School Sucks - Safety Third 52 

Kevin saying "My mom doesn't like you because you talk over me too much" while Will was talking over him was just perfect

Nigel is amazing. Pure lawful neutral. So dry, so funny.

I hate Williams argument that we should take time from teaching history to teach welding or something "useful" for the same reason he gives for who gets to choose what history concepts to teach. Welding is a useful skill for William and could be a fun hobby for others but it for 99.6% of the population it would be useless. (Of the 150 million working adults only 500k are welders). History while not direction 1:1 useful it helps in ways you don't consciously perceive. Learning about the successes and failures of the past help you develop a database of sorts, examples you can look at and compare even subconsciously when making your own choices. That helps everyone. The way we teach history is pretty dumb but the idea of teaching history is solid AF.

"Nazis are seen as so bad, even if you are one you can't call yourself that." - Nile. The fact this was recorded before Ye's infowar rant is hilarious.

I feel like a lot of these memorize things in school is more about "What can we put into a test" than "what useful things should we teach our children"

One of these days Nigels gonna have a really good story about drinking chemicals.

Watching this instead of paying attention to my biology teacher that says 1 word every 3 seconds and calls it talking

Never in my life have I ever needed to weld anything or do ANY of the things I learned in woodworking class. When I talk to other adults, they rarely ever use the kinds of knowledge and skills that I consider to be absolutely essential in my life (both personally and professionally). The problem is that we live in an incredibly complex society where 90-95% of students will never use 95% of the things that are taught in any given class. Teachers have to teach all students, since it's impossible to predict what students will end up doing 15, 10, or even 5 years in the future. Neglecting to teach all of the "irrelevant" and "useless" details to that 5 or 10% of students who will actually end up using that information just massively hinders their ability to actually use that knowledge in the future and progress in their chosen careers. Not only that, but learning all those "irrelevant" and "useless" details also builds different kinds of collateral skills in the process (skills that are needed to learn other subjects, such as how to study, how to prioritize information, how to write or communicate about things, how to delay gratification, how to pay attention to things that you aren't necessarily inherently interested in, how to find ways to relate to different kinds of information and find ways of making it interesting to yourself, etc). Teaching only supposedly "useful" or "practical" skills and information just leads to an incredibly dumb, narrow-minded, and unskilled population that is completely shackled by their ignorance of anything outside of their narrow little world of "useful" information. A population which doesn't have the broad background necessary to be able to transfer knowledge/skills from one domain to a different one or which doesn't have the context to be able to think creatively and adapt to new or changing situations. Nearly every single working professional thinks that their own specialized knowledge and skills are the most important ones, and they question and complain about all the other fields that they had to learn information from.

An eigenvalue is how much its corresponding eigenvector gets scaled after a linear transformation. An eigenvector is a vector that points in the same direction before and after a linear transformation. Ps. Will is totally right that just doing calculations and actually understanding the subject are two totally different things. For the longest time I thought I was a good student because I got good grades until I realized that i was lacking the understanding of the subjects I studied for. That false confidence is the main difference between purely academic people and people who spent time in their industry.

Just got my safety third sticker pack in, and they look great on my cat.

My calc teacher was fucking incredible. She was big on "don't memorize, generate!" The unit circle was a godsend, in relation to "whats a sine wave" I found calculus easier than any other math class I had to take specifically because of her ability to drive home the concept of being able to generate the answer, rather than see the patterns. For the first few weeks we had to do derivatives the looooooooong way where it takes like a full page of dumb math to complete the damn thing. Then we got to look at the patterns and the time spent answering questions when from 10 minutes per question to like two seconds per questions. These were ap classes, I got highest marks possible on the exams. Free college credit, dudes!

My school's business teacher is a former IBM executive who retired to a mansion about 45 minutes from my school and picked up teaching business at our school as something to do. He's absolutely the best teacher not because he's good at teaching as a profession, but because he's so knowledgable about business that he's inherently good at teaching it.

