never said that’s what I wanted to do when I grow up, I have no intention of starting a yoyo business or anything, it was just a nice fun project that I learned a lot from and right, manufacturing engineering.
And yes I have, I would take truss analysis any day over english and history.
Classes are not just about the end result. That sort of thinking, both in the minds of teachers and students, is part of what is wrong with education. I never cared for history either. Learning names and dates seems worthless, but it develops memory and recall skills that happen to be very important. Stop worrying about what you want to do in ten years, that time will come. Worry about becoming a better student and better person right now.
memory and recall skills can be developed in other ways.
don’t see how your last part is relevant, but I do try to be a better person every day, better student? not so much lol
I just wanted to add here that whilst I work in a relatively narrow field, there is not a single class I do not frequently wish I’d worked harder in, or read more broadly around, while I was in school. Some of it would be useful on a daily basis in my work, and some are because I wish I understood more of the world as a whole.
I also wanted to elude to the programming references made earlier: I frequently write code at work to shorten laborious tasks, and yet there is not a simple example of code I’ve written in which the solution can be found analytically. Learning to programme with careful code structure, minimizing iteration time, and developing efficient algorithms to solve numerical problems seem to me to be key features never truly taught and yet are vital for me. If you’re learning to code, I can’t recommend highly enough timing small segments of your code and then re-optimizing/re-writing to see if you can cut down on that time. I now routinely integrate different programming languages/scripting languages to reduce computational time.
What language do you use? Pearl Python Java C C++???
try telling this to our county’s school system they have the exact opposite idea of this. They want us to know what we want to do when we get out of college by our sophomore year of high school!
I have used all of the above at one point or another. I use Python and C/C++ most routinely as they are the easiest to interweave when the going gets tough and the number crunching gets intense.
I’m not against knowing what you want to do. When I was in middle school I figured it was about time for me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I chose a career that I wanted and obsessed about all the details to make it happen. By my freshman year of high school I had opened my eyes a bit more and changed my plans twice, but I was committed to making it happen. My problem with the educational system is that it is largely designed around job training—a foundation set by the industrial revolution. Public education fails to form the whole person, but instead tells students to pick out a job and then watches to see if they sink or swim.
Knowing what you want to do is great. You have a plan for your life and a goal to motivate you through the struggles that will undoubtedly come. Not knowing what you want to do is not the end of the world either. Most people don’t know what they want to do. Take a careful look at what interests you, what school subjects you are good at, and what you are good at and then think about what careers use those skills.
You shouldn’t be afraid to look far into the future, decide what you want to see there, and set goals to make it happen. However, you shouldn’t neglect the present for a future that will never come. Balance is an important skill to learn. Live in the present, but plan for the future.
Doing 5x5 blind will train my memory better than any dates in history class will.
Amen! Lol
Spacial memory is the easiest to get good at because it is programmed into the human brain for navigational purposes. It is quite different from other forms of memory that may be used in an academic setting although it can be tailored to support them.
