Saw a post the other day: "I'm so glad I learned what a parallelogram is and NOT how to do my taxes in school."
-
Also... what the heck do people mean by "how to do taxes" anyway? It's an *algorithm* How could that take more than 10min to understand?
When I see that meme what I take from it is that a lot of people remember the word "parallelogram" from math class and they don't know what the significance of it was or why they had to be so stressed out about it. They also recognize that taxes involve doing math. Maybe they suppose that it's through math that rich people pay so little tax?
@futurebird Thank you for expressing something that has always annoyed me.
People that say that seem to labour under the same misunderstanding as Sherlock Holmes. Remember that quote when he said that the brain is like an attic, and that to put one thing in you have to take one thing out.
Learning about parallelograms isn't why they can't do their taxes. To know more, you have to learn more, not less.
-
Saw a post the other day: "I'm so glad I learned what a parallelogram is and NOT how to do my taxes in school."
Generally, people who say such things don't know what a parallelogram is OR how to do their taxes. They have been failed twice. They were presented with the signifiers of a liberal arts education but received none of the substance.
This isn't their fault and replacing alienating signifiers of a liberals arts education with signifiers "trades training" won't do what they think.
@futurebird when I was younger I'd parrot this complaint but then I remembered the few times I was given real world advice as a teenager I simply lacked the real world experience to actually comprehend it, and I didn't truly understand the value of money until I lived on my own actually budgeting my own money to my own competing expenses.
For an example, in middle school I remember an assignment where they had us put down what we think various normal expenses cost like rent, water, electricity, and groceries. I don't remember what the point of the assignment was just the teachers laughing about how we had nearly zero idea of what anything actually cost and assigned high amounts to forgettable bills and low amounts to the most painful ones. I think it might have been a budgeting assignment? I honestly don't remember. But what I do remember is as kids who didn't have actual financial obligations we had no clue what anything cost so giving financial advice was kinda meaningless
-
@futurebird when I was younger I'd parrot this complaint but then I remembered the few times I was given real world advice as a teenager I simply lacked the real world experience to actually comprehend it, and I didn't truly understand the value of money until I lived on my own actually budgeting my own money to my own competing expenses.
For an example, in middle school I remember an assignment where they had us put down what we think various normal expenses cost like rent, water, electricity, and groceries. I don't remember what the point of the assignment was just the teachers laughing about how we had nearly zero idea of what anything actually cost and assigned high amounts to forgettable bills and low amounts to the most painful ones. I think it might have been a budgeting assignment? I honestly don't remember. But what I do remember is as kids who didn't have actual financial obligations we had no clue what anything cost so giving financial advice was kinda meaningless
Maybe the true lament is "I spent all that time hearing about parallelograms and still don't know what the big deal with them is anyway."
-
@futurebird when I was younger I'd parrot this complaint but then I remembered the few times I was given real world advice as a teenager I simply lacked the real world experience to actually comprehend it, and I didn't truly understand the value of money until I lived on my own actually budgeting my own money to my own competing expenses.
For an example, in middle school I remember an assignment where they had us put down what we think various normal expenses cost like rent, water, electricity, and groceries. I don't remember what the point of the assignment was just the teachers laughing about how we had nearly zero idea of what anything actually cost and assigned high amounts to forgettable bills and low amounts to the most painful ones. I think it might have been a budgeting assignment? I honestly don't remember. But what I do remember is as kids who didn't have actual financial obligations we had no clue what anything cost so giving financial advice was kinda meaningless
And what you explain is part of why I think crafting such lessons can be difficult. Part of being young is not really knowing what you might need to know.
-
Also, and I have thought about this, because I take education very seriously, making lesson plans on "how to do your taxes" for 8th graders (when you generally learn about parallelograms) sounds like such a horrible idea.
The kids would be bored out of their eyeballs. I do teach my seniors about things like banking, loans, reserves etc. but many "applied math" topics are boring and difficult to adapt into excellent lessons.
@futurebird a 5th grade teacher in .ca.us starts the first day of school with kids applying for jobs ( cleaning, grade accounting, banking, librarianing, ... ) that pay fake money and charges rent for desks
No job pays enough for rent, so they all have do side jobs like extra movie or book reports to make ends meet
not taxes per se, but accounting and budgeting
Students can save and buy their own desks, then buy other desks. He quickly learned he had to institute rent controls
-
@futurebird a 5th grade teacher in .ca.us starts the first day of school with kids applying for jobs ( cleaning, grade accounting, banking, librarianing, ... ) that pay fake money and charges rent for desks
No job pays enough for rent, so they all have do side jobs like extra movie or book reports to make ends meet
not taxes per se, but accounting and budgeting
Students can save and buy their own desks, then buy other desks. He quickly learned he had to institute rent controls
Listen. The first day of 5th grade is the first day in the "upper school" (technically the middle school) for many kids, and they are in a new building, they don't have a teacher who takes them from one class to the next in a group anymore. They have to go to lunch on their own.
The poor things look shell shocked all week. Like they have been left in the woods. I think they'd die if I told them they had to rent their desk too.
However, it might be amusing for the 6th graders.
-
And since I don't like it when people say "not enough people know X" but then don't explain X.
% is a symbol that means out of 100
2% is 2/100 or 0.02 without the %
You can multiply by a percent, like any other number to find that percent of a number.
"2% of $200 is $4"
(2/100)*200=4 or
0.02*200=4So what is 0.02%? Same math replace 2 with 0.02
(0.02/100)*200=0.04 or
0.0002*200=0.04"0.02% of $200 is $0.04 or 4 cents."
@futurebird @Dss oooh, cool, I do that correctly
I don't have to do percentages that often, but when explaining it to kidling at some point I said y percentage is y/100, so multiply by y, then divide by 100
Dividing by the percentage would multiplying by the inverse? e.g. 200 divided by 2% would be 200 * ( 100 / 2 ), which is 10,000 and gives you the amount that 200 is 2% of?
I just convinced myself mathematically that that is correct, but uncertain of the grammar/logic describing it
-
@futurebird @Dss oooh, cool, I do that correctly
I don't have to do percentages that often, but when explaining it to kidling at some point I said y percentage is y/100, so multiply by y, then divide by 100
Dividing by the percentage would multiplying by the inverse? e.g. 200 divided by 2% would be 200 * ( 100 / 2 ), which is 10,000 and gives you the amount that 200 is 2% of?
I just convinced myself mathematically that that is correct, but uncertain of the grammar/logic describing it
-
@sidereal @futurebird I feel like if you gave kids instructions on how to trisect an angle and they managed to follow those instructions, they would be completely competent to follow their instructions on how to file taxes. It's not that it's difficult, it's that they feel overwhelmed. They need practice to just be whelmed.
@dan613 @futurebird To me, the difference is that if you make a mistake on your math homework, you don't go to jail
-
@dan613 @futurebird To me, the difference is that if you make a mistake on your math homework, you don't go to jail
-
@futurebird a 5th grade teacher in .ca.us starts the first day of school with kids applying for jobs ( cleaning, grade accounting, banking, librarianing, ... ) that pay fake money and charges rent for desks
No job pays enough for rent, so they all have do side jobs like extra movie or book reports to make ends meet
not taxes per se, but accounting and budgeting
Students can save and buy their own desks, then buy other desks. He quickly learned he had to institute rent controls
@lufthans @futurebird am i the only one who thinks this is sick and absolutely disgusting?
-
@lufthans @futurebird am i the only one who thinks this is sick and absolutely disgusting?