I teach Mechanical Engineering part time and the kids are starving for anyone with real world experience. Their eyes light up when I tell them about the stuff I have done and have so many questions. I feel so bad that they don't get more of that through school.....But the academic world is so different than industry (tenure professors, slow to change, and bureaucratic) and doesn't pay enough that they will never get a huge influx of experience....

If your history teacher is making you memorize things they're a bad teacher. Social studies should be having you understand why things happened and helping you with your critical thinking skills. Coming from someone with a masters in secondary education.

I can see where you are coming from when you say that teachers should be people who do practical stuff in the industry, but the most important thing about teaching is being able to communicate well. You can be the smartest engineer who ever engineered that has both practical and theoretical knowledge about every field, but if you aren't able to communicate what you know to those that don't have this knowledge, then you would make for a bad teacher. Now sure, there are a percentage of teachers aren't very good at communication. And maybe the people who make it furthest in an industry might be on average better communicators, but I don't think that having teachers with the most practical knowledge of an industry would fix the education system as a whole.

William… WW2 is a prime example of something that we would like not to repeat. And there are more people denying it now a days because people aren’t educated enough

The irony of this episode where the phrase those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it and the discussion of bitcoin mining without anyone mentioning the original mining gold rush is truely beautiful

Calculus was the first time I felt like I actually understood math. Everything up to that point was memorizing patterns. Maybe I had good teachers or I’m just weird.

Canada in WW1 is actually really interesting and they did a lot, they also committed so many war crimes that the Geneva convention was updated because of Canada’s actions

William's reaction to people not celebrating Thanksgiving outside of the US was expected, but so funny. xD

STEM people really need to take the humanities more seriously. A history education is important. However the way history is taught at the lower levels is counter productive and unimportant. A good history education is instructive on the consequences of actions and helps a student learn practical critical thinking skills. Learning history isn't about memorizing dates or specific events its about understanding and connecting events. It's about having a basis for understanding why things are the way they are. You can not be adequately informed without a basic knowledge of history.

"they should stop teaching x because nobody uses it" is just about every every single topic except english, or whatever your native language happens to be. If you don't go into chemistry you don't need to know anything about chemistry. If you don't go into science you don't need to know anything about science. Most people certainly don't need to know welding. The reason why we learn most of the stuff in school is to give us a broad knowledge, a base knowledge of most topics that we can expand upon later. There's always room for improvement but it's beyond unhelpful to say that because YOU don't use something that means it shouldn't be taught.

Hearing Will talk about history being useless and why don't we teach more math and science is so funny because I always heard the opposite in school. Also history is incredibly important for people to learn because it directly impacts politics and who people vote for. It's more important for the average person to have a good understanding of history than calculus or chemistry honestly.

As someone with an advanced degree in math, I think the issue is that the "machinery" that underlies everything has to be extremely general in order to make the "system" flexible, however, that generality leads to an extreme degree of abstraction which many people have no interest or capacity to dig through. Sure I understand calculus (mostly measure theoretic applications), but realistically how many people need to understand it for their own use? Virtually nobody. It's pretty easy to say in plain language what a real number is, not too much harder to say what a complex number is if someone has taken high school algebra. But starting from ZFC axioms and logic, then building set theory up to being able to define what a 'number' is, then defining natural numbers, then integers, then rationals, then the reals (good luck if you try to define it as a completion under a metric rather than through Dedekind cuts), and finally the complex numbers? And this is just the 'analysis' point of view, there are entirely different approaches through abstract algebra to arrive in the same place. To 'use' complex numbers requires only a couple handy identities ('rules of thumb'), but to *understand* them to the level of being able to research with them requires a staggering amount of background. So if you don't already know about the uses of complex numbers, why go through this tremendous trouble? But if you don't know what a complex number is, how can you understand their uses? What about different axiomatic systems? Things get out of hand quickly. Similar story with linear algebra. If you don't already know about fields, how can you understand a vector space? But the problem is, if you don't know about vector spaces, how do you motivate the idea of a field? Everything has to start somewhere; I don't think high schools are going to be teaching formal logic and group theory anytime soon. I don't know what the solution is. Seeing the beauty of math is much more nuanced than the beauty of the physical sciences so it's easy to brush it aside as just a tool which most do.

