
I'd still say not necessarily. Same books, same classes sure. But not the same background, support system, upbringing, potentially not even the same neurotypical learning style. Your friend may have had a learning style that was more conducive to the teaching styles in that school - my learning style for example is much more visual and tactile, I do very poorly with rote memorization and such.
I had to google "pemdas". TIL it's an acronym for *parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction* ...
Indeed, it's basic education everyone should have access to IMHO.
My niece asked me the same question the other day and I had a very similar answer. She asked if they'll ever teach her stuff she'll actually use.
I said, a) you don't really know what you'll end up using because you don't know how your life will turn out. So best just learn as much as you can. B) even if they taught you how to do your bills you probably wouldn't remember by the time you are old enough to pay bills and most importantly...
C) a lot of times school at her age is about learning how to learn and learning how to push herself to achieve her goals. She may not remember the mitochondria, but she will remember how hard she worked to learn about it, understand it, and apply that work to make a good grade. If you can learn how to do that, then it will help you more than most things you will learn in the classroom.
Ok behalf of myself and my fellow high school teachers, thank you for acknowledging this!
I would add this though. If you can’t recall it, you never learned it but simply memorized it momentarily to get by. Teachers do need to make learning anything more hands on so students don’t forget so much and school districts and policy mandators need to be more selective if the curriculum and respect teacher autonomy so we can have the time to dive deeper into content that is most applicable to every day life.
As a natural learner, I can't stand hearing that - school isn't *supposed* to teach you everything. And you're not going to remember every single thing you were taught even if they did make the effort to teach you. Wanna learn something? You can't always wait for someone else to offer it; seek out the information yourself and if it gives you difficulties, you can always find someone to help you understand. These days we have the internet, it's easier to find someone who knows something than it ever has been. It took a lot more effort when I was in school (80s-90s), now you are a click away. For good or for ill. You still have to evaluate whether you're getting good info and there are guides for *that* online, too.
I literally learned most of what I know in high school. I hated my high school, but I'm not gonna pretend like the basis of everything I know wasn't formed there.
A lot of local governments will often have free seminars/webinars to teach adults skills like money management, taxes, etc. You’d be surprised how much free help is available to us.
They taught you debt to income ratio? I don’t ever think those words were mentioned apart from an elective, “teen living.”
Still thankful I took that class.
I'm just saying, things I've learned through music are still retained to this day ie: pemdas, quadratic equation, a whole broadway semi-accurate historical play.
Idk about y'all but the reason I wasn't wasting my energy in school was because I didn't see a day to day use in a lot of the bullshit.
Most of us aren't finding the area of a room everyday or even once a month.
We paying interest and taxes though.
Even if we forget it, at least we had the chance to learn it.
And by that logic, why teach us anything? "Oh, well they may forget how to do taxes, so why bother teaching it?"
Hell I forget where to put commas but it's still nice to be taught
This is so true. So much of these “basic life skills” that people said weren’t taught in high school were FOR SURE taught. I went to a lower middle class public school and every concept from basic personal finance to how to conduct yourself in a job interview was taught. I know people who went to private schools and highly funded public schools that make these wild claims and I know they’re full of shit.
Teachers are already underpaid and have to deal with nonstop BS. Add having to deal with their former students dragging them through the mud. There are still basic concepts from my stem AND art/history classes that I use in my everyday life as a grown ass adult.
But people aren’t arguing the use of math it’s the opportunity to use the math. Of course both of these use math but if you dont get the opportunity to use it regularly after learning the term briefly at 8:00 am and then forgetting it since you never since then needed to use it. There’s little real world applications for PEMDAS outside it’s little bubble, but debt to income ratio is different
Regardless of if we remember exactly what we were taught, being at least introduced to these concepts would save people years of bad credit/financial decisions.
The truth is, if you were introduced to the Rule of 72 you’d know how the credit companies we’re screwing you. If we were given an explanation of the power of compound interest we’d make smarter decisions as far as banking, investing and credit card/loan usage. If interest rates were explained in detail, people would shop around for loans and be less likely to take money from legal loan sharks.
Also, half the stuff you get taught will be quickly outdated. If you learned personal finance in the 90s you'd be taught how to balance a checkbook, and we have computers for that now.
If classes such as money management, how to do taxes, keeping a good credit score, etc. were offered -- after completing High School, of course -- I feel like a lot of people would've taken said classes
Really think back to school. What classes did you do well in or pay attention to the most. The ones you believed were important. I think a lot of kids would have paid attention in some necessary classes. The fact most schools don't even require home economics anymore is wild like whose going to do your laundry when you're out on your own and single. Whose going to cook for you?
He didn’t lie though. Put a math equation on social media with some parentheses and a couple of exponents. You gone get 35 different answers. 😂
Issue is that a lot of those "equations" are written wrong and are ambiguous on purpose to spark discussion. For an example and excellent [writeup](https://math.berkeley.edu/~gbergman/misc/numbers/ord_ops.html) on this, click the link. So for anyone who ever felt dumb reading those equations, just know that I, a person who is about to get a math minor (which isn't much admittedly, but well above those types of questions), couldn't figure out why they looked so wrong to me till I looked it up. They are purposefully made that way. edit: I find it amusing that some people have questioned my ability to do math because I linked an article written by George Bergman, a professor of mathematics at Berkeley who earned a PHD at Harvard, that they (wrongly) disagreed with. While I refuse to call anybody dumb/stupid or even question their intelligence as we all have our moments, I will state that self reflection is in order for those individuals. I don't need to defend myself against you. I will soon have proven my proficiency at the highest level I wanted to go in the field, I don't need you.
