Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for February 18, 2021

Kate, you are so very right.

Pretty sure I remember all the math I had in high school.

As with most things, it’s use it or lose it.

It’s all fun and games until somebody puts an IOU out.

I went into surveying in the military. I had to use trigonometry on a regular basis. That will really drive it into your head.

My Dad was a traveling securities salesman in the days before pocket calculators. The mental math techniques he taught me (e.g. for calculating discounts or premiums) drove my arithmetic teachers to distraction; they could neither understand nor deny my methods or accuracy.

In my generation, everything we had learned in “arithmetic” was scuttled for the “new math” (about 10th grade, as I recall) and I never did fully recover from the chaos that caused!

An education is what you have left after all the facts are gone.

Forget it kid. By the time you’re an adult, all the math you remember will have changed. I was a math major in college. I look at the stuff that they’re teaching my 11 year old granddaughter and go “Huh?!”

Here’s the latest: “ethnomathematics”

“Don’t Know Much About History, Don’t know Much Biology,…”

You just answered your own question. You have to learn that stuff so you can remember it as an adult.

Oh and Katie, it’s too late to make you feel stupid, he’s past the 3rd grade.

Neither do most adults!