The more of these podcasts with Nigel I hear the more surprised I am he grew up.

As a Mexican, William bringing up Fabuloso always feels unexpected

Honestly, my biggest issue in school is the inherent belief that memorization is the only way to really learn. I switched from math to cs in college, and one of the things I realized about this whole system is that you can't memorize everything. The whole idea of testing is more or less about trying to cram 10 lbs of shit into the 5lb bag that is your brain. That isn't to say that repetition and, in a way, memorization, are bad forms of learning. But the idea that somehow having the book with you during a test is bad more or less smacks at the fact that that's all you do when you're working!! All you do is look up works and texts, double check things you think you knew to make sure they're right. If having the textbook with you somehow defeats the purpose of testing, either the student is brilliant and can simply cross reference and learn from a book incredibly fast, or the tests are just lazy trials if memorization. Any time I pick a programming language back up, the first thing I have to do is remember the basics required for writing a basic file. I mean, think about it. When you took Calc or really any math class, if you just magically got the answer, unless it was multiple choice, you only got a fraction of the points. It was all about showing the work. The book can't teach you how to show the work. But it can help you fix a mistake, or remind you of an obscure identity used for derivation. Its like Nigel said, you have the damn periodic table everywhere in chemistry because most people simply don't have the wherewithal to remember literally everything.

Really interesting to listen to this as a current 5th grade classroom teacher and former elementary technology teacher. I think one of the issues is the lack of national or state level support for tech and engineering education all all K-12 levels. Even if a school gets the stuff for a maker space, there isn’t any large scale support so the funding is likely to disappear with the next change of admin or superintendent. This means that teachers don’t want to get too invested. The flip side that Will didn’t really address is that non-teachers tend to lack a lot of the classroom management and lesson skills that are necessary for teaching. I have had guest teachers come in who were amazing at what they did, but their lessons crashed and burned because the didn’t have the background knowledge to know how to introduce things in an age appropriate way. You don’t need a degree to learn it, but it does take a lot of time and practice to become good at it.

“Oysters were popping off” is a really funny statement lol

Perfect video for drinking rum straight while laying on the floor of the tub. Love listening to you guys talk about random shit

Currently getting an education in game programming, and I'm so happy all my teachers are people who are actually in the industry. But it sure sucks that none of them have any skill in public speaking or teaching.

Its insane listing to Will reading the eigen vector and eigan value wiki and understanding it and hearing him read it thinking "yep thats what they are" and then right as he finishes he says that it didn't explain what it is.

Being a history major, I don’t think I’ve ever been more offended

Ahhhhh, I thought y'all were just science guys who reluctantly used math when needed, so finding out Nigel liked math and took up to Calc 3 was a real treat (as a viewer who likes math)

History has been the most important and most actively used in my everyday life. Being able to identify and predict human behaviors based off of previous happenstance is the most useful application of historical knowledge. Having the macro and micro knowledge allows one to comprehend a wide spectrum of what is currently happening in the world. For instance: why we have the 24hr News cycle? Iran hostage crisis... Well why did that happen? Because Pro-American Iran college students got pissed at America when we didn't denounce Iran's leaders. Why didn't America support Pro American college students? Oil Crisis... It seems to go on and on, oh my God it's important. Imagine how much influence the 24-hour news cycle has had, now you know why.

When it comes to family vacations, I think a lot of people can relate to Kevin, specially if you have a dysfunctional family (like me). While if you have a happy (or "normal") family like Nigel, you can enjoy your family vacations. Or maybe I'm just assuming.

