Re: Alice's exams

On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 09:59:34 +0100, "Marjorie Clarke"
<dontusethisaddess@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Yebbut when you were taught to analyse a poem, it should have taught you to
understand not only that poem but other poems you would later come across,
as well as giving you a deeper understanding of the way language works,
including vocabulary, metaphor and imagery, syntax, and the expresssion of
ideas, etc etc. As language is something you use and encounter every day, it
should have had some useful effect (if it was properly taught).


If learning an obscure and practically useless element of the arts,
taught you all that useful stuff about how to use words...

Whereas I'm still waiting for calculus to prove useful or relevant to me in
any way. I'm not rubbishing maths in general, just the syllabus we had. I
can't say I've made much use of geometry (apart from the useful tip about
3/4/5 giving a right-angled triangle), logarithms or algebra either. Since
that joyful day when I had my last maths lesson, I have had to deal with
mathematical things at various times, but they nearly all relate to
statistics (percentages, probability, averages etc), much of which I've had
to work out for myself. I was numerate enough to do this by the time I was
11; the five years of grammar school maths was, for me, largely a waste of
time that could have been spent learning useful maths, or something else
entirely.

.... why didn't learning an obscure and practically useless element of
science, teach you lots of useful stuff about how to use numbers?

If language is something you use and encounter every day, why isn't
maths, with its elements of logic, deduction, calculation,
application, concentration etc, etc?

If English lit deserves the proviso of "if it's taught properly", why
doesn't calculus get the same escape clause?

Okay... I'm not really saying you're wrong to doubt the value of
calculus to you personally, and frankly I wouldn't know calculus if it
punched me on the nose...:o) but it seems to me that there's a strong
element of double standards being applied here: you're much more
tolerant and forgiving of the arts, simply because you like them more
and are better at them. That's human and natural, but it's not
objective.

--
Cheers, Kimbo (Keeper of the Languid Wave (tm))
Best of umra archive www.totternhoe.demon.co.uk/umra/
somerat is a spam trap, infrequently checked. Ask for a better address!
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Alices exams
    ... If learning an obscure and practically useless element of the arts, ... still are learning) but maths stopped dead at 11. ... You could probably have learned about language in a dozen ... In my school, ...
    (uk.media.radio.archers)
  • Re: Alices exams
    ... As language is something you use and encounter every day, ... I'm not rubbishing maths in general, ... doesn't calculus get the same escape clause? ... In my school, ...
    (uk.media.radio.archers)
  • Re: Academic/scientific journals in Esperanto?
    ... >> since there is no such thing as language or dialect. ... Or to do about anything in Maths. ... Back to linguistics, I would be happy to tolerate a much looser ... > Idealism; Idealism may have its scope but isn't universal. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Units as a checkable indicator of program errors
    ... scientists tracing through could probably pinpoint the line of ... our calculus of numbers. ... from Mathmatica no language supports units or unit checking, ... The Curl programming language has had built-in support for ...
    (comp.lang.misc)
  • Re: Hey Scousers *waves*
    ... Scousers? ... It's no good understanding Maths if you can't communicate properly. ... Maths is the only universal language. ... Without emotion, ambiguity and ...
    (uk.sport.football.clubs.liverpool)
Loading