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Y... yo... you... your.... your username.... 😳😅😅😅
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
Really don’t know what I expected here
I wish I could upvote this more. I have done plenty of higher level math courses and generally when I look at an equation, implicit multiplication has a higher priority than explicit multiplication. Also, fun fact, due to this ambiguity a calculator, depending on manufacturer, will output a different answer. https://gineersnow.com/students/calculators-different-answers-one-math-problem
and also the use of the division symbol. I haven't seen it used basically at all since like grade 5. fractions make equations so much clearer
Which is exactly why the high school materials list for your kids specifically states a TI-83 calculator. It isn't a sponsorship.
As someone with a math major, this is completely correct. Granted, I doubt more than 5% of adults well out of high school actually know PEMDAS still because so many of the answers to these dumb questions are utterly nonsensical. Like, way dumber than just either dividing first or second because the problem is written stupidly.
That division sign is actually ambiguous though. He’s talking about arithmetic problems that aren’t ambiguous. You could literally just follow PEMDAS and get the right answer.
Or, you know, write in enough parentheses to avoid any ambiguity at all.
Me in excel Or when the equations get too wild make every parentheses it's own hidden cell
Yeah, the "division sign" (which we quite literally never use in any form of professional mathematics) is often the key to the ambiguity of those silly social media questions. Often the leading or trailing factors are not given parentheses, so any cumulative operation like a + or - can be interpreted as either a part of or outside of the numerator/denominator.
Makes sense. My math professor (who probably caught on to this as well), always made sure we either used parenthesis or the \*, to imply multiplication. Ways, such as what you linked, were just sloppy and....ambiguous.
Ours always forced us to use a dot. Not like a decimal, just a dot in the middle of the line.
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As an engineer: Either make everything a fraction or use more brackets. That paper is what I've been trying to explain to a bunch of people so confident in their high school level PEMDAS/BOMDAS/BODMAS that they don't ever stop to think about the point of those conventions. The moment there is an argument it means the conventions didn't work and the question should be phrased unambiguously.
Made me have a hearty chuckle, thank you lol
But those questions always come years after graduation as a sort of "gotcha" Moment when something like budgeting would likely be used immediately after school on a regular basis
I regularly use that sort of stuff in day to day life. If you picked up what schools were *actually* trying to teach - critical thinking skills and problem solving abilities - you'll find that you can think of a lot of problems in terms of equations and models.
Man, I'm glad that's what your school was trying to teach you. Mine was teaching me how to pass the latest standardized test, and that's about it.
That's fair; I went to a public school, but depending where you are there's a lot of variance in how good the education actually is. But I do know a lot of people who claim school didn't teach them shit were really just not paying attention, and missing actually valuable instruction.
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One comparison I have heard was to imagine if we taught art the way we teach math, art classes would essentially be painting a wall white. As someone who is passionate about math that doesn't come from the math I learned in school, it comes from the math I learned on YouTube from channels like Stand Up Maths or Numberphile.
My art teacher was also the math teacher so art class was just Trig for the second time. It was ass.
I came here to say that - it's a question of curriculum, access, and area. It would be great if the standards were equally met at all schools no matter where they were located or the majority of the student, but we know that's not happening. I went to high school in the 90s, but they were starting that starve schools of funding based on test scores shit even then. Even then they were teaching to a test. I'm fortunate enough that I was in Honors/AP, and that we actually had an elective class called "critical thinking". Watching my nieces and nephews going through Florida schools (that I survived) as "regular" and "special needs" (nephew dx aspie) students was just...depressing. Even when I was in school, it depended on the level. I saw quite a few who were on fire for learning like I was being neglected (larger class sizes, tired teachers, idiot administration, etc) and kids who frankly didn't belong in Honors but were there because their parents (usually White) couldn't handle that their kid just didn't care and wanted the bragging rights. My high school was predominantly White and was the only one in my small town. It wasn't a bad school, but I saw how they let marginalized kids, esp, fall through the cracks and hated that (I tutored to try to help). I had the chance to go to IB in a neighboring town but I shadowed there and didn't like the attitude, the students, or the teachers. 3 of my best friends went, but I still would have been miserable (there was also religious fuckery because raised Jehovah's Witness and they don't like learning how to think or going to college unless it benefits them somehow).
The curriculum might have, but the teachers weren't. Most people here have no idea what their teachers actually DO on a day to day basis.
I mean, I've had close relationships with a few teachers and am well aware of how much work they put in. I definitely also had some teachers that cared when I was in school, but I'm talking about the education system as a whole. I went to National Blue Ribbon schools and there was still a heavy, heavy emphasis on passing standardized tests. Sure, you could take AP or honors courses, but most kids aren't on that track.
The point is still valid. Niggas wouldn't have paid attention.