In my last linear algebra exam i was asked "whats an eigenvalue?" i have used eigenvalues several times but no idea what it actually is

One of the coolest things about my little private school was that in Junior and Senior year was for one class we had a choice of courses that teachers decided they wanted to teach that year. Teachers teach better when they're passionate about it, and I felt like I learned more in those classes than any other.

Learning history in a US high school would have stressed me a lot tbh. Because in my country we were taught *mostly* local, regional and European history, but every year we learned about different periods, starting with 500bc or so. So we never really repeated stuff "over and over", but because we had so much to go through, there was some stuff we were forced to gloss over every year. T-T

I lived in Canada for a little while as a kid and the only thing I remember was learning about this guy Terry Fox who ran across Canada to raise awareness for cancer, I’m not sure if he was a big deal all over Canada or just where I used to live, but I thought he was a household name there or maybe it was cause I only saw a small glimpse of Canadian life.

Not me 6:45 My sister changed a painting on the other side of our dining room, and I noticed instantly. It used to be a side profile of a woman, but she changed it to a girl looking straight, dead forward. The eyes... it was the eyes... 😖😖

Heck yeah my t-shirt just got delivered this morning. Right on time for the upload!

hand tool restoration guy. you guys should have him on. love his channel ,the kinds of projects he does fits the theme and he has questions for Nigel

In my college calculus classes are all co-requisite with classes that study the practical uses of the calculus concepts. It really helps with understanding how the calculus is useful to us in computer engineering or physics.

william secretly trying to start an oyster cult

STEM people not understanding why we need history is a great argument for why we need more history, not less. 70% of jobs is just answering emails on a laptop, I don't think welding is gonna help with that Also Wills idea that people with even less training in teaching are a good idea clashed pretty hard with everyone that actually has to do with education.

My one maths teacher in high school was actually a retired mechanical engineer with a Master's degree, who had a passion for teaching. He also taught physics and related science subjects for a while. He also taught my older brother maths, and helped him go from failing maths to doing very well.

You guys hit the nail on the head on teaching concepts vs applied. I use trig, algebra, linear algebra, and other matrix transformations daily at work and in my free time course I'm over here writing shader code for real time graphics. rotation matricies into normal vectors to derive the dot product from the point in space to know if the pixel is being lit by the lights in real time. but heck, its all abstract math, just code, you give me a piece of paper and tell me to decompose a matrix, I have no clue

So one of my absolute favorite teachers was my auto tech teacher in high-school. He was a super experienced mechanic and he decided he wanted to teach kids his trade and took a massive pay cut to do so. He literally just wanted us to learn automotive stuff. The only things we 'learned' from the book were jammed into a few weeks and he only did it because the school system made him. He wanted us to be hands on, he helped us (those of us who actually had our own cars anyway) build and fix our own cars. like part of the curriculum was to take apart and rebuild an engine, and there were like a dozen or so v6's that were donated to the school system that we would use, BUT if you had a car that you wanted to build, he would help you and teach you how to build your own engine. Obviously you had to pay for the parts yourself, but he literally just wanted to teach younger people how to do mechanics.

Its interesting hearing them talk about calc 1,2,3. As someone taking calc 2 rn, but in europe the system for teaching it seems wildly different. We start with why we learn certain calculus principles and then we have to solve problems with it. taking imaginary numbers for instance kinda makes senses if you view as a vertical line of numbers orthogonal to real numbers. It doesn't fully makes sense but you can see the logic and reasoning behind it. Sure you won't need all the math in your profesional career (speaking from experience), but it really helps gaining insight in to what a numerical solver or matlab does behind the scenes.

I've always been a firm believer that you don't understand something untell you can teach it. I thought I knew some content pretty well and then I became a TA, and it is incredible how good a class of confused students is at finding the gaps in my knowledge. It really forces you as the teacher to move away from having knowledge and towards problem solving and figuring things out. And my favorite statagy to use when teaching is to just explain my thought process in figuring things out, like showing why it makes sense to do some weird seemingly out of place step. I've noticed that it is exactly the way many technical youtube videos are structured (like 3blue1brown videos).

