The Value of School

by Alex J Allen

aaa

It occurred to me today at work, that a whole variety of stupid, unecessary things I learnt in school are still affecting various aspects of people's behaviour in the workplace. Someone will be giving a presentation about something, and there's always one colleague that still puts their hand up to ask a question. Put your damn hand down Steve, you're 42, this isn't a class assembly on the water cycle! On top of that, you're perenially taught to sit with your legs crossed, which must be the single most uncomfortable way anyone has ever sat. As you get slightly older you realise that was largely because you went to a fairly shit school that couldn't afford any chairs, but still, when I'm on the train and there are no seats I still try and sit on the floor like that and it hurts like hell! That's probably because I'm about as supple as an arthritic 80 year old, but you take my point.
aaa

My other personal favourite is this calculator business. The standard maths teacher response to any student ever saying that if they ever had a maths problem to solve, they'd just use a calculator is 'well what if you didn't have a calculator?'. In my seven years since finishing secondary school, not once have I ever found myself without a calculator in a maths situation. Nor have I ever wandered in to my garden, measured the two fences down the left side and far end and decided that what I really wanted to do was use pythagoras to find the distance down the middle! It's a nonsense. Face it maths fans, the calculator has made your job totally redundant in all but the most geeky of circumstances. 'Use an equation to work out how many apples mark has'. Mark, is standing fucking right next to me, he can tell me how many apples he's got himself, although to be honest I'm struggling to think of any situation where an accurate count of Mark's apples would be even remotely necessary. We don't talk in code at work, when we need to know something, we ask! Furthermore, pretty much as soon as I left my GCSE maths exam I lost a substantial amount of information I'd taken in over the previous two years. Now all I have is a gappy knowledge of various maths terms that I have no ability to use. For example, I know that Pi is roughly 3.14, but I have no fucking idea what relavence that has to anything. I know that trigonometry has sin, cos and tan involved in it in some way, but again, no fucking clue why! I've essentially become the charity shop jigsaw puzzle of maths, I'm completely useless, it makes me wonder why anyone persisted with me in the first place.