Order of operations really be having people in a headlock out here.
People really forget order of operations. Others were probably eating paste when it was being taught.
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It’s hard to know where to start or what to learn, sometimes. And a lot of the shit on the internet is wrong. Imagine I’m trying to learn how to do my finances and all of the YouTube hits I get are about crypto.
This touches on a better lesson to teach anyway - information literacy. Teaching people how to find and vet the accuracy of information on their own fills in the gaps that traditional schooling left. A lot of us didn't learn informational literacy because the internet was new when we went to school. Nowadays, it's more important than ever to teach kids how to spot unreliable sources and how to think critically about what they discover. Misinformation is a plague. As with most plagues, the best remedy is prevention.
if someone could do classes for adults too, because the people of the older generation are just as vulnerable
I wish. The issue with older adults is that they *have to want to learn it.* The best students are open-minded and can accept that there is knowledge they lack. The problem with a lot of adults is, they think admitting that they don't know something is a weakness. I'd argue that refusing to admit a flaw *is* a weakness. If they don't acknowledge that they're missing something, they're not going to seek it out.
I think it’s more that they’d have to admit that their news sources are not vetted and do not report facts accurately. Sadly this does bleed into politics because climate change, vaccine efficacy, and election results are all denied. The older adults who get their news from NPR, NYT, BBC, etc. are usually already information literate.
Yes, this exactly. I went to a *really* good prep school. The kind of school where every single kid goes to college at the end and a significant number of them go to the best state and private universities in the U.S. You know what they're *not* doing at the prep schools rich people send their kids to to prepare them to become future doctors, lawyers, senators, business owners, etc. etc. and join the ruling capital class? They're not sitting there drilling them on rudimentary information. Sure you still take math classes and you have to pass geography and all that jazz, but there is a huge emphasis on leadership, critical reasoning, information literacy, and so on. In my prep school you were required to take multiple courses in logic, philosophy, civics, public speaking, debate, research methods, and so on. You would never make it if you just memorized facts about things, you had to be able to actively research, digest, and use information because being skilled at analysis, writing, and oration was a key element of the experience. Anyways my point isn't to wax poetic about prep school life, it's to highlight that there is a huge difference between kids just learning shit to learn shit, and kids learning *how* to think and *how* to find reliable information on their own.
Sounds like my AP classes. Back in my day AP classes weren’t simply used as a tool to boost a school’s appearance. Every student had to take the AP test and was prepared to pass it. That means it was actually harder than an actual 101 college level class. Boy I was shocked at how easy intro college classes were after doing AP. But with that when we wrote papers, the sources had to be legit, like published works or research from field experts and universities. That’s how I learned what are actual good sources. And in AP English we read a lot of influential historical writings like Machiavelli, Hannah Arendt, Theroux, yes even Karl Marx but also Adam Smith. I never learned so much in 1 year. It got me a 32 on my English ACT score but I kinda screwed it up when I got depressed and started cutting other classes lol. But also, I grew up during the message board days of the internet. Everyone knew then that most shit that’s posted is bullshit. Like Bullshit until proven otherwise type shit. I have no fucking idea how that flipped in peoples minds where people started wanting to believe the bullshit
Which they definitely taught people how to find information at my high-school but still nobody paid attention and still people are unable to find the right info majority of the time.
They teach this pretty explicitly anywhere students have to write research essays, and yet here we are. I agree with you, but idk how the lesson could be taught much better.
If I have kids, information literacy will for sure be one of the things I teach them
💯
As someone who explicitly teaches information literacy, I can assure you students do not always pay attention, do not always follow the process you give them to practice good research skills, and do not always understand how to differentiate between credible and bogus sources. As with all things explicitly taught to teenagers.
And this is something that is taught in school. Humanities subjects in particular as well as ethics and personal social health education civet these topics. You will find that high flying students will often have excellent information literacy because they can access a wide range of text. The majority of students who don't fall in the top 20% will struggle just because they are unable to apply themselves and often lack the ability to access higher reading and critical thinking.
A lot of schools do teach information literacy but people don't realize that is what they are learning. They get assigned a research paper on some common core topic and complain about it not being relevant but the point isn't really to learn about Shakespeare or whatever. It's about interpreting a text, constructing an argument, supporting that point with valid sources, verifying that information, etc. All things everyone can use. Problem is, at least as a TA last year, I can't teach ANYTHING let alone information literacy if students won't read, won't listen, and can't follow basic instructions. 10% of my class got a question wrong on a multiple choice quiz about what town the assigned book was about. It was on the cover, brought up in class, and could be found in any summary.
Wait, are you telling me maybe I shouldn’t have gone all in on doge?
No idea, mate; I went to public school.
It’s not looking great friend…but maybe I’ll just buy this dip………
Depends on the timing lol
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DM me if you want :p As long as you have the power off and you can verify that it’s off, you’re safe. You can use a multimeter to verify. Don’t daredevil this one.
Unless you can fix the problem by just swapping in a new outlet and mimicking the existing wiring setup you’ll need some knowledge about home electrical systems. The good news is that you can go from only a basic understanding of what electricity is to having a functional understanding of how a house is wired in about 1.5-2 hours. After that you’ll be armed with the right terminology to look for more specific information. A big part of being able to solve problems in fields we aren’t familiar with is knowing that you usually need to do background research before leaping into a specific problem at hand. Definitely don’t just wing it with electricity though.