History lessons are rather appreciated in my country (France). I also find it funny that I had answers about the history of Canada or the United States that you did not have during the conversation even though I am French

Nile (who plays with dangerous and toxic chemicals): idk guys I think guns have a dark side.

Good educators are few and far between. I'm in my junior year of undergrad and am finishing up Organic Chemistry 2 this semester. My lab professor is new this semester and he worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 40 years and has had many breakthroughs over his career. If every professor was as good of a teacher as he is, school would be much more enjoyable and worthwhile.

1:01:32 at fullsail they gave us a crashcourse on calculus and linear algebra for the sole purpose of being able to write a physics engine. it was great getting taught that stuff purely with the lens of a "real world application". my crappy game projects before were always running too fast or too slow depending on framerate. being taught "delta-time" was a magical epiphany moment for me because it makes the game run the same regardless of FPS. velocity+=acceleration*dt; position+=velocity*dt; or velocity=(position1-position0)/dt; all make perfect sense and i guess those are integrations and derivations after all 🤓 geometry and trigonometry are awesome for anything 2d/3d graphics or physics. i never gave sine/cosine a chance until one time in quickbasic i was trying to figure out an X,Y coordinate given an angle and distance. when i found the answer online, i realized it was the "converting between rectangular and polar coordinates" sine/cosine junk which i was taught in school and i guess it just never "clicked" at the time how it could ever be useful for anything. same deal with pythagorean's theorum: some "useless" triangle garbage until i realized its literally how you calculate the distance between two points. imo school is unnecessarily hard and cryptic because its all taught within some broad conceptual lens rather than an applied one. the "applied" scenarios that textbooks give, like "sally has 50 watermelons and joe bought half, how many does jim have", never worked for me because i didnt give two shits how many watermelons anyone has. to this day though, math whose "solution" is just another formula has never made sense to me. i feel like it has to result in actual value(s) for it to ever have a real world application.

I would say calculus is the first math course where you have a chance to really understand it since like...algebra? Adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division are all discrete enough to be fairly intuitive. As is some of geometry. But a ton of algebra II, geometry, and trigonometry is just three years of prepping for calculus. But once you finally get to derivatives, and learn about it in terms of physics, mostly time, velocity, and acceleration, it oddly begins to have some sort of inuitiveness again, at least for me. That being said though, a lot of math that was developed once the concept of negative numbers was beginning to be accepted as important and real, as with things like complex numbers, math really is a way to logically extract things from the real world, and less about "understanding" it. Just like quantum entanglement was considered "spooky action at a distance", once you realize all of the unsolved and possibly unsolvable problems in math, even ones where some answers seem trivial on the surface, you realize math is kind of spooky too. I think, despite always enjoying math, once I went to college, I realized there's a certain level of mystery to it, more than really anything else.

1:07:38 I feel called out lol, I was just about to write this whole long comment about how, now I haven't taken an engineering class, but from what friends have told me, the engineering major is structured just as you describe, at least that's how I reconcile with the fact that past maybe Calc 2,that's not how any of my classes worked. The biggest example you brought up is matrices. The reason linear algebra is such a calculation kind of course is because it's the foundation of everything else you need matrices for, so you're gonna need a lot of practice working eith them. A good linear course will also talk about theory a good bit,but I suspect that's not what you meN when you say 'tell me how to use it' and additionally, you don't remember whT an eigenvalues is because you haven't needed to use it since you took the course, and if they're not useful to you, sure you can forget about them. If you need to remember again you can use an old textbook or the internet. I can tell you first hand that as a physics student in quantum, there's no way I could forget what an eigenvalues is, it has been seared onto my Grey matter

