Nigel is just an entertaining person because he’s always so emotionless while doing crazy stuff in his lab on his normal channel so seeing him just do random stuff and seeing him just react to stuff just entertaining in a weird way
"Nazis are seen as so bad, even if you are one you can't call yourself that." - Nile. The fact this was recorded before Ye's infowar rant is hilarious.
I feel like a lot of these memorize things in school is more about "What can we put into a test" than "what useful things should we teach our children"
Never in my life have I ever needed to weld anything or do ANY of the things I learned in woodworking class. When I talk to other adults, they rarely ever use the kinds of knowledge and skills that I consider to be absolutely essential in my life (both personally and professionally). The problem is that we live in an incredibly complex society where 90-95% of students will never use 95% of the things that are taught in any given class. Teachers have to teach all students, since it's impossible to predict what students will end up doing 15, 10, or even 5 years in the future. Neglecting to teach all of the "irrelevant" and "useless" details to that 5 or 10% of students who will actually end up using that information just massively hinders their ability to actually use that knowledge in the future and progress in their chosen careers. Not only that, but learning all those "irrelevant" and "useless" details also builds different kinds of collateral skills in the process (skills that are needed to learn other subjects, such as how to study, how to prioritize information, how to write or communicate about things, how to delay gratification, how to pay attention to things that you aren't necessarily inherently interested in, how to find ways to relate to different kinds of information and find ways of making it interesting to yourself, etc). Teaching only supposedly "useful" or "practical" skills and information just leads to an incredibly dumb, narrow-minded, and unskilled population that is completely shackled by their ignorance of anything outside of their narrow little world of "useful" information. A population which doesn't have the broad background necessary to be able to transfer knowledge/skills from one domain to a different one or which doesn't have the context to be able to think creatively and adapt to new or changing situations. Nearly every single working professional thinks that their own specialized knowledge and skills are the most important ones, and they question and complain about all the other fields that they had to learn information from.
An eigenvalue is how much its corresponding eigenvector gets scaled after a linear transformation. An eigenvector is a vector that points in the same direction before and after a linear transformation. Ps. Will is totally right that just doing calculations and actually understanding the subject are two totally different things. For the longest time I thought I was a good student because I got good grades until I realized that i was lacking the understanding of the subjects I studied for. That false confidence is the main difference between purely academic people and people who spent time in their industry.
I hate Williams argument that we should take time from teaching history to teach welding or something "useful" for the same reason he gives for who gets to choose what history concepts to teach. Welding is a useful skill for William and could be a fun hobby for others but it for 99.6% of the population it would be useless. (Of the 150 million working adults only 500k are welders). History while not direction 1:1 useful it helps in ways you don't consciously perceive. Learning about the successes and failures of the past help you develop a database of sorts, examples you can look at and compare even subconsciously when making your own choices. That helps everyone. The way we teach history is pretty dumb but the idea of teaching history is solid AF.
"they should stop teaching x because nobody uses it" is just about every every single topic except english, or whatever your native language happens to be. If you don't go into chemistry you don't need to know anything about chemistry. If you don't go into science you don't need to know anything about science. Most people certainly don't need to know welding. The reason why we learn most of the stuff in school is to give us a broad knowledge, a base knowledge of most topics that we can expand upon later. There's always room for improvement but it's beyond unhelpful to say that because YOU don't use something that means it shouldn't be taught.
I didn't get that out of the conversation, what I think they are asking is to have more practical examples as close to the real world as a justification and less rote memorization. learning is an inate skill, and humans (and especially children) are pretty well prepared to exloration. Kindling their curiosity and making learning accessible is the only task that needs to be done, while they describe some annoying, useless, demotivating experience. Teaching is a thing where you can indeed do more harm than good - for example I loved physics, read books and had a lot of fun with rube goldberg style contraptions, played phun (algoodo) and similar games... but then physics classes started, and in half a year all my enthusiasm dissapeared. If instead of annoying class I was left alone with a book - I am absolutely sure I would've got further on my own. The assumption that kids need to be force-fed data decided by committe without any regards to interests and intrinsic motivation - this is what's beyond unhelpful. man, I'm still bitter and I get safety third guys all too well *shrug*
Studying History enables you to understand the world you live in and how it works. It's a major study every intelligent human being should and would have to learn about.
@@kerolokerokerolo i agree, i feel like having a general understanding of world history is important for us to understand the world we live in and the problems we currently have. it's a useful knowledge for sure.
By year 10 in school you should probably have a pretty good Idea of what jobs you would like to work in, so the fact that we’re required to take english all 4 years doesn’t make much sense for the people who want to be anything else other than a writer.
My calc teacher was fucking incredible. She was big on "don't memorize, generate!" The unit circle was a godsend, in relation to "whats a sine wave" I found calculus easier than any other math class I had to take specifically because of her ability to drive home the concept of being able to generate the answer, rather than see the patterns. For the first few weeks we had to do derivatives the looooooooong way where it takes like a full page of dumb math to complete the damn thing. Then we got to look at the patterns and the time spent answering questions when from 10 minutes per question to like two seconds per questions. These were ap classes, I got highest marks possible on the exams. Free college credit, dudes!
Seriously a good calculus teacher makes learning SO much easier like nothing was ever “hand waved” in my class the logic behind every rule was always explained in detail through practical examples it made learning so much easier
I can see where you are coming from when you say that teachers should be people who do practical stuff in the industry, but the most important thing about teaching is being able to communicate well. You can be the smartest engineer who ever engineered that has both practical and theoretical knowledge about every field, but if you aren't able to communicate what you know to those that don't have this knowledge, then you would make for a bad teacher. Now sure, there are a percentage of teachers aren't very good at communication. And maybe the people who make it furthest in an industry might be on average better communicators, but I don't think that having teachers with the most practical knowledge of an industry would fix the education system as a whole.
You're absolutely right, communication is key. And the trickiest part is understanding a concept in a way where you can explain it in 3 different ways to make super everyone gets it. Funny enough one of my didactics teachers said that it's usually about 50% people who love explaining things and 50% people who have the best understanding of a subject. The tricky part is compensating for your weaknesses, that what makes a good teacher. I think the problem is a lot of teachers didn't really struggle with the subject they teach. If you went from struggling student to master, you know what's hard and unnecessary, what needs more explanation, what you had problems with and what you didn't. And any teacher that loves their subject will probably not want to cut things out. Like asking a parent to choose their least favourite child to sacrifice
I teach Mechanical Engineering part time and the kids are starving for anyone with real world experience. Their eyes light up when I tell them about the stuff I have done and have so many questions. I feel so bad that they don't get more of that through school.....But the academic world is so different than industry (tenure professors, slow to change, and bureaucratic) and doesn't pay enough that they will never get a huge influx of experience....
I'd agree with this. I'm someone that learns by doing so hearing people talk about book stuff isn't all that interesting. But if you tell me how you apply that knowledge it helps me understand it. I get excited because I can see how it's applied and utilized. It's empowering. Too much schooling is just memorization. you're supposed to hear something and then remember it. That's not how most people's brains work.
My school's business teacher is a former IBM executive who retired to a mansion about 45 minutes from my school and picked up teaching business at our school as something to do. He's absolutely the best teacher not because he's good at teaching as a profession, but because he's so knowledgable about business that he's inherently good at teaching it.
The irony of this episode where the phrase those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it and the discussion of bitcoin mining without anyone mentioning the original mining gold rush is truely beautiful
William… WW2 is a prime example of something that we would like not to repeat. And there are more people denying it now a days because people aren’t educated enough
Really interesting to listen to this as a current 5th grade classroom teacher and former elementary technology teacher. I think one of the issues is the lack of national or state level support for tech and engineering education all all K-12 levels. Even if a school gets the stuff for a maker space, there isn’t any large scale support so the funding is likely to disappear with the next change of admin or superintendent. This means that teachers don’t want to get too invested. The flip side that Will didn’t really address is that non-teachers tend to lack a lot of the classroom management and lesson skills that are necessary for teaching. I have had guest teachers come in who were amazing at what they did, but their lessons crashed and burned because the didn’t have the background knowledge to know how to introduce things in an age appropriate way. You don’t need a degree to learn it, but it does take a lot of time and practice to become good at it.
If your history teacher is making you memorize things they're a bad teacher. Social studies should be having you understand why things happened and helping you with your critical thinking skills. Coming from someone with a masters in secondary education.
Thinking that memorization, any topic, is learning, means you don't know squat. To really understand a topic, is well beyond simple memorization. Even a rigid topic like math. The grand majority of people only "learn" arithmetic manipulation. To learn it properly is knowing the concepts behind the manipulation.
@@jordanjoe7276 Yes. Most teachers are shit. Just like most of things are shit. But the really great ones teach History as a sociological narrative, not pointless facts that miss the point of studying history.
Canada in WW1 is actually really interesting and they did a lot, they also committed so many war crimes that the Geneva convention was updated because of Canada’s actions
@@cmmartti They tended not to take prisoners, they would allow the Germans to surrender then chuck hand grenades at them, stuff like that, Canadians fought in some of the worst battles as well
Hearing Will talk about history being useless and why don't we teach more math and science is so funny because I always heard the opposite in school. Also history is incredibly important for people to learn because it directly impacts politics and who people vote for. It's more important for the average person to have a good understanding of history than calculus or chemistry honestly.
Honestly, my biggest issue in school is the inherent belief that memorization is the only way to really learn. I switched from math to cs in college, and one of the things I realized about this whole system is that you can't memorize everything. The whole idea of testing is more or less about trying to cram 10 lbs of shit into the 5lb bag that is your brain. That isn't to say that repetition and, in a way, memorization, are bad forms of learning. But the idea that somehow having the book with you during a test is bad more or less smacks at the fact that that's all you do when you're working!! All you do is look up works and texts, double check things you think you knew to make sure they're right. If having the textbook with you somehow defeats the purpose of testing, either the student is brilliant and can simply cross reference and learn from a book incredibly fast, or the tests are just lazy trials if memorization. Any time I pick a programming language back up, the first thing I have to do is remember the basics required for writing a basic file. I mean, think about it. When you took Calc or really any math class, if you just magically got the answer, unless it was multiple choice, you only got a fraction of the points. It was all about showing the work. The book can't teach you how to show the work. But it can help you fix a mistake, or remind you of an obscure identity used for derivation. Its like Nigel said, you have the damn periodic table everywhere in chemistry because most people simply don't have the wherewithal to remember literally everything.
