Whoa, don’t diss schools.
I use algebra all the time! Not just in the lab, but in cooking — how do you do unit conversions or scaling of simple quantities without it?
I don’t think King Lear is a manual in how to divide inheritances, and if you think it is, maybe you need to read it again, for comprehension.
Evolution doesn’t suggest that modern fish will turn into modern mammals in real time. Somebody wasn’t paying attention in class.
Dodgeball…I will give her that. We learned nothing from dodgeball, it was the favorite game of the class bullies. Why were we playing dodgeball in school anyway?
Sadistic PE teachers?
Dodgeball?
Training to survive crossing the street, with MAGA morons and their monster trucks nearby.
Y’know, the ones that have “DODGE” on the side, and “RAM” on the front. I’m sure you’ve seen them.
Just eyeball it and hope for the best.
@3 Like my grandma did with the stuff she cooked and baked regularly:
“How much flour do you use for that cake?” “Enough for one baking tray.”
“How much milk do you use?” “So much that the dough get’s the right consistency.”
She also taught herself algebra back in ’44 so she could get into a course on air plane mechanics to avoid being drafted into the Volkssturm when the Nazi government threw women, old men and children into their pointless war.
@4
I’m constantly perplexed by some of my Grandmother’s recipes:
“one wine glass of oil” was a favorite of hers
A wine glass is 6oz, or twice that if you fill it to the brim. Your grandmother’s food must have been incredibly oily!
When I left school I wanted to be a chef. It never happened, and now I know why…
If it wasn’t for dodgeball, a certain ex-president might’ve been hit with a flying shoe. Maybe that isn’t the best argument here.
Why do we teach all that “useless” stuff in school here in the States? Blame John Dewey. His education reforms weren’t very impressive when he tried to implement them, but the principles underlying them were convincing enough. Basically kids don’t have a basis from which to know what will be important to them. School tries to provide them with a broad education, as much as they can learn. When they find their avocation hopefully they will have a basis from which to start out.
There are other forces that shape our schools, of course. Our idea that people are required to be “useful” members of society, the moral hazard of idleness, that kind of nonsense is why there are always voices calling for “employable graduates” and I think this cartoon kind of is part of that chorus of neo-liberal anti-humanist bullshit.
“neo-liberal anti-humanist” – unless I read the cartoon with a satirical voice…
My favourite game was five-a-side football. When a sliding tackle from behind took down a top-heavy bastard the worst I got was someone blowing a whistle at me.
I read Mark Twain in school where we learned about satire and irony. I have never had to use satire and irony in my life since then? What a waste of time?
PE taught me that boys receive the rules of baseball, football, and basketball genetically, so the PE teacher never has to explain what double dribbling is. If one doesn’t know what double dribbling is and dares to ask, that person is to be mocked by all the others. However, if one happens to know Ohm’s Law and dares to demonstrate that knowledge in Science class, that person is to be mocked as a know-it-all.
Why were we playing dodgeball in school anyway?
Maybe because you had PE teachers who couldn’t even teach the basics of anything more complex, like soccer or baseball?
Without the traditional subjects the fundies will fill up all the available time with BS like teaching biblical un-science, venerating the flag, totally Goebbelised history et cetera. Some math and physics so you can get a new generation of weapons engineers.
Actually, Dodgeball has real-life applications:
“If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball”
Similarly, if you can dodge a ball, you can dodge an anvil.(something Wiley E. Coyote obviously never put into practise).
As an Australian child of the 70s I laugh at dodge-ball. We had a game called brandy. Officially the object of the game is to hit another child with a tennis ball. The real objective was to hit them so hard that it left a mark. Soaking the ball in water really helped with that.
Then there was mugby. The official objective was to hold a football for as long as possible, before throwing or kicking it away. The real objective was murder the kid with the football. I got knocked out playing it once. Happy days.
Perhaps another reason for dodgeball in schools, is to teach and condition kids that it’s their responsibility to dodge whatever the bullies throw at them, in the limited space the adults give them, rather than fight back or try to seek redress.
I thought the objective of dodgeball was to teach you that whenever you get to throw the ball you get to be the bully.
SMBC is pretty consistently great, but the problem with this particular cartoon is that being a nurse means she does benefit from understanding evolution because it’s critical to managing antibiotic resistance and cancer therapy.
I’m still trying to get over a US wine glass being 355 ml. 8-O (#6)
You guys really do like to supersize. X-D
A little research shows that would mean a bottle of wine is two glasses filled to the brim. 8-O
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_bottle
(Here a standard drink of wine is considered 120ml. Not filled to the brim of course.)
@2 How dare you disparage their emotional support vehicles! lol
“A standard drink of wine” is 200ml in Germany, or 250ml, a “Schoppen”, in some regions.
Traditionally, there were glass sizes where the amount would fit almost to the brim.
Nowadays, all the glasses in restaurants are way bigger. Everybody can do a show of sniffing the odeur and being a real conoisseur, but I could possibly not discern something really expensive from something available in tetra-paks.