There's a classic trope about a husband and wife where the wife only talks to her husband about jewelry and expensive things so the husband, a successful businessman, spends all day starting new projects at work so that he can earn enough money to buy his wife more fancy things. The husband doesn't really enjoy his job anymore - he'd much rather spend time with his wife - but he slogs through it to satisfy her lavish tastes. The twist is, while the wife doesn't mind having nice things, she'd much rather have more time with her husband! Your history teacher probably didn't want you to memorize the name of every president. That may be what you *thought* they wanted because that's what they spent so much time talking about. But what they really wanted (maybe) was exactly what you wanted: to put your knowledge of history to *use*. Unfortunately, there's a circular element to it. Students often fixate on memorizing facts because it's easier than thinking deeply about them; they don't want to think deeply about it because they hate school and want to spend as little effort on it as possible; and they hate school because they think it's all about boring facts that don't mean anything.

theres a 100% increase of pets in this episode of Saftey Third (podcast)

I agree with almost everything you're saying about school makerspaces and education, at least in public schools. I work in the makerspace at an independent school, though, and the amount of money, time, and effort that goes into helping students become capable makers is significant. Even the fact that I'm here, with no college degree but years of experience making stuff at home, speaks to the focus on life skills more than just grades.

one of my favorite things about my old school (i transferred to a stem academy) was our engineering teacher. we had an entire career and technical wing (welding, auto, electrical, pre nursing, biomedical sciences, ag, early childhood ed, engineering,, compsci), but i adored those specific classes. my teacher is a retired engineer, and while he has the general gen x tech issues, he’s an awesome teacher.

3blue1brown has a great series of videos on this (eigenvectors and eigenvalues). If you represent the transformation as a matrix (M), M * v maps a vector v from its old value to its new value. This new position could be anywhere and depends on M. The neat thing about eigenvectors is that the direction of the vector after applying the transformation remains unchanged, so the new value is just a scale factor off from the old value. This scale factor is the corresponding eigenvalue.

Can we get this exact same podcast, with all the same questions, but with Shane from Stuff Made Here as a guest?

As a nurse, watching medical shows is tough. The only one I can watch is House and I view it as a detective show, not a medical show.

This was the reason my secondary school (uk) engineering class was so good. 1. we had a workshop with multiple lathes, a milling machine, welders, forge, a cnc lazer cutter as well as a woodworking room and electronics room, and 2. our teacher had many years of experience working his way up a well known engineering firm from practically making the parts to designing solutions and management involving all the health and safety and risk stuff, as well as owning a farm, the only reason he went into teaching was because he was starting to have medical problems meaning he couldnt be quite as active as he used to be and it was something he enjoyed allowing him to provide opportunities to students that he wished he had had. We also had a construction class which my friend took. Looking back i was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunities i did in my school especially in comparison to other schools in the area, there was always a massive focus on the practical side of things, a massive reason i stopped on at their sixthform for my A-levels, even better is that the school lets me use their workshop for personal projects as long as I let them know before hand that i wish to use the equiptment. I wish other schools could offer the simular opportunities for practical subjects to that i had and it just shows how different 2 schools can be even if theyre both government run / non paid.

I know this episode was posted a month ago, but I have to chime in. I'm a former high school teacher, located in Washington state. Over here, there is a large push for CTE education (career and technical education). These are middle/high school elective classes that are typical taught by people who were previously working in industry. For example, I don't have a teaching degree, but because of my professional/educational background, I taught a Communications class. However, you can also choose to "specialize" in CTE if your trying to become teacher right out of the gate, but it creates two really different types of education for the students. Half of CTE is taught be industry professionals and the other half is taught be teachers who studied it in school. So for example, you could have two different cooking classes, but one is taught by a former chef/restaurant owner and the other is taught by a teacher who studied to teach a cooking class...not necessarily a bad thing, but really different for the students. CTE education has other things like cooking, shop, ag, auto, etc. It kind of just depends on the needs of the school/ how much funding they get. Thankfully, here in WA, educational legislation is really pushing for these programs. Idk if they have this same thing in California, Florida, or Montreal, but I'd be willing to bet there is something similar. The hardest part about teaching without having student taught/gone to school for it, is learning the craft of teaching itself and learning how to plan curriculum for the first time. I've since left teaching but have been working on my curriculum for the day I go back. Since having to write curriculum for the first time, I now write down processes for everything I do. Also, becoming an 'Instructional designer' is a big thing right now for teachers looking to leave teaching. It's essentially learning how to build online courses and be a consultant/freelancer, which you all are already doing. It would be super cool if anyone on safety third ever decided to make a class ( or some sort of online course )for K-12. Getting to build a class, while not under the constraints/stresses of teaching day-to-day would be such a game changer for so many teachers. Additionally, pulling people from industry isn't typical (or often allowed if they don't already have a teaching certificate) in K-12 education, but it'd be amazing to see how different the core subjects could be taught if that was the case. Great episode! Sorry for such a long tangent.