Calculus was the first time I felt like I actually understood math. Everything up to that point was memorizing patterns. Maybe I had good teachers or I’m just weird.
same! everything before calc just felt like memorising and just recognising patterns to solve problems, it was boring and repetetive. calculus was like a blow of fresh air for me
I had the exact same experience. I didn't hate math before Calc, but I definitely fell in love with it after learning Calc. It felt like all these little dots of knowledge I had in my head got connected
So one of my absolute favorite teachers was my auto tech teacher in high-school. He was a super experienced mechanic and he decided he wanted to teach kids his trade and took a massive pay cut to do so. He literally just wanted us to learn automotive stuff. The only things we 'learned' from the book were jammed into a few weeks and he only did it because the school system made him. He wanted us to be hands on, he helped us (those of us who actually had our own cars anyway) build and fix our own cars. like part of the curriculum was to take apart and rebuild an engine, and there were like a dozen or so v6's that were donated to the school system that we would use, BUT if you had a car that you wanted to build, he would help you and teach you how to build your own engine. Obviously you had to pay for the parts yourself, but he literally just wanted to teach younger people how to do mechanics.
STEM people really need to take the humanities more seriously. A history education is important. However the way history is taught at the lower levels is counter productive and unimportant. A good history education is instructive on the consequences of actions and helps a student learn practical critical thinking skills. Learning history isn't about memorizing dates or specific events its about understanding and connecting events. It's about having a basis for understanding why things are the way they are. You can not be adequately informed without a basic knowledge of history.
Also, a lot of the content taught at lower levels is about learning how to research and write a paper. It really doesn't matter what the paper was about.
@@OriamRepus yeah in high school if youre lucky and freshman/sophomore of college . But in grade school it's mostly just memorization which is bad. They should focus more on how events connect together and causes and effects. Its more useful and the bonus is that's also easier to retain.
@@TheEnoEtile where I live it's always just memorization. throughout the entirety of primary school, middle school and high school it's just memorizing dates names that don't seem to connect to anything. it's a mess and I was always terrible at it.
As someone with an advanced degree in math, I think the issue is that the "machinery" that underlies everything has to be extremely general in order to make the "system" flexible, however, that generality leads to an extreme degree of abstraction which many people have no interest or capacity to dig through. Sure I understand calculus (mostly measure theoretic applications), but realistically how many people need to understand it for their own use? Virtually nobody. It's pretty easy to say in plain language what a real number is, not too much harder to say what a complex number is if someone has taken high school algebra. But starting from ZFC axioms and logic, then building set theory up to being able to define what a 'number' is, then defining natural numbers, then integers, then rationals, then the reals (good luck if you try to define it as a completion under a metric rather than through Dedekind cuts), and finally the complex numbers? And this is just the 'analysis' point of view, there are entirely different approaches through abstract algebra to arrive in the same place. To 'use' complex numbers requires only a couple handy identities ('rules of thumb'), but to *understand* them to the level of being able to research with them requires a staggering amount of background. So if you don't already know about the uses of complex numbers, why go through this tremendous trouble? But if you don't know what a complex number is, how can you understand their uses? What about different axiomatic systems? Things get out of hand quickly. Similar story with linear algebra. If you don't already know about fields, how can you understand a vector space? But the problem is, if you don't know about vector spaces, how do you motivate the idea of a field? Everything has to start somewhere; I don't think high schools are going to be teaching formal logic and group theory anytime soon. I don't know what the solution is. Seeing the beauty of math is much more nuanced than the beauty of the physical sciences so it's easy to brush it aside as just a tool which most do.
They should still teach some of the history and where the formulas come from. For example, the unit circle was only taught to us *years* after trig was first introduced. Knowing the unit circle made solving trig problems *way* easier, no need to memorise the SOHCAHTOA bullcrap. Same thing with the kinematic equations. No idea why they work. Just pure memorisation and plugging in the numbers. But once we learnt a bit of calculus, you don't even need to use the equations. Seeing the beauty in mathematics isn't too difficult. I saw it immediately once I took maths classes at uni. Maths before uni was just teaching students how to do boring calculations and formulas, I don't think it even should be called maths class. Maths at uni showed us the proofs, and we even got come up with proofs ourselves which was super fun.
Ahhhhh, I thought y'all were just science guys who reluctantly used math when needed, so finding out Nigel liked math and took up to Calc 3 was a real treat (as a viewer who likes math)
One of the coolest things about my little private school was that in Junior and Senior year was for one class we had a choice of courses that teachers decided they wanted to teach that year. Teachers teach better when they're passionate about it, and I felt like I learned more in those classes than any other.
I've always been a firm believer that you don't understand something untell you can teach it. I thought I knew some content pretty well and then I became a TA, and it is incredible how good a class of confused students is at finding the gaps in my knowledge. It really forces you as the teacher to move away from having knowledge and towards problem solving and figuring things out. And my favorite statagy to use when teaching is to just explain my thought process in figuring things out, like showing why it makes sense to do some weird seemingly out of place step. I've noticed that it is exactly the way many technical youtube videos are structured (like 3blue1brown videos).
In my college calculus classes are all co-requisite with classes that study the practical uses of the calculus concepts. It really helps with understanding how the calculus is useful to us in computer engineering or physics.
Currently getting an education in game programming, and I'm so happy all my teachers are people who are actually in the industry. But it sure sucks that none of them have any skill in public speaking or teaching.
It's a hard trade off, those kinds of teachers are useful for connections but even that well dries when they prioritize teaching (which isn't bad because then they get better with teaching). I learned from plenty of musicians within the field and nothing beats having as many perspectives as possible
My one maths teacher in high school was actually a retired mechanical engineer with a Master's degree, who had a passion for teaching. He also taught physics and related science subjects for a while. He also taught my older brother maths, and helped him go from failing maths to doing very well.
This was the reason my secondary school (uk) engineering class was so good. 1. we had a workshop with multiple lathes, a milling machine, welders, forge, a cnc lazer cutter as well as a woodworking room and electronics room, and 2. our teacher had many years of experience working his way up a well known engineering firm from practically making the parts to designing solutions and management involving all the health and safety and risk stuff, as well as owning a farm, the only reason he went into teaching was because he was starting to have medical problems meaning he couldnt be quite as active as he used to be and it was something he enjoyed allowing him to provide opportunities to students that he wished he had had. We also had a construction class which my friend took. Looking back i was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunities i did in my school especially in comparison to other schools in the area, there was always a massive focus on the practical side of things, a massive reason i stopped on at their sixthform for my A-levels, even better is that the school lets me use their workshop for personal projects as long as I let them know before hand that i wish to use the equiptment. I wish other schools could offer the simular opportunities for practical subjects to that i had and it just shows how different 2 schools can be even if theyre both government run / non paid.
Good educators are few and far between. I'm in my junior year of undergrad and am finishing up Organic Chemistry 2 this semester. My lab professor is new this semester and he worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 40 years and has had many breakthroughs over his career. If every professor was as good of a teacher as he is, school would be much more enjoyable and worthwhile.
When it comes to family vacations, I think a lot of people can relate to Kevin, specially if you have a dysfunctional family (like me). While if you have a happy (or "normal") family like Nigel, you can enjoy your family vacations. Or maybe I'm just assuming.
History has been the most important and most actively used in my everyday life. Being able to identify and predict human behaviors based off of previous happenstance is the most useful application of historical knowledge. Having the macro and micro knowledge allows one to comprehend a wide spectrum of what is currently happening in the world. For instance: why we have the 24hr News cycle? Iran hostage crisis... Well why did that happen? Because Pro-American Iran college students got pissed at America when we didn't denounce Iran's leaders. Why didn't America support Pro American college students? Oil Crisis... It seems to go on and on, oh my God it's important. Imagine how much influence the 24-hour news cycle has had, now you know why.
I agree with almost everything you're saying about school makerspaces and education, at least in public schools. I work in the makerspace at an independent school, though, and the amount of money, time, and effort that goes into helping students become capable makers is significant. Even the fact that I'm here, with no college degree but years of experience making stuff at home, speaks to the focus on life skills more than just grades.
1:07:38 I feel called out lol, I was just about to write this whole long comment about how, now I haven't taken an engineering class, but from what friends have told me, the engineering major is structured just as you describe, at least that's how I reconcile with the fact that past maybe Calc 2,that's not how any of my classes worked. The biggest example you brought up is matrices. The reason linear algebra is such a calculation kind of course is because it's the foundation of everything else you need matrices for, so you're gonna need a lot of practice working eith them. A good linear course will also talk about theory a good bit,but I suspect that's not what you meN when you say 'tell me how to use it' and additionally, you don't remember whT an eigenvalues is because you haven't needed to use it since you took the course, and if they're not useful to you, sure you can forget about them. If you need to remember again you can use an old textbook or the internet. I can tell you first hand that as a physics student in quantum, there's no way I could forget what an eigenvalues is, it has been seared onto my Grey matter
one of my favorite things about my old school (i transferred to a stem academy) was our engineering teacher. we had an entire career and technical wing (welding, auto, electrical, pre nursing, biomedical sciences, ag, early childhood ed, engineering,, compsci), but i adored those specific classes. my teacher is a retired engineer, and while he has the general gen x tech issues, he’s an awesome teacher.
Its insane listing to Will reading the eigen vector and eigan value wiki and understanding it and hearing him read it thinking "yep thats what they are" and then right as he finishes he says that it didn't explain what it is.
I was in the middle of yelling at my screen when Will said “there’s someone very mad at this conversation right now”. I will say history in school is absolutely horrible and needlessly repetitive, but Will’s take just kept getting worse the more he tried to fix it. If you do read this Will, imagine how someone who doesn’t work in a stem field feels about all of the stem classes they had to take. Them thinking that they have no use for all of the knowledge that was drilled into them does not mean that teaching stem is useless. Also this is not hate, just me inserting myself into the conversation.
Exactly. I used to think like Will, but now I see the value of basic knowledge not related to my field, the thing is though, school should be interesting for kids ( probably can't make kids love school, need to learn some seemingly boring stuff, but it should still be a compromise ). TH-cam is good like that, you can learn random stuff when you are in the mood, or need the thing - Black pen Red pen is the only reason I managed to finish my math classes
I lived in Canada for a little while as a kid and the only thing I remember was learning about this guy Terry Fox who ran across Canada to raise awareness for cancer, I’m not sure if he was a big deal all over Canada or just where I used to live, but I thought he was a household name there or maybe it was cause I only saw a small glimpse of Canadian life.
Its interesting hearing them talk about calc 1,2,3. As someone taking calc 2 rn, but in europe the system for teaching it seems wildly different. We start with why we learn certain calculus principles and then we have to solve problems with it. taking imaginary numbers for instance kinda makes senses if you view as a vertical line of numbers orthogonal to real numbers. It doesn't fully makes sense but you can see the logic and reasoning behind it. Sure you won't need all the math in your profesional career (speaking from experience), but it really helps gaining insight in to what a numerical solver or matlab does behind the scenes.
