John Oliver took a quick break from his vacation from “Last Week Tonight” to help prepare students for the upcoming school year.
He gave quick lessons on history, biology and chemistry, and told students which characters die at the end of a few books, including “The Great Gatsby” and “Death of a Salesman.” Oliver also urged viewers to learn about former President Warren G. Harding’s salacious love life.
He told kids that beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they won’t need much math in the real world.
“You’re going to be repeatedly told you need this when you grow up. That is bullshit,” he said.
Watch Oliver’s video below:
We have been freaking out about Math and Science since the launch of Sputnik, but the reality is that most of us never use much more than basic algebra in our daily lives and most of the science we learn never applies either. However, being able to compose a decent report, read adequately and know our history is vital to our daily lives.
Sadly, and as a big fan of mathematics, I have to agree with Mr Oliver. Even calculus, which I found very exciting, is pretty much obsolete. We don’t have to integrate graphs symbolically anymore, we just add up millions of data points in a millisecond, and we’re done. The advantage of this new way is that, sadly, calculus was typically an approximation – calculating where a tossed football will land involves air resistance and other things; things easy to figure out iteratively, but damn hard to do with calculus.
I have found that Algegra was useful and even necessary for my particular career which involved negotiating contracts and price analysis. So, even though advanced math is not necessary for most people, I wouldn’t say only adding, subtracting, etc. is necessary.
“Algegra”? Is that mathematics or a country in Africa? Either way, John Oliver says I do not need to know. (Unless it is a misspelling of a word, which he said I do sort of need to know.)
While I’ve never used differential equations or imaginary numbers and such in “real” life, I used the basic arsenal of calculations including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, algebra, geometry, square roots, logarithms, etc. in my work. No, I had no exotic jobs… a business manager, and then the owner of a pet grooming shop, and prior to that some professional use in clinical psychology. And yes, I used spreadsheets heavily and very much appreciated their ability to short cut the actual calculations–but I had to understand what I wanted them to do or they’d have done me very little good. Even figuring out gas mileage for my car, storage room in a truck when moving, analyzing and projecting personal budgets, designing my kitchen or a computer room, use math skills; the more you have (up to a point) the more useful they are. Math is rightly known as the queen of studies.