Ooh! New ep

I love all of you guys videos

As a Maine Native(on multiple levels, I'm Penobscot), hearing Nigel say All-dressed and ketchup chips are Canadian reminds me most of the rest of America already thinks we're a part of Canada...

I used to work in an 'institution' that served a 'just add sugar and water' lemonade mix. It was disgusting. Fluorescent yellow and tasted like citric acid with a fake lemon scent. I'm absolutely convinced it was also sold as a cleaner. It was packaged in the same type of jug as janitorial supplies

Former history major here. While I switched my major to a science from history, I still believe teaching kids history is important, primarily because it is beneficial to be politically knowledgable and having an extensive knowledge of history is key to being so. To address William's comment, of "What power do i have to do what hitler did," while, no you may never be Hitler, it was people like myself and anyone reading this who brought Hitler to power. The saying "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," is significantly deeper than most percieve.

Teddy Roosevelt was the trust buster man he taught us how to fight the corporate man and the need to ensure corporations don't end up with cartels collusion and monopoly

Love the podcast guys!

The thing is, I loved learning about the orbitals in chemistry, because it finally explained (somewhat) why chemistry works. Before that it was just magic: we mix these 2 chemicals and something happens, but these other identical looking chemicals do nothing. So part of a broad education is to expose different people to different parts of the knowledge, so they can find something they like and something that works for them.

My highschool was clearly different from yours. While they weren't wildly promoted my school had many classes that taught real world skills. I learned how to household electrical work, DC wiring, the classic woodshop stuff like chairs and end tables, we built 4 sheds in a trimester, and installed them. There were classes that I didn't get to where you would build and race small electric cars and they converted a motorcycle to electric (this was in the early 2010s) We also had a "Tech Center" nearby that was a school you could go to for a few hours and learn a trade. Anything from robotics, medical, car repair, anything IT related, graphic design, and so much more. I even got to take a moderate level C# college class for free there where I got try out Microsoft's Hololens when it was released. I knew I went to the "rich" school for a rural school in the Midwest but damn school should at least teach you how to be an adult a little bit

Learning is fun, bad teachers suck.

There was a time in college physics I was having trouble setting up the integral for a problem in. I think was heat transfer across a melting lake; as the lake melted there would be less ice that the heat had to conduct through so it'd melt faster, etc. I could find the equation to describe it in the book but it didn't have the dx/dt stuff in that version so I had no idea how to set it up to integrate. But the assignment was a replacement for a lab section and I got the bright idea to kinda cheat and just integrate it in Excel and claim since it was a lab assignment I could use tools and techniques we could normally use in labs. The funny thing is as I was setting up the calculations in the spread sheet, I suddenly made that connection of the dx variable being the term that was incrementally changing in tiny steps to recalculate the rest of the equation and I was able to make a good stab at doing the integral.

So I say this as someone who just finished their masters in physics, regarding imaginary numbers, they are "real" even though they're not "Real" numbers. (And frankly calling them imaginary has not helped with this). Basically, all maths is like, derived from definitions. And under the basic definitions of maths, the square root of -1 didn't have a definition, because no "Real" numbers could be the answer. So we defined it as i. But it does show up in plenty of real phenomena, especially regarding waves. The schrodinger equation uses it too. But in order to get a "real" probability, you effectively square the final result (I am simplifying here). And so, like, yeah, it no longer has an i in it, but i^2 is still part of the answer. So i exists in the same way any number "exists". They're all just constructed from rules and definitions really.