I would say calculus is the first math course where you have a chance to really understand it since like...algebra? Adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division are all discrete enough to be fairly intuitive. As is some of geometry. But a ton of algebra II, geometry, and trigonometry is just three years of prepping for calculus. But once you finally get to derivatives, and learn about it in terms of physics, mostly time, velocity, and acceleration, it oddly begins to have some sort of inuitiveness again, at least for me. That being said though, a lot of math that was developed once the concept of negative numbers was beginning to be accepted as important and real, as with things like complex numbers, math really is a way to logically extract things from the real world, and less about "understanding" it. Just like quantum entanglement was considered "spooky action at a distance", once you realize all of the unsolved and possibly unsolvable problems in math, even ones where some answers seem trivial on the surface, you realize math is kind of spooky too. I think, despite always enjoying math, once I went to college, I realized there's a certain level of mystery to it, more than really anything else.
Also sine and cosine, we represent them as squiggly lines, but don't they essentially just represent rotations of a circle? Hence all the pi stuff involved.
There's a classic trope about a husband and wife where the wife only talks to her husband about jewelry and expensive things so the husband, a successful businessman, spends all day starting new projects at work so that he can earn enough money to buy his wife more fancy things. The husband doesn't really enjoy his job anymore - he'd much rather spend time with his wife - but he slogs through it to satisfy her lavish tastes. The twist is, while the wife doesn't mind having nice things, she'd much rather have more time with her husband! Your history teacher probably didn't want you to memorize the name of every president. That may be what you *thought* they wanted because that's what they spent so much time talking about. But what they really wanted (maybe) was exactly what you wanted: to put your knowledge of history to *use*. Unfortunately, there's a circular element to it. Students often fixate on memorizing facts because it's easier than thinking deeply about them; they don't want to think deeply about it because they hate school and want to spend as little effort on it as possible; and they hate school because they think it's all about boring facts that don't mean anything.
Not me 6:45 My sister changed a painting on the other side of our dining room, and I noticed instantly. It used to be a side profile of a woman, but she changed it to a girl looking straight, dead forward. The eyes... it was the eyes... 😖😖
STEM people not understanding why we need history is a great argument for why we need more history, not less. 70% of jobs is just answering emails on a laptop, I don't think welding is gonna help with that Also Wills idea that people with even less training in teaching are a good idea clashed pretty hard with everyone that actually has to do with education.
You guys hit the nail on the head on teaching concepts vs applied. I use trig, algebra, linear algebra, and other matrix transformations daily at work and in my free time course I'm over here writing shader code for real time graphics. rotation matricies into normal vectors to derive the dot product from the point in space to know if the pixel is being lit by the lights in real time. but heck, its all abstract math, just code, you give me a piece of paper and tell me to decompose a matrix, I have no clue
1:01:32 at fullsail they gave us a crashcourse on calculus and linear algebra for the sole purpose of being able to write a physics engine. it was great getting taught that stuff purely with the lens of a "real world application". my crappy game projects before were always running too fast or too slow depending on framerate. being taught "delta-time" was a magical epiphany moment for me because it makes the game run the same regardless of FPS. velocity+=acceleration*dt; position+=velocity*dt; or velocity=(position1-position0)/dt; all make perfect sense and i guess those are integrations and derivations after all 🤓 geometry and trigonometry are awesome for anything 2d/3d graphics or physics. i never gave sine/cosine a chance until one time in quickbasic i was trying to figure out an X,Y coordinate given an angle and distance. when i found the answer online, i realized it was the "converting between rectangular and polar coordinates" sine/cosine junk which i was taught in school and i guess it just never "clicked" at the time how it could ever be useful for anything. same deal with pythagorean's theorum: some "useless" triangle garbage until i realized its literally how you calculate the distance between two points. imo school is unnecessarily hard and cryptic because its all taught within some broad conceptual lens rather than an applied one. the "applied" scenarios that textbooks give, like "sally has 50 watermelons and joe bought half, how many does jim have", never worked for me because i didnt give two shits how many watermelons anyone has. to this day though, math whose "solution" is just another formula has never made sense to me. i feel like it has to result in actual value(s) for it to ever have a real world application.
I know this episode was posted a month ago, but I have to chime in. I'm a former high school teacher, located in Washington state. Over here, there is a large push for CTE education (career and technical education). These are middle/high school elective classes that are typical taught by people who were previously working in industry. For example, I don't have a teaching degree, but because of my professional/educational background, I taught a Communications class. However, you can also choose to "specialize" in CTE if your trying to become teacher right out of the gate, but it creates two really different types of education for the students. Half of CTE is taught be industry professionals and the other half is taught be teachers who studied it in school. So for example, you could have two different cooking classes, but one is taught by a former chef/restaurant owner and the other is taught by a teacher who studied to teach a cooking class...not necessarily a bad thing, but really different for the students. CTE education has other things like cooking, shop, ag, auto, etc. It kind of just depends on the needs of the school/ how much funding they get. Thankfully, here in WA, educational legislation is really pushing for these programs. Idk if they have this same thing in California, Florida, or Montreal, but I'd be willing to bet there is something similar. The hardest part about teaching without having student taught/gone to school for it, is learning the craft of teaching itself and learning how to plan curriculum for the first time. I've since left teaching but have been working on my curriculum for the day I go back. Since having to write curriculum for the first time, I now write down processes for everything I do. Also, becoming an 'Instructional designer' is a big thing right now for teachers looking to leave teaching. It's essentially learning how to build online courses and be a consultant/freelancer, which you all are already doing. It would be super cool if anyone on safety third ever decided to make a class ( or some sort of online course )for K-12. Getting to build a class, while not under the constraints/stresses of teaching day-to-day would be such a game changer for so many teachers. Additionally, pulling people from industry isn't typical (or often allowed if they don't already have a teaching certificate) in K-12 education, but it'd be amazing to see how different the core subjects could be taught if that was the case. Great episode! Sorry for such a long tangent.
History lessons are rather appreciated in my country (France). I also find it funny that I had answers about the history of Canada or the United States that you did not have during the conversation even though I am French
I guess history lessons in France have to be very interesting because of the 1000 year rivalry with the UK (lots of wars and history to learn from that), because you invaded most of Europe at one point, and because you've always been more or less the center (culturally or politically) of this continent. 🤣 You won't have to repeat just one war "over and over" again in class, when you have hundreds to choose from.
@@JordiVanderwaal or just teach history of other countries and the world. I dont understand what your country gains by merely teaching history of your own country in minute detail. Knowing barebones of early human history, the emergence of civilization and then regional history and important events around the world is the most important thing. You dont need to know multiple generals of the us civil war. Just skim over long times of global history and make little mini detailed lections about the important times.
@@lenoio512 yeah but in most places they teach us history from our country and the countries surrounding us (or the entire continent), with few exceptions like the world wars for example. I guess it's easier to learn or care about something when it "affects" you (even if it doesn't because it happened in the past), and also an extensive global history would be too hard to teach and assuming most people won't move to a different continent, it would be "useless" as well (from their point of view on teaching you about stuff they think it's gonna be useful in life).
As a Maine Native(on multiple levels, I'm Penobscot), hearing Nigel say All-dressed and ketchup chips are Canadian reminds me most of the rest of America already thinks we're a part of Canada...
My field isn't even the humanities (currently a Physics undergrad), but I am also quite irritated. Elementary / High school history education is terrible. Because it's designed that way by the powers that be. But just because the pedagogy is horrible, doesn't mean history is worthless. There are a lot of horrors in history (especially for former colonies by Western powers, whose skin colors aren't white). That's why "real" history isn't taught to the vast majority of the populace, to "protect" a nation's "image" per se. Which for me is a form of brainwashing / erasing history. Erasing one's mistakes and never learning for them. "Who are you who do not know your history?" Most problems today are traceable back to history. Be it psychological, economical, technological, sociological, political (local and geopolitics) or even ideological. Even Science, without acknowledging its history, one will never fully appreciate how far we have discovered and invented. I am personally uncomfortable learning a new mathematical tool whose origins I don't fully understand myself. I have realized, even as a young student, that the education system (at least in my own country) is absolutely shitty. But that doesn't mean the topics that were poorly taught are no longer important. I studied them on my own time, for the sake of my own curiosity (and also for seeking explanations as to why we are what we are today). That's why I am irritated the most. Because it's almost as if they have never tried to peer deeply to the problem, and just said "School Sucks" period, end of the story. Well, at least Nigel's implicit stance is the pedagogy is wrong, but not the topic (History) itself.
@@__rikaisuru I mean, it makes sense that they would see it that way. History itself is valuable, but like you said, schools typically do a bad job of teaching it until you hit college. You can't really blame them for equating that with history itself being bad, when that's the only experience they've had with it; we can only make judgements based on our personal experiences and what we've heard from others. Sure, if you happen to be curious about history, you can delve into it and learn a lot more about why present issues exist, and talk/vote on them in a more informed manner--but not everyone is going to be curious about everything, and that's OK. Ultimately it falls on educators and history buffs to make history more approachable to laypeople, and not the other way around.
@@cn8229 @cn8229 my only counter point is thus: “Why are you not curious about the past-about how you and everything else came to be? Who are you, who do not know your history?” This isn’t just about simple curiousity, though I did phrase it that way. Or, rather, that history is intimately tied to society, technology, ideologies, conflict, governance, politics, capitalism, and every other aspect of our lives in micro- and macro-scales. If you wish to be informed, or at least to be aware, of why things are the way they are, you are naturally bound to go back to historical progress. I agree that the pedagogy of History is horrifically wrong. But it’s not the fault of the “history buffs” nor is it the burden of educators to bear. Who runs / supervises Education? The government, in most countries. Henceforth, the problem is political, societal, and cultural. There are great history information out there. Usually. But, it is still dependent on people actually care about history. I am not against apathy or disinterest / lack of curiosity. However, I will do get irritated if one makes opinions without any knowledge of history-especially regarding current events that are _inherently_ tied to historical events. Such as the current war right now on Europe.
@@__rikaisuru I pretty much agree with you. But I do want to clarify a few things I said. When I said it's the burden of people who care about history to make it more approachable, I don't mean to assign blame or to imply that they're somehow divinely obligated to do so. I meant that making history more approachable is necessary to get everyone to learn about it, and "educators and history buffs" are the only people in a position to do that. Politicians certainly aren't going to help; they have a vested interest in lying to children, so that's exactly what most of them are going to do. On that note, people are going to have opinions about current events. It's impossible not to, when it's crammed in our faces every day. And it's impossible to be fully informed about everything, or even most things. At the end of the day, people make judgements based on what they know. I don't think it's fair to blame people who don't have informed opinions about current events when education is so politicized. In my opinion, the blame should rest entirely on the authorities that decide what history can and can't be taught. And finally, to address what you said initially, I'm really not too curious about where I came from. I'd rather learn about the history of the world as an outsider than as a participant--way too much general nastiness that I had no say in. Honestly, my favorite part of history is seeing the general trend of things improving over the last thousand years or so, because it gives me hope for the future.