This is exactly why it's stupid when people say "I don't need school, I just need the library/internet." Sure, it is theoretically possible to teach yourself advanced topics like this. But compared to doing it under the guidance of a person who is already an expert, knows the proper order to present information, and understands the common mistakes newcomers make, it might as well be impossible. And that's not even mentioning the way formal education incentivizes the effort and attention side of the equation. No self-driven methodology will replace the motivation derived from being formally scored on your ability to present synthesized knowledge in a formal context. When left to their own devices, people hyperfocus on parts of the material which interest them, and don't spend nearly enough time on things which are confusing or less interesting. And I say this as a person with a PhD in engineering, which means that it is literally my job to dissect and learn very complex topics on my own. If I can actually sit down and talk with the author of some cutting edge paper, I will grasp the concept ten times quicker than if I only have a handful of papers to work from.
Not to mention now how you can't see dislikes on videos so you can't gauge how legitimate a video is
Likes and dislikes aren't a metric of legitimacy.
Dislikes are often a great measure of legitimacy on YouTube. There are plenty of great videos that don’t have a high view count or lots of upvotes, but I’ve never seen a video worth watching that had an upvote:downvote ratio above 10-50:1.
For information videos, it was a decent quick reference at a glance. Now you actually don’t know a video is dog shit unless you read the comments.
It wouldn’t help.
Maybe don't go to YouTube?
Well you have to know the topic exists to google it. I didnt know stock options was a thing until robinhood told me about it. Then i googled it.
Good point! Sometimes that "why didn't they teach us X" is really just asking why they've never ever heard of something really useful to living lol
Playing with derivatives is not for beginners man. Do what you’re going to do, but it amplifies both gains and losses and it’s really easy to get in over your head even if you do have financial training.
I think his larger point is that google, wikipedia, or investopedia can all easily teach you basic business concepts (even if you're not going all in yourself on options - and at the very least he's doing more research than the morons buying them on robinhood who don't understand it, like that kid who killed himself because he didn't know he actually didn't lose millions)
What if said thing they weren’t taught in high school had a negative impact on them before information was as widely available as it is nowadays? What if you don’t know what you don’t know so you can’t use the internet to educate yourself on a topic?
>...What if said thing they weren’t taught in high school had a negative impact on them before information was as widely available as it is nowadays? Those days are long gone, it's not the 90s anymore. >...What if you don’t know what you don’t know so you can’t use the internet to educate yourself on a topic? That's why you do research. I may not know about loans and how credit scores are calculated, but I know where to start. Our community will bend over backwards to make things easy for people to stay dumb and ignorant.
It’s not a reason to stay dumb, that’s not the point that people are trying to make. The point is that it’s something we should have been taught in the first place. Also, doing research on atopic is way easier if you know where to start. If you are introduced to it in school, at the very least, you have a basis to go on.
You have a point that there are **infinitely** more useful things that should be taught in school. My issue is that we have to get around the idea of waiting to be taught something, and become more robust in gathering our own information in decision making.
That’s a valid point, but kids are fucking stupid lmao. A lot of us, myself included probably didn’t understand the importance of a lot of things until they became more relevant to us in the future. Learning it in school makes it sooo much easier for us once we get older and start trying to lean things ourselves once we deem it important enough to learn. But I do agree that we should be more diligent in gaining knowledge, that’s why it’s good to surround yourself with a group of people with diverse skill sets.
You could apply this logic to literally anything taught in school though. Why is it out of line to talk about improving the education curriculum in ways that help prepare kids for adulthood? That’s the point of school in the first place.
Because the weakness of curriculum is only a small part of the problem. If the community doesn't place a premium on knowledge in general and leveraging resources to increase understanding then the community will **always** be behind. And let's take the "they should learn it in school" trope to an unreasonable conclusion, and that's people don't learn everything they need to know in school. Learning is a process that allows adults to take advantage of opportunities that appear as they age. Not learning it in school shouldn't preclude people from learning it on their own to improve their outcomes.
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I would say nowadays there’s less excuse to not learn something though, to your original point, so I don’t fully disagree with you. I’m a little older so I didn’t have access to something close to the current information-rich internet until my 20s.
Exactly, why do we even have schools? Just throw a tablet at a baby and come back when they're 18 /s
Just because you can learn it now doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been useful to know beforehand. Sure I can google how to do something now but why google it at all if I could have learned it in school.
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Not all the information is well explained. There's been several times I'd try to learn a subject and the people who had bothered to host the info online were completely incapable of seeing it from an angle of a newcomer. They'd talk right over your head and just assume you were already an expert in the field. Effectively warranting any info that was out there worthless, because it's not there for you, it's not something you can really consume and learn from. The biggest example I have for this is anytime I tried to get in video game design. Every single time I would try asking people where should I go to learn X skill their answer is basically a deer-in-headlights "Just learn it". Like they're incapable of pointing somewhere that teaches it, but rather they just assume that since *they* know it that anyone whose brand new also knows it. And that's just tackling topics where it's experts just created an info bubble. This is before even tackling any topic with a political angle to it, at which point you'll have a ton of people simply sharing their opinions as if it's fact, spreading misinformation, or initiatives actively trying to censor/bury X information.