Eigenvalues/vectors are the decomposition of a complex system in a very simple form. Given a system which applies a very complex operation, you can replace it with a decomposition in eigenvectors, multiply them by the eigenvalues, and compose again. Fourier is a good example: a filter can be computed as separating a signal in all frequencies (eigenvectors), then multiplying by the eigenvalues and ensamble all again.

For a long time in the state I live in, fireworks were pretty heavily controlled. That changed about 5 years ago, and now we have fireworks stores all over the place. But before then, the only way to get anything bigger than sparklers and poppers was to go out of state. Thankfully for my brother and me (and all of our friends), our annual family road trip always went through a neighboring state that had ZERO fireworks restrictions. And you can bet your sweet bippy we spent ALL of our lawn-mowing money buying the strongest stuff we could get our hands on.

Safety Third, in the middle of november: Proceeds to spend 3 hours talking about fireworks

I've always had moments where I feel like I'm fully grasping some math concept but then I lose it. I just got good at solving the problems without understanding deeply. One class I took was fluid dynamics simulation and my god. If I remember right it was iterative 3 variable calculus. I had a rainman moment on that final. Pretty sure I blacked out.

Ah, this hits home so bad, exact same issues in school and with school system

for the first time i actually wanna be a patron - for the nile fanfic

i is actually a lot of fun in my opinion. if you're doing something like CAD in three dimensions, the math for adding the third dimension can get tricky because the values for different axes are interchangeable. when you're working with curves that relate to other properties in multiple dimensions like with electromagnetic waves it's very important. the specific properties of a number that is the square root of a negative are really unique and fit a lot of puzzle piece gaps in various places in math

I worked in a family owned fireworks store that looked like a giant fire-hazard barn (Sheltons), and I always enjoyed seeing grown men get giddy over all the fireworks 😄

Knowing that those volume equations come from calculus has really helped my understanding - thank you, Will. You've been more helpful in understanding math than any teacher I ever had ... My 8th grade math teacher stunted my math education 😢

the worst quote I've heard was "fuck knowledge, don't go to college"

I think the reason none of us remember history from primary school is that it's taught in the most miserable, boring, tedious way imaginable. Lately I've been watching a lot of Extra History videos over on the Extra Credits channel and it's goddamn _delightful_ and I wish _that's_ how we'd been taught. History isn't just about warnings of past wrongs, it's also about celebrations of past victories, and it _is_ valuable to see what we've overcome and how... it's just easily the most boring subject in school because it's taught primarily as just rote memorization. ...At least that's how _I_ was taught.

This reminds me when I spent 30 minutes at a previous job explaining lefty loosie righty tighty to someone that has 3 PhDs

Watching this just after getting my college acceptance lol. (I’ve been avoiding school for 3 years.)

Weird, I saw this video on front page before getting notification, even though I have "all" set as my notification preference.

We used matrices in high school to predict sports betting for football

have my physical chemistry final next week and really connected to this episode about being lost with derivatives

6:56 I used to love America, I don't hate America now As a European, that's actually very relatable. xD

This podcast helps me sleep at night and I also use it to help wake me up in the morning. I love the podcast you guys are epic

On family vacations; The destinations were great but the 3-7 day car ride each way with my older sister, were horrible.

The education rabbit hole goes down so fucking deep it's actually insane. In today's world there is 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt bigger than Canada's entire GDP. 3x what it was in 2006 the world. Greedy colleges and policy makers are milking every cent from young people. It's is a fucking tragedy.

Being a Junior in Mech E right now all of these class experiences and math talk are hitting scarily close to home rn

The history talk highlighted to me the blatant difference between taking history in Canada vs the US.