The education rabbit hole goes down so fucking deep it's actually insane. In today's world there is 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt bigger than Canada's entire GDP. 3x what it was in 2006 the world. Greedy colleges and policy makers are milking every cent from young people. It's is a fucking tragedy.
I used to work in an 'institution' that served a 'just add sugar and water' lemonade mix. It was disgusting. Fluorescent yellow and tasted like citric acid with a fake lemon scent. I'm absolutely convinced it was also sold as a cleaner. It was packaged in the same type of jug as janitorial supplies
For a long time in the state I live in, fireworks were pretty heavily controlled. That changed about 5 years ago, and now we have fireworks stores all over the place. But before then, the only way to get anything bigger than sparklers and poppers was to go out of state. Thankfully for my brother and me (and all of our friends), our annual family road trip always went through a neighboring state that had ZERO fireworks restrictions. And you can bet your sweet bippy we spent ALL of our lawn-mowing money buying the strongest stuff we could get our hands on.
25:37 Ironic, cause history IS repeating itself and the funny part is that people did not learn jack shit from it. People took the lesson that X=Bad, not understanding that extremism=bad. So they just become extremists in their ideologies, making history repeat itself, while sitting on an ivory throne of privilege, pretending they are on some "objectively good" side. I love all of you guys, but I do really hope you one day realize that supporting extremist ideologies will lead to human suffering. No matter how good the core principles of the ideology are. Anyone who thinks they are in a war of good vs evil, will always end up creating suffering. That applies to any political and social stances that are executed by people convinced that their fellow human is the enemy, and their own views are objectively the correct ones. In order to not repeat history, we need to stay humble, and listen to the people we don't agree with. In compromise we find humanity and community.
I think your values might be a bit off. Suffering = bad. While extremism can and often does lead to violence, it's important to understand why more radicalized people are in the position where they feel ready to carry out violence. Often, it is the status quo of one group that ends up creating suffering on an unimaginable scale. ie Indian removal act, slavery, European colonialism etc. When I think of extremism, my mind immediately goes to today's issues, but when thinking historically, we have to understand that often violent extremism is in response to banal, often systematic, oppression. On the idea that seeing someone as an enemy creates suffering too, this is an oversimplification. Would you not say that Oliver Cromwell, or any number of British up and ups, were the enemy of Irish people? Or those profiting off of slavery are the enemy of the enslaved? I'm not endorsing violence against all political enemies, infact I think movements such as the civil rights movement and the work of Gandhi are proof that nonviolence can be used despite violence from opposition. With that being said, in a famous letter from MLK, he stated that it is moderates who were in the way of equality. A man despised in his time as an extremist turned out to be fighting for a righteous cause, interesting
3blue1brown has a great series of videos on this (eigenvectors and eigenvalues). If you represent the transformation as a matrix (M), M * v maps a vector v from its old value to its new value. This new position could be anywhere and depends on M. The neat thing about eigenvectors is that the direction of the vector after applying the transformation remains unchanged, so the new value is just a scale factor off from the old value. This scale factor is the corresponding eigenvalue.
Former history major here. While I switched my major to a science from history, I still believe teaching kids history is important, primarily because it is beneficial to be politically knowledgable and having an extensive knowledge of history is key to being so. To address William's comment, of "What power do i have to do what hitler did," while, no you may never be Hitler, it was people like myself and anyone reading this who brought Hitler to power. The saying "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," is significantly deeper than most percieve.
I think the reason none of us remember history from primary school is that it's taught in the most miserable, boring, tedious way imaginable. Lately I've been watching a lot of Extra History videos over on the Extra Credits channel and it's goddamn _delightful_ and I wish _that's_ how we'd been taught. History isn't just about warnings of past wrongs, it's also about celebrations of past victories, and it _is_ valuable to see what we've overcome and how... it's just easily the most boring subject in school because it's taught primarily as just rote memorization. ...At least that's how _I_ was taught.
My highschool was clearly different from yours. While they weren't wildly promoted my school had many classes that taught real world skills. I learned how to household electrical work, DC wiring, the classic woodshop stuff like chairs and end tables, we built 4 sheds in a trimester, and installed them. There were classes that I didn't get to where you would build and race small electric cars and they converted a motorcycle to electric (this was in the early 2010s) We also had a "Tech Center" nearby that was a school you could go to for a few hours and learn a trade. Anything from robotics, medical, car repair, anything IT related, graphic design, and so much more. I even got to take a moderate level C# college class for free there where I got try out Microsoft's Hololens when it was released. I knew I went to the "rich" school for a rural school in the Midwest but damn school should at least teach you how to be an adult a little bit
Learning history in a US high school would have stressed me a lot tbh. Because in my country we were taught *mostly* local, regional and European history, but every year we learned about different periods, starting with 500bc or so. So we never really repeated stuff "over and over", but because we had so much to go through, there was some stuff we were forced to gloss over every year. T-T
In my school in America I only got US history twice between year 6 and 12 and then we had different regional history. I think these dudes just had terrible schools.
australia is fun because we just don't have enough history to fill more than 2 units. you got aboriginal history and the frontier wars, the gold rush, federation and then world war one (where we spent like 5 lessons learning about conscription laws). my schools history was so luckluster outside that because half of the year instead of history we had geography which was two terms spent learning about aquifers. like we learnt about the spanish conquest of mexico, just mexico and just the conquest. and then like a bit on ancient egyptian society. i knew nothing about anything coming out of that and had to learn basic stuff completely on my own, stuff like "poland was invaded by germany at the start of ww2"
@@JordiVanderwaal australia is pretty disconnected from south east asia. while technically close, in practice there's a massive desert and an ocean sitting between them and where 99% of the population live. there is some entanglement between us, there's a not insignificant Vietnamese, chinese, indian and indonesian diaspora here. we owned papua new guinea for a while, enough where a few of my aunts and uncles were born there because my grandparents lived there. in ww2 the pacific theater had some action by australians like with the kokoda trail in new guinea, i personally don't know anything about it but most australians do. we were also in the vietnam war along side america. oh and the island of bali in indonesia constantly has australian tourists going there for beaches and stuff. thats it, thats all the involment australia has with south east asia. new zealand is given more cultural awareness because they speak english and we have an intertwined history. but we watch american media and follow american news. we're in the eurovision contest despite being on the otherside of the world. 90% of the population is white. if you got the right guy doing the talking you could probably convince the eu to let us join. so us not learning about the history of south east asia in school isn't all that surprising, given that we barely learned about european history.
@@duskpede5146 I guess it's more of a cultural and geographical disconnect, that prevents you guys from forming bonds with most of your neighbours, strong enough to care (=learn) about their history, maybe. But on Europe we suffer from this as well, maybe to a lesser extent. We don't talk much about the ancient/old history of Oceania, America and even Sub-Saharan Africa, unless when they gave us important dates (first settlers, first remains found, waves of migration to/from those regions thousands of years ago), which is something, but not much. And when it comes to Asia we always talk about the big Empires of the past, but those lessons still focused on the Mediterranean way more. Modern and Contemporary Ages were the messiest ones, where they taught us more about every continent, specially the wars. Btw pls join the EU and stay in Eurovision forever.
i is actually a lot of fun in my opinion. if you're doing something like CAD in three dimensions, the math for adding the third dimension can get tricky because the values for different axes are interchangeable. when you're working with curves that relate to other properties in multiple dimensions like with electromagnetic waves it's very important. the specific properties of a number that is the square root of a negative are really unique and fit a lot of puzzle piece gaps in various places in math
The thing is, I loved learning about the orbitals in chemistry, because it finally explained (somewhat) why chemistry works. Before that it was just magic: we mix these 2 chemicals and something happens, but these other identical looking chemicals do nothing. So part of a broad education is to expose different people to different parts of the knowledge, so they can find something they like and something that works for them.
@@roneyandrade6287 I think its a case of "I don't use it in my everyday life, so what's the use?". In the end it must have something to do with how different people learn and how they want to go about things
@@vke6077 Honestly that is the majority of people. Like why bother learning something if you are not going to use it every day of your life? Hell my 7th grade math teacher always got mad when someone said "I am not going to use it outside of school so why bother if it is not going to be practical to me?" and people usually say that after being caught falling asleep as math is fucking boring unless they show you practical applications for everyday life to go along with it. Most of the stupid questions for the equations is something no one would ever think of, but practical applications that someone would use a lot in their life is what would make students want to care about the theory a little more or not and then just be like me knows no theory as who gives a fuck and knows only enough to not kill themselves when working on extracting the precious metals that they would then melt down and sell em, you know a practical application Money. Before you ask gold is not worth rummaging around in old salvage er i mean electronics as copper is king as around $3.50 per pound of copper and copper is abundant in electronics especially power supplies that don't work anymore such as ones for a N64 as a example
@@JohnnyYeTaecanUktena I see your point, and I agree that should be the focus at least in middle school. In high school maths they should have some kind of rigour since you're the one that chose to do it, same for chemistry. In chemistry its especially important to have a sense of theory because it allows you to extrapolate your knowledge.
@@vke6077 i have no idea what extrapolate means as i don't even know how it sounds so ima just assume it is something to do with charts and graphs so statistics and not many normal Americans actually care about statistics even if they opted to take those classes as most of thwe time they thought they were going to do interesting things not pointless maths. Also i don't know what a rigour is as i am a American and when i look that up it just says "an episode of shaking or exaggerated shivering which can occur with a high fever." I would actually be more receipted to maths of any kind if middle school did not try to fucking force it down our throats in every fucking class not just maths class, as my god what does art class have anything to do with maths? No one literally no one thinks of maths and angles when they are doing art they just do it for so long they learn how to draw not mathematically make perfect angels for good drawings like fuck that shit who cares. Good luck to those of us that was actually sick for most of the school year so they just send you home as you were court ordered to attend anyways and now the nurse is pissed off that you keep going to school sick with the flu or something else as flu shots don't stop you from getting the flu in fact they always gave me the flu either way i had to do make up shit with current shit so i just got so aggravated once i refused to do any work at school once The teachers complained to my parents once and my Parents said "When he is at school he is your problem, more so since you never held him back when he needed it so now you are just bombarding him with so much shit he just refuse to do anymore and Johnny does what Johnny wants to do" My mom even once said "Johnny has flat out told a teacher before that he is choosing to do schoolwork not that he is being made to do the work and he only does homework he finds interesting"
Eigenvalues/vectors are the decomposition of a complex system in a very simple form. Given a system which applies a very complex operation, you can replace it with a decomposition in eigenvectors, multiply them by the eigenvalues, and compose again. Fourier is a good example: a filter can be computed as separating a signal in all frequencies (eigenvectors), then multiplying by the eigenvalues and ensamble all again.