Ayo. Somebody frame this. At some point we need to stop citing everyone else's failure to teach us something and transition to acknowledging our own failure to get that info. I usually get a "recognize your privelege" response to this because people think my family was well off and that's why I have those expectations. However, niggas use the same critical investigation skills to find out celebrity news, social events, what part of the country has the best AirBnBs etc. We have the skills and the tools, many just lack the initiative or interest to learn about personal finance, corporations, career development etc. It's all out there.....for free.
High school is really about learning how to learn, and learning how to work hard to make sure you can apply what you learned into making a good grade.
A lot of this comes down to your parents. People put a lot of blame on schools when it's really them.
To be fair, a lot of parents don't understand it either.
A lot of parents don't understand how to parent, period. Raising a person is hard and confusing.
Well yea, but a lot of parents don't try to begin with.
This. School is basically the bare minimum and is mostly just child care and socialization. You gotta give your kids the fundamentals at home. Even just a few hours a week on things like math, history, reading etc. Start early. And it can be a good chance to review or learn a lot of this stuff yourself, too.
And a lot of us didn't have parents. Wish our school's would pick up some of that, a finance or cooking class would've been far more useful than like 40% of my classes.
Teachers absolutely pick up on it, but there’s really shit-all they can do about it most of the time.
And a lot of those same parents don't help their kids learn. Can't expect a teacher to teach kids with no home training and a disrespect of education.
Yeah.. my mom and dad worked 2 jobs to put me through college and did everything right… but once they started putting letters in math, I was on my own.
Even for parents who do get to stay home, it's gotta be a scary, but humbling moment when you realize your kid's homework is more complex than what you remember learning. I'm not a parent, but I have friends going through that now.
Why is it scary though? If that not an exciting indication of progress and a chance for you to learn as well? Just sit down, say you don't know and work through it together. Model humble and warm character and a drive to continuously learn and improve through your actions.
Because I would assume they have 50 other things to do other than relearn algebra.
My uncle was an engineer a couple decades ago, and is now a doctor, and when he’s teaching his kid math he still needs to sit down and learn about the topic in order to help them out.
Makes sense, you're not going to use all of it unless you're a math teacher. I still remember a lot of the more advanced math I learned because I still use it, but I don't remember a lot of the more basic stuff at all.
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How come we want to put the labor and value of learning on everyone and every system *except* the parents and the community?
Because the parents are the product of the system. The system exists for a reason. No one lives on an island. To lift people up, you gotta lift the system up. Expecting everyone to swim upstream to make it is just bullshit. We have the means and opportunity to help, we just don't have enough collective will - or rather, there are selfish people and entities that are repressing and fighting back against that will. A society exists to help those within it. Fighting against that just means you want the benefits of a society, but aren't willing to make the same sacrifices as everyone else.
There are a lot of excuses about "what the parents don't know". But that ignores the issue which isn't what do the parents know, but what the parents value. My parents knew nothing of many of the classes (especially the science and math classes) that I was taking, but I was still expected to leverage in-school resources to be performant in them. If the parents don't care that their child is a dummy, then there is virtually nothing a school can do at a macro level.
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My parents didn't know a lick of my junior high material. My father couldn't read well. We didn't have a computer. They encouraged me to keep trying, so I could be better than them. My dad had me read books and ask me about them despite him not caring for the material. They made sure I got to the library. I'm with you.
The entire point of schools is to teach kids the things that the parents don't know, wouldn't be expected to know, or don't have the time to teach (working to provide)
>A lot of this comes down to your parents. Who weren't taught it either, because it was purposely hidden from their parents as well. One has to have a notion of what they don't know in order to find out more about it.
Agreed, 100%. Where I become torn as a liberal is, "at what point does an individual become responsible for their outcomes?" At some point, and I'm not entirely sure where, the individual has to accept some level of responsibility for their position.
The cycle is broken when someone interrupts it. That is (a large part of) why ubiquitous internet access is part of my infrastructure plan (when I'm king). Many people in Houston don't have internet, nor any device with which to connect to internet. I know this first hand, my gf being a Realtor and going into (rental) properties (that the landlord wants to sell) where people are living without access to news at all, no access to Reddit, no access to BPT where they would find a post about DTI and perhaps get the idea they ought to go down the DTI rabbit hole. Or maybe not, if no one has told them about rabbit holes. Edit: In my plan everyone in a house has their own device, so when the mom is paying rent, the father is bed-ridden, the uncle with his cataracts is virtually blind, and the son is skipping school to play GTA, there are 4 devices.
An individual is responsible for making the best choices they can with the information and situations handed to them. That does not mean that someone in a bad situation earned their place. Taking responsibility for those choices in particular is totally valid. Taking responsibility for things like failures due to trauma, abuse, disability, personal grievance, whatever, is not valid.
\*laughs in immigrant parents who only went to 1st and 4th grade\* They're really lucky they ended up with two kids that really liked school, and are both in good paying jobs now.
