* 22 . she/her pronouns . NYC *
* social-issues . school . personal . fitness . bodymods*
New Grad student, studying math, trying to better the world my life.
re:what people are saying about certain concepts in math education being useless
1. You will never have to do a compass-and-straight edge construction for your job, unless you teach math for a living. This is true. Compass and straight edge construction was invented in ancient Greece as a puzzle/game for rich people, and is best approached as a game (tools like the neusis existed for practical geometry).
2. We live in a complex world where math and statistics are used to validate or refute fact claims all the time. A lack of statistical literacy means, in effect, a lack of the ability to judge someone else’s fact claims for yourself. When a journalist says “Scientists say XYZ”, you need statistical literacy if you’re even going to check if the scientist is actually making the claim they’re being quoted as making, nevermind checking if the claim is supported by the scientist’s data.
3. There is no substitute for actually doing the math. Even if you’re just going to dump a bunch of numbers into a computer 99% of the time when you’re actually doing stats, to build an actual understanding of what all that is, you have to at least know and practice where the numbers come from, and work out why. If you truly understand a bit of math, you can do it, with the right tools.
4. Actually proving the theorems underlying statistics requires calculus. Most statistics software runs on calculus underneath it (the guaranteed way to find the maximum of a function, for instance, requires calculus; therefore the calculation to check the goodness of a fit is a calculus problem). Even the parts of stats that don’t run on calculus run on algebra.
5. Blind trust in a tool where you don’t understand how it works is best avoided where possible (she types into a computer where an operating system large enough that no one person truly understands all of the individual components and how they fit together drives chips made by competing companies none of which thoroughly document how all of it works, and sends it through an internet full of years-old “urgent: fix this” comments to be published on a site that rarely retains developers for more than six months. the moral here is to not blindly trust your computer, its OS, the internet, or tumblr in particular)
Where I’m going with this is that most of the esoteric stuff you learn in middle school and high school math is going to be a building block to making sure you can understand and verify fact claims people make when you’re grown up. Math, even the boring parts of algebra, is, in short, every bit as much a part of the fundamentals of critical thinking as, say, analytical writing.
Because math doesn’t lie (within its own constricted domain), it’s one of your tools to know when you are being lied to. That’s important.
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education.
Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When
they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for
their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s
Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that
revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every
dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative
professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized
in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated
differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce
law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as
adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Play college sports
Title IX of the Education
Amendments of protects people from discrimination based
on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal
financial assistance
It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs
The EEOC rules that
sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling
is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to
apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory.
I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school.
Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s. This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
we know plankton and krabs have been playing poker together for 15 years
we also know this episode aired before the episode where pearl turned 16
while the non-continuity & non-chronological order of the series means that assuming that pearl was 15 in welcome to the chum bucket is a fool’s gamble - it’s reasonable enough that if there is an episode about her turning 16, her character was likely conceptualized as being 15 years old prior to that point. but either she was 15 or she was 16 in welcome to the chum bucket … and either way, that’s about as long as pearl’s been alive.
we also know that pearl is krabs’ biological daughter … through a combination of facts … and were given reason to believe that something happened to the mother of his child shortly after pearl’s birth that made him depressed. she’s not around anymore and no longer apart of their lives in any way shape or form.
we also know plankton and krabs were childhood best friends, going on to have an on-again-off-again friendship for years prior to spongebob getting a job at the krusty krab … and the two are shown to occasionally have moments where they truly, genuinely care about each other deep down, despite the rivalry …
conclusion: plankton might have started playing poker with krabs to cheer him up after the death of his wife
oh thank god i thought you were going to say plankton was pearls mom
It’s almost as if schools push and ideology that benefits schools.
Bruh, trades are in high fucking demand right now too. Between now and 2020 there are suppose to be 300,000 more jobs and that’s just for welder.
Shit, they’ll pay for you to learn how to do it.
I just finished high school and got a untility job in a factory and I have almost no experience. They’re gonna train me for everything plus it has full health benefits.
Trades are fucking great.
My husband is a welder, and is very very good at it. He got hired by a locksmith company pretty much just by walking in and going “Yes I can weld.”
All of the other guys there were great at locksmithing, but none of them were trained welders, and they needed someone who could build custom doors and frames.
They trained him to do lock stuff too, so now he can weld AND pick locks.
The owner of the company, when he handed out Christmas bonuses, looked at him and went “Dude we literally cannot fire you because we’d be screwed so here’s your bonus and also we’re giving you a raise.”
Welders are in desperate demand.
Blows kisses to this post.
Anyway, learn a trade, unionize, wear your PPE, memorize OSHA’s phone number.
My husband went to a fast track auto school and made almost 80k at his last job. Benefits are shit if you’re in a trade with no union but the money can be really good
Fun statistical fact: Cows are about 300 times more likely to kill you than coyotes.
Minor sidenote to statistical fact: If it was common for people to keep several hundred coyotes on their property and routinely chase them into a corral and handle them, this statistic would be different.
this is a great summary of ‘conditional probability’, a statistical property many people grapple with
…I feel like this post just made me realize that both coconut trees and vending machines, items often quoted in wacky death statistics, are both things that people shake vigorously often.