1:01:44 I disagree with them on this; I do feel like some people (~30% maybe?) in cal 1-3 are understanding the "intuitiveness" of what is happening when they do the math. It wasn't until the end of cal 3 (for me personally) that it started getting hard to understand. The business cal/cal1/physics cal seems to go well for most people since it's all about the relationship between functions and derivatives (like position, velocity, acceleration).
listening to this made me appreciate swedens education system way more. here we choose a field to study during high school, for example i chose the “nature” (stem) programme where we have like chem and physics but also history and religion and those. and we have sooo many like close to 20 different ones i believe with multiple ones in the same school. my school has like stem and technology and the builders and the economy people like we got it alllll, they even got art and dance and stuff. and u guys have mentioned before that u never had proper handicraft lessons (i think thats the name…), which is INSANE to me because we have had those since 3rd grade!!!!! every single child in sweden has sewing (it’s more than just that but whatever) and woodwork (and a bit of metal) classes from 3rd - 9th grade. and i always had teachers who knew exactly what they were doing and they were very passionate. the subjects i lacked good teachers in were the actual important ones that i needed to know before high school (like physics 😞) but whatever. the school system here is so clever i believe and soooo many people complain but omg pls. it works so well like. we have so so so many options and u can even switch programme if u aren’t happy. u can add SO many courses like??? i go stem but am also an artist and love languages so i just added art and higher spanish courses. we also have free school lunch and have had since kindergarten! it’s even free in high school even though high school here isn’t obligatory. i honestly love the system here and i hope u people get a better one 😔😔 btw our practical chem lessons are always introduced or briefly explained before we even do them. we usually do like calculations and stuff about the practical, before the practical. annndddddd everyone has to pay attention to these lessons bc there’s always questions abt them on the exams!! overall i think everything seems nicely thought out also!!!!! you guys just memorize stuff for history ?!?$??!!??$ poor students
your problem when talking about learning history and science is that you don't have in mind the fact that those are the assignments where you learn critical thinking for the most part
The fireworks talk was fun. In my part of Florida people love em, actually last week someone drove an SUV into a fireworks store about half an hour away from me and the whole damn building blew up
So I say this as someone who just finished their masters in physics, regarding imaginary numbers, they are "real" even though they're not "Real" numbers. (And frankly calling them imaginary has not helped with this). Basically, all maths is like, derived from definitions. And under the basic definitions of maths, the square root of -1 didn't have a definition, because no "Real" numbers could be the answer. So we defined it as i. But it does show up in plenty of real phenomena, especially regarding waves. The schrodinger equation uses it too. But in order to get a "real" probability, you effectively square the final result (I am simplifying here). And so, like, yeah, it no longer has an i in it, but i^2 is still part of the answer. So i exists in the same way any number "exists". They're all just constructed from rules and definitions really.
All this talk about the lack of experience among educators reminds me how thankful I was for how my Computer Science professors went out of their way to work in industry during the summer break. Made their insight seem so much more relevant than otherwise.
Teddy Roosevelt was the trust buster man he taught us how to fight the corporate man and the need to ensure corporations don't end up with cartels collusion and monopoly
In high school, we had a comp/sci and physics teacher who actually knew his shit; he was an Ivy League graduate with decades of experience, and he still did comp/sci challenges in his free time. Thing was that he was _so_ qualified that he couldn’t really empathize with people who had less prior knowledge about a subject, so he failed to explain things well let alone answer the followup questions to his explanations. His comp/sci class started out full with some students unable to get in. By the end, everyone except for me and one other kid had dropped it.
That happens to me all the time. I usually don't get notifications for at least half a day after a video posts even for channels I am subscribed to with notifications turned on but if i am online when videos launch they usually show up in my recommended feed .
Nigel's got it right about the "TH-cam Guru" thing. Requiring the TH-cam Guru to have their own successful channel before listening is like a "Healer, heal thyself!" argument. It's entirely possible to be able to diagnose common problems on someone else's channel and be unable to diagnose them on your own, simply because you're too close to the problem. Paddy Galloway, for instance, is mostly a TH-cam Guru guy; all of his videos are about what other TH-camrs are doing right. But he makes way more money consulting with TH-camrs than he does making videos, so that's where he spends the overwhelming majority of his time. Colin and Samir are another example; all they do is interview other TH-camrs about what that TH-camr knows about being a success on TH-cam; their potential market of viewers is tiny, so of course they'll never be huge massive successes on TH-cam. The only one who's going to watch them is other TH-camrs.
Kevin saying "My mom doesn't like you because you talk over me too much" while Will was talking over him was just perfect
Nigel is amazing. Pure lawful neutral. So dry, so funny.
Which is hilarious, given that his personal history is 100% chaotic neutral.
Nigel is also my favorite.
Nigel is just an entertaining person because he’s always so emotionless while doing crazy stuff in his lab on his normal channel so seeing him just do random stuff and seeing him just react to stuff just entertaining in a weird way
Oh yes
"Nazis are seen as so bad, even if you are one you can't call yourself that." - Nile.
The fact this was recorded before Ye's infowar rant is hilarious.
I feel like a lot of these memorize things in school is more about "What can we put into a test" than "what useful things should we teach our children"
That's exactly what it is. Schools aren't about educating children, they're about getting children to pass standardized tests.
Never in my life have I ever needed to weld anything or do ANY of the things I learned in woodworking class. When I talk to other adults, they rarely ever use the kinds of knowledge and skills that I consider to be absolutely essential in my life (both personally and professionally).
The problem is that we live in an incredibly complex society where 90-95% of students will never use 95% of the things that are taught in any given class. Teachers have to teach all students, since it's impossible to predict what students will end up doing 15, 10, or even 5 years in the future. Neglecting to teach all of the "irrelevant" and "useless" details to that 5 or 10% of students who will actually end up using that information just massively hinders their ability to actually use that knowledge in the future and progress in their chosen careers.
Not only that, but learning all those "irrelevant" and "useless" details also builds different kinds of collateral skills in the process (skills that are needed to learn other subjects, such as how to study, how to prioritize information, how to write or communicate about things, how to delay gratification, how to pay attention to things that you aren't necessarily inherently interested in, how to find ways to relate to different kinds of information and find ways of making it interesting to yourself, etc). Teaching only supposedly "useful" or "practical" skills and information just leads to an incredibly dumb, narrow-minded, and unskilled population that is completely shackled by their ignorance of anything outside of their narrow little world of "useful" information. A population which doesn't have the broad background necessary to be able to transfer knowledge/skills from one domain to a different one or which doesn't have the context to be able to think creatively and adapt to new or changing situations.
Nearly every single working professional thinks that their own specialized knowledge and skills are the most important ones, and they question and complain about all the other fields that they had to learn information from.
I would bet money that you have had times were you needed to weld. maybe you just didn't recognize it.
An eigenvalue is how much its corresponding eigenvector gets scaled after a linear transformation. An eigenvector is a vector that points in the same direction before and after a linear transformation.
Ps. Will is totally right that just doing calculations and actually understanding the subject are two totally different things. For the longest time I thought I was a good student because I got good grades until I realized that i was lacking the understanding of the subjects I studied for. That false confidence is the main difference between purely academic people and people who spent time in their industry.
He's more right, that as an EE I lost my freaken mind lol.
One of these days Nigels gonna have a really good story about drinking chemicals.
technically we're all drinking chemicals.
He probably has a lot just that he can't remember them because of the chemicals he drank
Because he forgets
Just got my safety third sticker pack in, and they look great on my cat.
my safety third pins look great on my cat
I hate Williams argument that we should take time from teaching history to teach welding or something "useful" for the same reason he gives for who gets to choose what history concepts to teach. Welding is a useful skill for William and could be a fun hobby for others but it for 99.6% of the population it would be useless. (Of the 150 million working adults only 500k are welders). History while not direction 1:1 useful it helps in ways you don't consciously perceive. Learning about the successes and failures of the past help you develop a database of sorts, examples you can look at and compare even subconsciously when making your own choices. That helps everyone. The way we teach history is pretty dumb but the idea of teaching history is solid AF.
"they should stop teaching x because nobody uses it" is just about every every single topic except english, or whatever your native language happens to be. If you don't go into chemistry you don't need to know anything about chemistry. If you don't go into science you don't need to know anything about science. Most people certainly don't need to know welding. The reason why we learn most of the stuff in school is to give us a broad knowledge, a base knowledge of most topics that we can expand upon later. There's always room for improvement but it's beyond unhelpful to say that because YOU don't use something that means it shouldn't be taught.
If you don't talk or write or read, you also don't need to learn English (or your native language). xD
I didn't get that out of the conversation, what I think they are asking is to have more practical examples as close to the real world as a justification and less rote memorization. learning is an inate skill, and humans (and especially children) are pretty well prepared to exloration. Kindling their curiosity and making learning accessible is the only task that needs to be done, while they describe some annoying, useless, demotivating experience. Teaching is a thing where you can indeed do more harm than good - for example I loved physics, read books and had a lot of fun with rube goldberg style contraptions, played phun (algoodo) and similar games... but then physics classes started, and in half a year all my enthusiasm dissapeared. If instead of annoying class I was left alone with a book - I am absolutely sure I would've got further on my own. The assumption that kids need to be force-fed data decided by committe without any regards to interests and intrinsic motivation - this is what's beyond unhelpful. man, I'm still bitter and I get safety third guys all too well *shrug*
Studying History enables you to understand the world you live in and how it works. It's a major study every intelligent human being should and would have to learn about.
@@kerolokerokerolo i agree, i feel like having a general understanding of world history is important for us to understand the world we live in and the problems we currently have. it's a useful knowledge for sure.
By year 10 in school you should probably have a pretty good Idea of what jobs you would like to work in, so the fact that we’re required to take english all 4 years doesn’t make much sense for the people who want to be anything else other than a writer.
Watching this instead of paying attention to my biology teacher that says 1 word every 3 seconds and calls it talking
same
You privileged kids and your Bluetooth headphones
Back in my day...
During the period in college where all of my classes were virtual I had a teacher like that and I got very accustomed to watching lectures at 5x speed
I am shaking and crying rn
My calc teacher was fucking incredible. She was big on "don't memorize, generate!" The unit circle was a godsend, in relation to "whats a sine wave" I found calculus easier than any other math class I had to take specifically because of her ability to drive home the concept of being able to generate the answer, rather than see the patterns. For the first few weeks we had to do derivatives the looooooooong way where it takes like a full page of dumb math to complete the damn thing. Then we got to look at the patterns and the time spent answering questions when from 10 minutes per question to like two seconds per questions. These were ap classes, I got highest marks possible on the exams. Free college credit, dudes!