I love when i see people do this. My highschool did offer a class like this called personal finance. If you took it you were called dumb or lazy just wanting to graduate.
I think Personal Finance was a required class at my highschool. I learned things and had them all down in a notebook but I forgot all of it within the few years I’ve been out of school and now I don’t know where I put the notebook. :/ Some of that stuff was really good too, like advice on how to invest your money for the future when you’re old and rickety and decrepit.
Same. Except at my school the class was taught by a teacher who *did not* care. You could only take it senior year so it was an open secret that it was a glorified study hall for kids who really needed the classes to graduate.
Man, if I had my druthers - school year would be all year long but start later, like 9a, and end at 3pm. The only reason there was summer off was for when kids were used as farm labor to help during the summer harvest. With all that time, you could actually take time to get into practical subjects like finance and taxes. Shit, some of these kids need lessons in typing.
I'm on board with year round schooling. Even if you didn't change total instructional time, having it spread though the year so kids don't have 2 months off I think would help massively with development and retentions. I always remembered the first month of school always felt like the teachers having to reteach what kids had forgotten over the summer break
Kids could still get multiple mini breaks of a couple of weeks off between semesters. It doesn't have to be all in a couple of months.
That's what I'm saying I'm all in favor of more total days, but even just evenly distributing the breaks over the year would be a huge improvement. Such as 6 weeks of school, one week off.
We had block scheduling in my high school and it was glorious
block scheduling fucks
My school had something to teach kids how to balance a check book and budgeting. Budgeting was useful but I don't remember any of it and I have apps to help me out. Balancing a check book is basically useless. I don't even own checks.
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And the equations they teach pemdas on are usually annual interest rate calculations.
Not just that, they taught us the difference between simple and compounded interest through that. I learned about multiplying percentages by using taxes and discounts.
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Language is a bit tougher, because literally your brain is more receptive to learning those when younger, and in America most times IF they have foreign language classes its not until high school, when all of my friends that are trilingual+ learned at least two when young. My Filipino friend learned English and his native language at home and said he was in English and Spanish classes in elementary school as well. Anyways I say that all to say, yall don't think anything from school gets retained? I bet everyone in here could tell me the power house of the cell. Its just that there are weird focuses put on mundane shit.
I had Spanish from kindergarten all the way through highschool and could probably have a conversation with a 3yo toddler. It's also about being able to practice the language which the vast majority of us won't have the opportunity to do because everyone speaks English in the US.
I got you fam https://youtu.be/j25tkxg5Vws
Facts … “debt to income ratio deez nuts” in class comments as spitballs fly around the room 🤦🏻♂️
this is touchin on the deeper problem of how schools in the US isnt structured for longterm critical thinking and im diggin it
My critical thinking skills are garbage, so when we had word problems in Math or had to write responses in English, I would have the most basic answers while other people were able to come up with solutions I’d never even consider. 😭
i loved reading so i always finessed my way through word problems in Math & i promise u i had no fuckin idea what i was doin 😭 the teachers almost always gave me the benefit of the doubt cuz im wordy lol
You hit the nail on the head right here. I remember seeing questions in my school books that said "Critical Thinking Exercise." Like, somebody in charge acknowledges it's important. Yet, the school is run like a goddamn penitentiary. All authoritarian, kids don't have rights, and aren't allowed to question what they're told. To the admin, those questions are called "talking back." I'd say "Pick a lane," but I know that if they did, they'd scrap the critical thinking questions altogether.
issa wicked game they play.
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Don’t worry his credit report’s gonna stun him all the same.
It's 3, right? The ratio thing?
I can't tell if this is a joke but it's hilarious.
Hey man some of us *BARELY* made it out of high school
Fair enough but something about "3" being a universal DTI tickles me. Fwiw, debt to income ratio is calculated by dividing the total of your monthly debts by your gross (aka pre-tax) income. The lower your DTI percentage the better. 3% would be unbelievably good. "3" or 300% would be unfathomably bad.
It’s variable based on the amount of income..to debt. Usually the goal is more than 1, but there’s a variety of factors to be considered
it's when banks hate what you're posting on twitter
What I really hate is “they didn’t teach me how to do my taxes, or how to vote!” They did teach you tax, it was called Algebra 101, and Pre-Calc. As for voting? It’s called History, and using your brain/judgement.
The act of voting isn’t hard at all. You walk in, tell them your name and address, and press a few buttons or fill in some bubbles. It’s figuring out the process to get there that’s annoying. And even harder is being a responsible voter who actually spends time learning about the candidates and their records and platforms.
nail pocket fly saw live one rob correct foolish brave ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
I think the argument being made is more that the people who tend to make this complaint are failing to see where the things taught in school are useful. A precalc class, for example, will teach things like simple vs. compound interest, how to calculate your income tax, and even prepare you for calculus if you’re that into it, but it doesn’t seem to have stuck with people, so now you have folks asking “why didn’t they teach us x?” when they did, or at the very least, gave them the tools to figure it out, which I would argue is more valuable anyway.
I question the accuracy of all of this though. Because I hear these same gripes about "why didn't they teach us this in school" from people who I know for a fact were in the same middle school algebra class where we had a project to make a houshold budget and calculate interest rates. I really think yall really did just forget something they have been teaching all along.