Seriously a good calculus teacher makes learning SO much easier like nothing was ever “hand waved” in my class the logic behind every rule was always explained in detail through practical examples it made learning so much easier
I can see where you are coming from when you say that teachers should be people who do practical stuff in the industry, but the most important thing about teaching is being able to communicate well. You can be the smartest engineer who ever engineered that has both practical and theoretical knowledge about every field, but if you aren't able to communicate what you know to those that don't have this knowledge, then you would make for a bad teacher. Now sure, there are a percentage of teachers aren't very good at communication. And maybe the people who make it furthest in an industry might be on average better communicators, but I don't think that having teachers with the most practical knowledge of an industry would fix the education system as a whole.
You're absolutely right, communication is key. And the trickiest part is understanding a concept in a way where you can explain it in 3 different ways to make super everyone gets it. Funny enough one of my didactics teachers said that it's usually about 50% people who love explaining things and 50% people who have the best understanding of a subject. The tricky part is compensating for your weaknesses, that what makes a good teacher. I think the problem is a lot of teachers didn't really struggle with the subject they teach. If you went from struggling student to master, you know what's hard and unnecessary, what needs more explanation, what you had problems with and what you didn't. And any teacher that loves their subject will probably not want to cut things out. Like asking a parent to choose their least favourite child to sacrifice
So true, a teacher's job is more to teach you how to learn.
I teach Mechanical Engineering part time and the kids are starving for anyone with real world experience. Their eyes light up when I tell them about the stuff I have done and have so many questions. I feel so bad that they don't get more of that through school.....But the academic world is so different than industry (tenure professors, slow to change, and bureaucratic) and doesn't pay enough that they will never get a huge influx of experience....
I'd agree with this. I'm someone that learns by doing so hearing people talk about book stuff isn't all that interesting. But if you tell me how you apply that knowledge it helps me understand it. I get excited because I can see how it's applied and utilized. It's empowering.
Too much schooling is just memorization. you're supposed to hear something and then remember it. That's not how most people's brains work.
@@CRneu yeah, more project based learning would be so much better. Actual creative problem solving and hands on work!
the teachers assistant in my high school digital electronics was retired NASA, and before that he was an army radar tech. Guy was awesome.
@@blockstacker5614 those are the perfect teachers. Good stories too! 😁
he had some pretty crazy stories for sure
My school's business teacher is a former IBM executive who retired to a mansion about 45 minutes from my school and picked up teaching business at our school as something to do. He's absolutely the best teacher not because he's good at teaching as a profession, but because he's so knowledgable about business that he's inherently good at teaching it.
Does he teach at a public school? Does he have any teaching credentials?
damn, so lucky! learning from an expert :)
The irony of this episode where the phrase those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it and the discussion of bitcoin mining without anyone mentioning the original mining gold rush is truely beautiful
William's reaction to people not celebrating Thanksgiving outside of the US was expected, but so funny. xD
What's a thanksgiving? Is that kind of like Burns Night?
@@EnsignLovell if you consider haggis to be the Scottish equivalent for turkey, maybe then you can say Burns Night is a bit like Thanksgiving haha
William… WW2 is a prime example of something that we would like not to repeat. And there are more people denying it now a days because people aren’t educated enough
Really interesting to listen to this as a current 5th grade classroom teacher and former elementary technology teacher. I think one of the issues is the lack of national or state level support for tech and engineering education all all K-12 levels. Even if a school gets the stuff for a maker space, there isn’t any large scale support so the funding is likely to disappear with the next change of admin or superintendent. This means that teachers don’t want to get too invested. The flip side that Will didn’t really address is that non-teachers tend to lack a lot of the classroom management and lesson skills that are necessary for teaching. I have had guest teachers come in who were amazing at what they did, but their lessons crashed and burned because the didn’t have the background knowledge to know how to introduce things in an age appropriate way. You don’t need a degree to learn it, but it does take a lot of time and practice to become good at it.
If your history teacher is making you memorize things they're a bad teacher. Social studies should be having you understand why things happened and helping you with your critical thinking skills. Coming from someone with a masters in secondary education.
lies
Thinking that memorization, any topic, is learning, means you don't know squat. To really understand a topic, is well beyond simple memorization. Even a rigid topic like math. The grand majority of people only "learn" arithmetic manipulation. To learn it properly is knowing the concepts behind the manipulation.
@@michaelmoorrees3585 me when people dont learn the 360 page proof for 1 + 1 = 2
many history teachers do it wrong then, because memorizing everything and dates was the only focus of my history course in highschool
@@jordanjoe7276 Yes. Most teachers are shit. Just like most of things are shit. But the really great ones teach History as a sociological narrative, not pointless facts that miss the point of studying history.
The more of these podcasts with Nigel I hear the more surprised I am he grew up.
Canada in WW1 is actually really interesting and they did a lot, they also committed so many war crimes that the Geneva convention was updated because of Canada’s actions
@@cmmartti you don't even want to know how they used maple syrup...
@@cmmartti They tended not to take prisoners, they would allow the Germans to surrender then chuck hand grenades at them, stuff like that, Canadians fought in some of the worst battles as well
Hearing Will talk about history being useless and why don't we teach more math and science is so funny because I always heard the opposite in school. Also history is incredibly important for people to learn because it directly impacts politics and who people vote for. It's more important for the average person to have a good understanding of history than calculus or chemistry honestly.
“Oysters were popping off” is a really funny statement lol
Honestly, my biggest issue in school is the inherent belief that memorization is the only way to really learn. I switched from math to cs in college, and one of the things I realized about this whole system is that you can't memorize everything. The whole idea of testing is more or less about trying to cram 10 lbs of shit into the 5lb bag that is your brain. That isn't to say that repetition and, in a way, memorization, are bad forms of learning. But the idea that somehow having the book with you during a test is bad more or less smacks at the fact that that's all you do when you're working!! All you do is look up works and texts, double check things you think you knew to make sure they're right. If having the textbook with you somehow defeats the purpose of testing, either the student is brilliant and can simply cross reference and learn from a book incredibly fast, or the tests are just lazy trials if memorization. Any time I pick a programming language back up, the first thing I have to do is remember the basics required for writing a basic file. I mean, think about it. When you took Calc or really any math class, if you just magically got the answer, unless it was multiple choice, you only got a fraction of the points. It was all about showing the work. The book can't teach you how to show the work. But it can help you fix a mistake, or remind you of an obscure identity used for derivation. Its like Nigel said, you have the damn periodic table everywhere in chemistry because most people simply don't have the wherewithal to remember literally everything.
Calculus was the first time I felt like I actually understood math. Everything up to that point was memorizing patterns. Maybe I had good teachers or I’m just weird.
Dude same, though. My calc teacher was a beast, for real.
same! everything before calc just felt like memorising and just recognising patterns to solve problems, it was boring and repetetive. calculus was like a blow of fresh air for me
I had the exact same experience. I didn't hate math before Calc, but I definitely fell in love with it after learning Calc. It felt like all these little dots of knowledge I had in my head got connected
So one of my absolute favorite teachers was my auto tech teacher in high-school. He was a super experienced mechanic and he decided he wanted to teach kids his trade and took a massive pay cut to do so. He literally just wanted us to learn automotive stuff. The only things we 'learned' from the book were jammed into a few weeks and he only did it because the school system made him. He wanted us to be hands on, he helped us (those of us who actually had our own cars anyway) build and fix our own cars. like part of the curriculum was to take apart and rebuild an engine, and there were like a dozen or so v6's that were donated to the school system that we would use, BUT if you had a car that you wanted to build, he would help you and teach you how to build your own engine. Obviously you had to pay for the parts yourself, but he literally just wanted to teach younger people how to do mechanics.
STEM people really need to take the humanities more seriously. A history education is important. However the way history is taught at the lower levels is counter productive and unimportant. A good history education is instructive on the consequences of actions and helps a student learn practical critical thinking skills. Learning history isn't about memorizing dates or specific events its about understanding and connecting events. It's about having a basis for understanding why things are the way they are. You can not be adequately informed without a basic knowledge of history.
Also, a lot of the content taught at lower levels is about learning how to research and write a paper. It really doesn't matter what the paper was about.
@@OriamRepus yeah in high school if youre lucky and freshman/sophomore of college . But in grade school it's mostly just memorization which is bad. They should focus more on how events connect together and causes and effects. Its more useful and the bonus is that's also easier to retain.
@@TheEnoEtile where I live it's always just memorization. throughout the entirety of primary school, middle school and high school it's just memorizing dates names that don't seem to connect to anything. it's a mess and I was always terrible at it.
@@eggi4443 it's being taught wrong then
As someone with an advanced degree in math, I think the issue is that the "machinery" that underlies everything has to be extremely general in order to make the "system" flexible, however, that generality leads to an extreme degree of abstraction which many people have no interest or capacity to dig through. Sure I understand calculus (mostly measure theoretic applications), but realistically how many people need to understand it for their own use? Virtually nobody.
It's pretty easy to say in plain language what a real number is, not too much harder to say what a complex number is if someone has taken high school algebra. But starting from ZFC axioms and logic, then building set theory up to being able to define what a 'number' is, then defining natural numbers, then integers, then rationals, then the reals (good luck if you try to define it as a completion under a metric rather than through Dedekind cuts), and finally the complex numbers? And this is just the 'analysis' point of view, there are entirely different approaches through abstract algebra to arrive in the same place. To 'use' complex numbers requires only a couple handy identities ('rules of thumb'), but to *understand* them to the level of being able to research with them requires a staggering amount of background. So if you don't already know about the uses of complex numbers, why go through this tremendous trouble? But if you don't know what a complex number is, how can you understand their uses? What about different axiomatic systems? Things get out of hand quickly.
Similar story with linear algebra. If you don't already know about fields, how can you understand a vector space? But the problem is, if you don't know about vector spaces, how do you motivate the idea of a field?
Everything has to start somewhere; I don't think high schools are going to be teaching formal logic and group theory anytime soon. I don't know what the solution is. Seeing the beauty of math is much more nuanced than the beauty of the physical sciences so it's easy to brush it aside as just a tool which most do.
They should still teach some of the history and where the formulas come from. For example, the unit circle was only taught to us *years* after trig was first introduced. Knowing the unit circle made solving trig problems *way* easier, no need to memorise the SOHCAHTOA bullcrap. Same thing with the kinematic equations. No idea why they work. Just pure memorisation and plugging in the numbers. But once we learnt a bit of calculus, you don't even need to use the equations.
Seeing the beauty in mathematics isn't too difficult. I saw it immediately once I took maths classes at uni. Maths before uni was just teaching students how to do boring calculations and formulas, I don't think it even should be called maths class. Maths at uni showed us the proofs, and we even got come up with proofs ourselves which was super fun.
As a Mexican, William bringing up Fabuloso always feels unexpected
well, he lives in california, where you basically can live in a mexican culture inside usa, you dont even need to learn english there
I found some in Canada! One of my favourite cleaning channels uses it.
Ahhhhh, I thought y'all were just science guys who reluctantly used math when needed, so finding out Nigel liked math and took up to Calc 3 was a real treat (as a viewer who likes math)
One of the coolest things about my little private school was that in Junior and Senior year was for one class we had a choice of courses that teachers decided they wanted to teach that year. Teachers teach better when they're passionate about it, and I felt like I learned more in those classes than any other.
Heck yeah my t-shirt just got delivered this morning. Right on time for the upload!
I've always been a firm believer that you don't understand something untell you can teach it. I thought I knew some content pretty well and then I became a TA, and it is incredible how good a class of confused students is at finding the gaps in my knowledge. It really forces you as the teacher to move away from having knowledge and towards problem solving and figuring things out. And my favorite statagy to use when teaching is to just explain my thought process in figuring things out, like showing why it makes sense to do some weird seemingly out of place step. I've noticed that it is exactly the way many technical youtube videos are structured (like 3blue1brown videos).
In my college calculus classes are all co-requisite with classes that study the practical uses of the calculus concepts. It really helps with understanding how the calculus is useful to us in computer engineering or physics.
Currently getting an education in game programming, and I'm so happy all my teachers are people who are actually in the industry.
But it sure sucks that none of them have any skill in public speaking or teaching.
It's a hard trade off, those kinds of teachers are useful for connections but even that well dries when they prioritize teaching (which isn't bad because then they get better with teaching). I learned from plenty of musicians within the field and nothing beats having as many perspectives as possible
My one maths teacher in high school was actually a retired mechanical engineer with a Master's degree, who had a passion for teaching. He also taught physics and related science subjects for a while.
He also taught my older brother maths, and helped him go from failing maths to doing very well.
This was the reason my secondary school (uk) engineering class was so good. 1. we had a workshop with multiple lathes, a milling machine, welders, forge, a cnc lazer cutter as well as a woodworking room and electronics room, and 2. our teacher had many years of experience working his way up a well known engineering firm from practically making the parts to designing solutions and management involving all the health and safety and risk stuff, as well as owning a farm, the only reason he went into teaching was because he was starting to have medical problems meaning he couldnt be quite as active as he used to be and it was something he enjoyed allowing him to provide opportunities to students that he wished he had had. We also had a construction class which my friend took.
Looking back i was incredibly fortunate to have the opportunities i did in my school especially in comparison to other schools in the area, there was always a massive focus on the practical side of things, a massive reason i stopped on at their sixthform for my A-levels, even better is that the school lets me use their workshop for personal projects as long as I let them know before hand that i wish to use the equiptment.
I wish other schools could offer the simular opportunities for practical subjects to that i had and it just shows how different 2 schools can be even if theyre both government run / non paid.
Good educators are few and far between. I'm in my junior year of undergrad and am finishing up Organic Chemistry 2 this semester. My lab professor is new this semester and he worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 40 years and has had many breakthroughs over his career. If every professor was as good of a teacher as he is, school would be much more enjoyable and worthwhile.
When it comes to family vacations, I think a lot of people can relate to Kevin, specially if you have a dysfunctional family (like me). While if you have a happy (or "normal") family like Nigel, you can enjoy your family vacations. Or maybe I'm just assuming.
History has been the most important and most actively used in my everyday life.
Being able to identify and predict human behaviors based off of previous happenstance is the most useful application of historical knowledge.
Having the macro and micro knowledge allows one to comprehend a wide spectrum of what is currently happening in the world.
For instance: why we have the 24hr News cycle? Iran hostage crisis... Well why did that happen? Because Pro-American Iran college students got pissed at America when we didn't denounce Iran's leaders. Why didn't America support Pro American college students? Oil Crisis...
It seems to go on and on, oh my God it's important. Imagine how much influence the 24-hour news cycle has had, now you know why.
I agree with almost everything you're saying about school makerspaces and education, at least in public schools. I work in the makerspace at an independent school, though, and the amount of money, time, and effort that goes into helping students become capable makers is significant. Even the fact that I'm here, with no college degree but years of experience making stuff at home, speaks to the focus on life skills more than just grades.
1:07:38 I feel called out lol, I was just about to write this whole long comment about how, now I haven't taken an engineering class, but from what friends have told me, the engineering major is structured just as you describe, at least that's how I reconcile with the fact that past maybe Calc 2,that's not how any of my classes worked. The biggest example you brought up is matrices. The reason linear algebra is such a calculation kind of course is because it's the foundation of everything else you need matrices for, so you're gonna need a lot of practice working eith them. A good linear course will also talk about theory a good bit,but I suspect that's not what you meN when you say 'tell me how to use it' and additionally, you don't remember whT an eigenvalues is because you haven't needed to use it since you took the course, and if they're not useful to you, sure you can forget about them. If you need to remember again you can use an old textbook or the internet. I can tell you first hand that as a physics student in quantum, there's no way I could forget what an eigenvalues is, it has been seared onto my Grey matter
one of my favorite things about my old school (i transferred to a stem academy) was our engineering teacher. we had an entire career and technical wing (welding, auto, electrical, pre nursing, biomedical sciences, ag, early childhood ed, engineering,, compsci), but i adored those specific classes. my teacher is a retired engineer, and while he has the general gen x tech issues, he’s an awesome teacher.
Its insane listing to Will reading the eigen vector and eigan value wiki and understanding it and hearing him read it thinking "yep thats what they are" and then right as he finishes he says that it didn't explain what it is.
Yeah it seemed like a good explanation to me. It does require understanding that a matrix is a transformation though.
yeah same. I did just finish a semester of Linear Algebra last week though ;)
I was in the middle of yelling at my screen when Will said “there’s someone very mad at this conversation right now”. I will say history in school is absolutely horrible and needlessly repetitive, but Will’s take just kept getting worse the more he tried to fix it. If you do read this Will, imagine how someone who doesn’t work in a stem field feels about all of the stem classes they had to take. Them thinking that they have no use for all of the knowledge that was drilled into them does not mean that teaching stem is useless. Also this is not hate, just me inserting myself into the conversation.
Exactly. I used to think like Will, but now I see the value of basic knowledge not related to my field, the thing is though, school should be interesting for kids ( probably can't make kids love school, need to learn some seemingly boring stuff, but it should still be a compromise ). TH-cam is good like that, you can learn random stuff when you are in the mood, or need the thing - Black pen Red pen is the only reason I managed to finish my math classes
@@ffoska I still like Will, there’s just things like this that bother me
I lived in Canada for a little while as a kid and the only thing I remember was learning about this guy Terry Fox who ran across Canada to raise awareness for cancer, I’m not sure if he was a big deal all over Canada or just where I used to live, but I thought he was a household name there or maybe it was cause I only saw a small glimpse of Canadian life.
Its interesting hearing them talk about calc 1,2,3. As someone taking calc 2 rn, but in europe the system for teaching it seems wildly different. We start with why we learn certain calculus principles and then we have to solve problems with it. taking imaginary numbers for instance kinda makes senses if you view as a vertical line of numbers orthogonal to real numbers. It doesn't fully makes sense but you can see the logic and reasoning behind it. Sure you won't need all the math in your profesional career (speaking from experience), but it really helps gaining insight in to what a numerical solver or matlab does behind the scenes.
I would say calculus is the first math course where you have a chance to really understand it since like...algebra? Adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division are all discrete enough to be fairly intuitive. As is some of geometry. But a ton of algebra II, geometry, and trigonometry is just three years of prepping for calculus. But once you finally get to derivatives, and learn about it in terms of physics, mostly time, velocity, and acceleration, it oddly begins to have some sort of inuitiveness again, at least for me. That being said though, a lot of math that was developed once the concept of negative numbers was beginning to be accepted as important and real, as with things like complex numbers, math really is a way to logically extract things from the real world, and less about "understanding" it. Just like quantum entanglement was considered "spooky action at a distance", once you realize all of the unsolved and possibly unsolvable problems in math, even ones where some answers seem trivial on the surface, you realize math is kind of spooky too. I think, despite always enjoying math, once I went to college, I realized there's a certain level of mystery to it, more than really anything else.
Also sine and cosine, we represent them as squiggly lines, but don't they essentially just represent rotations of a circle? Hence all the pi stuff involved.
There's a classic trope about a husband and wife where the wife only talks to her husband about jewelry and expensive things so the husband, a successful businessman, spends all day starting new projects at work so that he can earn enough money to buy his wife more fancy things. The husband doesn't really enjoy his job anymore - he'd much rather spend time with his wife - but he slogs through it to satisfy her lavish tastes. The twist is, while the wife doesn't mind having nice things, she'd much rather have more time with her husband!
Your history teacher probably didn't want you to memorize the name of every president. That may be what you *thought* they wanted because that's what they spent so much time talking about. But what they really wanted (maybe) was exactly what you wanted: to put your knowledge of history to *use*. Unfortunately, there's a circular element to it. Students often fixate on memorizing facts because it's easier than thinking deeply about them; they don't want to think deeply about it because they hate school and want to spend as little effort on it as possible; and they hate school because they think it's all about boring facts that don't mean anything.
Not me 6:45
My sister changed a painting on the other side of our dining room, and I noticed instantly.
It used to be a side profile of a woman, but she changed it to a girl looking straight, dead forward.
The eyes...
it was the eyes... 😖😖
STEM people not understanding why we need history is a great argument for why we need more history, not less. 70% of jobs is just answering emails on a laptop, I don't think welding is gonna help with that
Also Wills idea that people with even less training in teaching are a good idea clashed pretty hard with everyone that actually has to do with education.
You guys hit the nail on the head on teaching concepts vs applied.
I use trig, algebra, linear algebra, and other matrix transformations daily at work and in my free time
course I'm over here writing shader code for real time graphics.
rotation matricies into normal vectors to derive the dot product from the point in space to know if the pixel is being lit by the lights in real time.
but heck, its all abstract math, just code, you give me a piece of paper and tell me to decompose a matrix, I have no clue
1:01:32 at fullsail they gave us a crashcourse on calculus and linear algebra for the sole purpose of being able to write a physics engine. it was great getting taught that stuff purely with the lens of a "real world application". my crappy game projects before were always running too fast or too slow depending on framerate. being taught "delta-time" was a magical epiphany moment for me because it makes the game run the same regardless of FPS. velocity+=acceleration*dt; position+=velocity*dt; or velocity=(position1-position0)/dt; all make perfect sense and i guess those are integrations and derivations after all 🤓
geometry and trigonometry are awesome for anything 2d/3d graphics or physics. i never gave sine/cosine a chance until one time in quickbasic i was trying to figure out an X,Y coordinate given an angle and distance. when i found the answer online, i realized it was the "converting between rectangular and polar coordinates" sine/cosine junk which i was taught in school and i guess it just never "clicked" at the time how it could ever be useful for anything. same deal with pythagorean's theorum: some "useless" triangle garbage until i realized its literally how you calculate the distance between two points.
imo school is unnecessarily hard and cryptic because its all taught within some broad conceptual lens rather than an applied one. the "applied" scenarios that textbooks give, like "sally has 50 watermelons and joe bought half, how many does jim have", never worked for me because i didnt give two shits how many watermelons anyone has.
to this day though, math whose "solution" is just another formula has never made sense to me. i feel like it has to result in actual value(s) for it to ever have a real world application.