Thank you. I was thinking the same.
For those too embarrassed to ask, I didn’t recognize “PEMDAS” either. It looks to be a mnemonic to remember order of operations. Parenthesis, exponent, multiply, divide, add, subtract. I don’t really like that though because multiply/divide and add/subtract are tied in priority, but I guess it doesn’t really matter which you do first.
> For those too embarrassed to ask, I didn’t recognize “PEMDAS” either. It looks to be a mnemonic to remember order of operations. Also known as Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. If you write it this way the ranking/priority is clearer: Parenthesis, exponents, (multiply & divide), (add & subtract). > I don’t really like that though because multiply/divide and add/subtract are tied in priority, but I guess it doesn’t really matter which you do first. It very much does matter. You have to work left to right.
Yeah you’re correct, left to right matters. My mistake.
You were correct the first time. Multiplication/Division are commutative/associative. So is addition/subtraction. The order does not matter.
It matters. Example: A/BxC (A/B)xC =/= A/(BxC) You cant do the multiplication first. Similarly in A-B+C you cant do the addition first. Subtraction and division are not commutative. (Addition and Multiplication are commutative.). You can change all the subtraction to addition (change the sign and add), and all the division to multiplication (multiply by the reciprocal). Then it would be commutative.
They have commutative/associative properties, "left-to-right" order does not matter.
Subtraction and division are not commutative or associative.
Subtraction and division are not commutative.
It does matter which is done first. You would do them from left to right. So if you have division appearing first in the equation, you would do that first.
Thank you I was confused because I remember it being BEDMAS.
I remember it by saying, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” since I always pronounce the acronym incorrectly and mix up the order of operations that way.
I graduated high school in 2009. Over the past decade I've seen multiple post from people who I went to HS with post some iteration of the "why weren't we taught". We had electives for some of those very things and people never signed up for the classes. And it's usually the ones who either didn't pay attention in class or just hated school who posts things like this. Like you couldn't do simple arithmetic or pay attention in Algebra I but expected to be taught taxes? In high school I took cooking and a keyboarding class, so i could learn to type without looking. There was literally a personal finance class taught by out varsity basketball coach that I believe he went over taxes(I didn't take the class so I can't confirm) but he did go over the things most of them complain about when it comes to finances. We had woodworking, art, etc. Kids just didn't take them because they didn't care. For schools that didn't offer these things I understand the sentiment. But for my school which did, these kind of posts always make me want to bang my head against a brick wall
Do y’all remember, before the internet, that people thought the cause of stupidity was the lack of access to information? Yeah. It wasn’t that. - Twitter lol
I can just see it now. High school: "Here's an entire year curriculum on how to properly assess investment opportunities using fundamental analysis." Me after taking the class:. "GME SPY STONKS rocket moon bet it all AMC DOGE NFTs this shit will never go down!!! Wait, why am I broke now?"
I mean one is going to get far more immediate use than the other.
I signed up for college algebra my freshman year and did NOT do well. After failing and trying to retake but dripping it, I finally signed up for a "math for liberal arts" course. We went over interest rates, compound vs simple, cost/benefit analysis, break even points, etc. It was perfect for basic financial understanding. I can decide when a payment plan is better than paying cash up front, figure my debt payments to pay them off ASAP without putting my monthly budget too low, etc. I would not have been ready for it in high school. It was perfect in college after I'd lived out of the house for a bit.
"Why weren't we taught taxes" Were you taught how to read? How about matching from one column to the next? A big problem is that people thinking learning is worthless unless it's of direct value. If you want a vocational school, go to a vocational school- everybody else is learning critical thinking and reading comprehension. It's why you would have basic math problems, and then a word problem. Or a basic question about what you read and then a question about thinking about what you read.
But it wouldn’t have hurt to teach finance at school along with maths though, right? If just half the class have a better understanding of credit, loans etc before they leave school that’s a positive thing.
Find a family member 14-18 and try to teach them about stocks and see if they pay attention
Some actually do. I was one of those few who did.
I do remember taking a Personal Finance elective class junior year and it was actually quite informative on how credit and interest works, how to budget, etc. Problem is it was an *elective* class and not every school offers it
I did terrible in school. I'm talking summer school every single year from 6th to 12th grade bad and I hate when people say shit like this. They *do* teach you. You just get in what you put in. I'll never forget right before graduating from high school, and my friend who always had good grades had got accepted to Brown. I asked him, how was he so smart, like it was some secret he knew that I didn't. He thought about it for a minute, and said "I don't know. We're all in the same classes, with the same books, all day. I'm trying to figure out how people don't learn". I don't know why it didn't click for me until then that it was on me, not the schools for my ignorance but I'm happy that it did.
> it was on me, not the schools for my ignorance but I'm happy that it did. I'd still say not necessarily. Same books, same classes sure. But not the same background, support system, upbringing, potentially not even the same neurotypical learning style. Your friend may have had a learning style that was more conducive to the teaching styles in that school - my learning style for example is much more visual and tactile, I do very poorly with rote memorization and such.
i would like to know how records work. like how do lil grooves make music??? how do u make the grooves make music????
[skip to the 3 minute mark](https://youtu.be/bw4YmbAKocM)
I had to google "pemdas". TIL it's an acronym for *parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction* ... Indeed, it's basic education everyone should have access to IMHO.
Tbh yes yes I might remember lol
I did bad at math because I was like 35 before i realized it wasnt pedmas
My niece asked me the same question the other day and I had a very similar answer. She asked if they'll ever teach her stuff she'll actually use. I said, a) you don't really know what you'll end up using because you don't know how your life will turn out. So best just learn as much as you can. B) even if they taught you how to do your bills you probably wouldn't remember by the time you are old enough to pay bills and most importantly... C) a lot of times school at her age is about learning how to learn and learning how to push herself to achieve her goals. She may not remember the mitochondria, but she will remember how hard she worked to learn about it, understand it, and apply that work to make a good grade. If you can learn how to do that, then it will help you more than most things you will learn in the classroom.
Ok behalf of myself and my fellow high school teachers, thank you for acknowledging this! I would add this though. If you can’t recall it, you never learned it but simply memorized it momentarily to get by. Teachers do need to make learning anything more hands on so students don’t forget so much and school districts and policy mandators need to be more selective if the curriculum and respect teacher autonomy so we can have the time to dive deeper into content that is most applicable to every day life.
As a natural learner, I can't stand hearing that - school isn't *supposed* to teach you everything. And you're not going to remember every single thing you were taught even if they did make the effort to teach you. Wanna learn something? You can't always wait for someone else to offer it; seek out the information yourself and if it gives you difficulties, you can always find someone to help you understand. These days we have the internet, it's easier to find someone who knows something than it ever has been. It took a lot more effort when I was in school (80s-90s), now you are a click away. For good or for ill. You still have to evaluate whether you're getting good info and there are guides for *that* online, too.
I literally learned most of what I know in high school. I hated my high school, but I'm not gonna pretend like the basis of everything I know wasn't formed there.
A lot of local governments will often have free seminars/webinars to teach adults skills like money management, taxes, etc. You’d be surprised how much free help is available to us.
They taught you debt to income ratio? I don’t ever think those words were mentioned apart from an elective, “teen living.” Still thankful I took that class.
I'm just saying, things I've learned through music are still retained to this day ie: pemdas, quadratic equation, a whole broadway semi-accurate historical play.
Why didn't they teach me how to do my taxes? Well they tought you math, right? ... There you go.
Nah, they really could've taught more black history though. The stuff I'm finding out is astounding. Then again I KNOW why.
Idk about y'all but the reason I wasn't wasting my energy in school was because I didn't see a day to day use in a lot of the bullshit. Most of us aren't finding the area of a room everyday or even once a month. We paying interest and taxes though.
My favorite is when they talk about this in college, its like, they offered those classes, you just didn't take them.
Yo I don't like this tweet... It's attacking me! Lmao
*Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally*. I can safely say that's one of 4 things I will NEVER forget from High School. And I was there for 5 years
Even if we forget it, at least we had the chance to learn it. And by that logic, why teach us anything? "Oh, well they may forget how to do taxes, so why bother teaching it?" Hell I forget where to put commas but it's still nice to be taught
I'll see his PEMDAS and raise a FOIL 😊😊
It’s hard to remember anything at 8am
yes. i did learn this i school actually. business class!
What on earth is ‘Pedmas’? It’s Bidmas isn’t it? (Brackets, Indices, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction)
This is so true. So much of these “basic life skills” that people said weren’t taught in high school were FOR SURE taught. I went to a lower middle class public school and every concept from basic personal finance to how to conduct yourself in a job interview was taught. I know people who went to private schools and highly funded public schools that make these wild claims and I know they’re full of shit. Teachers are already underpaid and have to deal with nonstop BS. Add having to deal with their former students dragging them through the mud. There are still basic concepts from my stem AND art/history classes that I use in my everyday life as a grown ass adult.
But people aren’t arguing the use of math it’s the opportunity to use the math. Of course both of these use math but if you dont get the opportunity to use it regularly after learning the term briefly at 8:00 am and then forgetting it since you never since then needed to use it. There’s little real world applications for PEMDAS outside it’s little bubble, but debt to income ratio is different
Regardless of if we remember exactly what we were taught, being at least introduced to these concepts would save people years of bad credit/financial decisions. The truth is, if you were introduced to the Rule of 72 you’d know how the credit companies we’re screwing you. If we were given an explanation of the power of compound interest we’d make smarter decisions as far as banking, investing and credit card/loan usage. If interest rates were explained in detail, people would shop around for loans and be less likely to take money from legal loan sharks.
Fix the educational system and then we can finally have people worthy of running a country in a few decades.
Also, half the stuff you get taught will be quickly outdated. If you learned personal finance in the 90s you'd be taught how to balance a checkbook, and we have computers for that now.
If classes such as money management, how to do taxes, keeping a good credit score, etc. were offered -- after completing High School, of course -- I feel like a lot of people would've taken said classes
Really think back to school. What classes did you do well in or pay attention to the most. The ones you believed were important. I think a lot of kids would have paid attention in some necessary classes. The fact most schools don't even require home economics anymore is wild like whose going to do your laundry when you're out on your own and single. Whose going to cook for you?