I know this episode was posted a month ago, but I have to chime in. I'm a former high school teacher, located in Washington state. Over here, there is a large push for CTE education (career and technical education). These are middle/high school elective classes that are typical taught by people who were previously working in industry. For example, I don't have a teaching degree, but because of my professional/educational background, I taught a Communications class. However, you can also choose to "specialize" in CTE if your trying to become teacher right out of the gate, but it creates two really different types of education for the students. Half of CTE is taught be industry professionals and the other half is taught be teachers who studied it in school. So for example, you could have two different cooking classes, but one is taught by a former chef/restaurant owner and the other is taught by a teacher who studied to teach a cooking class...not necessarily a bad thing, but really different for the students.
CTE education has other things like cooking, shop, ag, auto, etc. It kind of just depends on the needs of the school/ how much funding they get. Thankfully, here in WA, educational legislation is really pushing for these programs. Idk if they have this same thing in California, Florida, or Montreal, but I'd be willing to bet there is something similar.
The hardest part about teaching without having student taught/gone to school for it, is learning the craft of teaching itself and learning how to plan curriculum for the first time. I've since left teaching but have been working on my curriculum for the day I go back. Since having to write curriculum for the first time, I now write down processes for everything I do.
Also, becoming an 'Instructional designer' is a big thing right now for teachers looking to leave teaching. It's essentially learning how to build online courses and be a consultant/freelancer, which you all are already doing.
It would be super cool if anyone on safety third ever decided to make a class ( or some sort of online course )for K-12. Getting to build a class, while not under the constraints/stresses of teaching day-to-day would be such a game changer for so many teachers. Additionally, pulling people from industry isn't typical (or often allowed if they don't already have a teaching certificate) in K-12 education, but it'd be amazing to see how different the core subjects could be taught if that was the case.
Great episode! Sorry for such a long tangent.
Perfect video for drinking rum straight while laying on the floor of the tub. Love listening to you guys talk about random shit
History lessons are rather appreciated in my country (France). I also find it funny that I had answers about the history of Canada or the United States that you did not have during the conversation even though I am French
I guess history lessons in France have to be very interesting because of the 1000 year rivalry with the UK (lots of wars and history to learn from that), because you invaded most of Europe at one point, and because you've always been more or less the center (culturally or politically) of this continent. 🤣 You won't have to repeat just one war "over and over" again in class, when you have hundreds to choose from.
@@JordiVanderwaal or just teach history of other countries and the world. I dont understand what your country gains by merely teaching history of your own country in minute detail. Knowing barebones of early human history, the emergence of civilization and then regional history and important events around the world is the most important thing. You dont need to know multiple generals of the us civil war.
Just skim over long times of global history and make little mini detailed lections about the important times.
@@lenoio512 yeah but in most places they teach us history from our country and the countries surrounding us (or the entire continent), with few exceptions like the world wars for example. I guess it's easier to learn or care about something when it "affects" you (even if it doesn't because it happened in the past), and also an extensive global history would be too hard to teach and assuming most people won't move to a different continent, it would be "useless" as well (from their point of view on teaching you about stuff they think it's gonna be useful in life).
@@lenoio512 That's what we do
As a Maine Native(on multiple levels, I'm Penobscot), hearing Nigel say All-dressed and ketchup chips are Canadian reminds me most of the rest of America already thinks we're a part of Canada...
william secretly trying to start an oyster cult
Being a history major, I don’t think I’ve ever been more offended
My field isn't even the humanities (currently a Physics undergrad), but I am also quite irritated.
Elementary / High school history education is terrible. Because it's designed that way by the powers that be. But just because the pedagogy is horrible, doesn't mean history is worthless. There are a lot of horrors in history (especially for former colonies by Western powers, whose skin colors aren't white). That's why "real" history isn't taught to the vast majority of the populace, to "protect" a nation's "image" per se. Which for me is a form of brainwashing / erasing history. Erasing one's mistakes and never learning for them.
"Who are you who do not know your history?"
Most problems today are traceable back to history.
Be it psychological, economical, technological, sociological, political (local and geopolitics) or even ideological. Even Science, without acknowledging its history, one will never fully appreciate how far we have discovered and invented. I am personally uncomfortable learning a new mathematical tool whose origins I don't fully understand myself.
I have realized, even as a young student, that the education system (at least in my own country) is absolutely shitty. But that doesn't mean the topics that were poorly taught are no longer important. I studied them on my own time, for the sake of my own curiosity (and also for seeking explanations as to why we are what we are today).
That's why I am irritated the most. Because it's almost as if they have never tried to peer deeply to the problem, and just said "School Sucks" period, end of the story. Well, at least Nigel's implicit stance is the pedagogy is wrong, but not the topic (History) itself.
@@__rikaisuru I mean, it makes sense that they would see it that way. History itself is valuable, but like you said, schools typically do a bad job of teaching it until you hit college. You can't really blame them for equating that with history itself being bad, when that's the only experience they've had with it; we can only make judgements based on our personal experiences and what we've heard from others.
Sure, if you happen to be curious about history, you can delve into it and learn a lot more about why present issues exist, and talk/vote on them in a more informed manner--but not everyone is going to be curious about everything, and that's OK. Ultimately it falls on educators and history buffs to make history more approachable to laypeople, and not the other way around.
@@cn8229 @cn8229 my only counter point is thus:
“Why are you not curious about the past-about how you and everything else came to be? Who are you, who do not know your history?”
This isn’t just about simple curiousity, though I did phrase it that way.
Or, rather, that history is intimately tied to society, technology, ideologies, conflict, governance, politics, capitalism, and every other aspect of our lives in micro- and macro-scales.
If you wish to be informed, or at least to be aware, of why things are the way they are, you are naturally bound to go back to historical progress.
I agree that the pedagogy of History is horrifically wrong. But it’s not the fault of the “history buffs” nor is it the burden of educators to bear. Who runs / supervises Education? The government, in most countries. Henceforth, the problem is political, societal, and cultural.
There are great history information out there. Usually.
But, it is still dependent on people actually care about history.
I am not against apathy or disinterest / lack of curiosity.
However, I will do get irritated if one makes opinions without any knowledge of history-especially regarding current events that are _inherently_ tied to historical events. Such as the current war right now on Europe.
@@__rikaisuru I pretty much agree with you. But I do want to clarify a few things I said.
When I said it's the burden of people who care about history to make it more approachable, I don't mean to assign blame or to imply that they're somehow divinely obligated to do so. I meant that making history more approachable is necessary to get everyone to learn about it, and "educators and history buffs" are the only people in a position to do that. Politicians certainly aren't going to help; they have a vested interest in lying to children, so that's exactly what most of them are going to do.
On that note, people are going to have opinions about current events. It's impossible not to, when it's crammed in our faces every day. And it's impossible to be fully informed about everything, or even most things. At the end of the day, people make judgements based on what they know. I don't think it's fair to blame people who don't have informed opinions about current events when education is so politicized. In my opinion, the blame should rest entirely on the authorities that decide what history can and can't be taught.
And finally, to address what you said initially, I'm really not too curious about where I came from. I'd rather learn about the history of the world as an outsider than as a participant--way too much general nastiness that I had no say in. Honestly, my favorite part of history is seeing the general trend of things improving over the last thousand years or so, because it gives me hope for the future.
Same, but as a classics graduate... my history is so far back that it's barely even relevant anymore! But i still love it to death
The education rabbit hole goes down so fucking deep it's actually insane. In today's world there is 1.6 trillion dollars in student debt bigger than Canada's entire GDP. 3x what it was in 2006 the world. Greedy colleges and policy makers are milking every cent from young people. It's is a fucking tragedy.
theres a 100% increase of pets in this episode of Saftey Third (podcast)
I used to work in an 'institution' that served a 'just add sugar and water' lemonade mix. It was disgusting. Fluorescent yellow and tasted like citric acid with a fake lemon scent. I'm absolutely convinced it was also sold as a cleaner. It was packaged in the same type of jug as janitorial supplies
For a long time in the state I live in, fireworks were pretty heavily controlled. That changed about 5 years ago, and now we have fireworks stores all over the place. But before then, the only way to get anything bigger than sparklers and poppers was to go out of state. Thankfully for my brother and me (and all of our friends), our annual family road trip always went through a neighboring state that had ZERO fireworks restrictions. And you can bet your sweet bippy we spent ALL of our lawn-mowing money buying the strongest stuff we could get our hands on.
Nile (who plays with dangerous and toxic chemicals): idk guys I think guns have a dark side.
Can we get this exact same podcast, with all the same questions, but with Shane from Stuff Made Here as a guest?
25:37 Ironic, cause history IS repeating itself and the funny part is that people did not learn jack shit from it. People took the lesson that X=Bad, not understanding that extremism=bad. So they just become extremists in their ideologies, making history repeat itself, while sitting on an ivory throne of privilege, pretending they are on some "objectively good" side.
I love all of you guys, but I do really hope you one day realize that supporting extremist ideologies will lead to human suffering. No matter how good the core principles of the ideology are.
Anyone who thinks they are in a war of good vs evil, will always end up creating suffering. That applies to any political and social stances that are executed by people convinced that their fellow human is the enemy, and their own views are objectively the correct ones.
In order to not repeat history, we need to stay humble, and listen to the people we don't agree with. In compromise we find humanity and community.
I think your values might be a bit off. Suffering = bad. While extremism can and often does lead to violence, it's important to understand why more radicalized people are in the position where they feel ready to carry out violence. Often, it is the status quo of one group that ends up creating suffering on an unimaginable scale. ie Indian removal act, slavery, European colonialism etc. When I think of extremism, my mind immediately goes to today's issues, but when thinking historically, we have to understand that often violent extremism is in response to banal, often systematic, oppression. On the idea that seeing someone as an enemy creates suffering too, this is an oversimplification. Would you not say that Oliver Cromwell, or any number of British up and ups, were the enemy of Irish people? Or those profiting off of slavery are the enemy of the enslaved? I'm not endorsing violence against all political enemies, infact I think movements such as the civil rights movement and the work of Gandhi are proof that nonviolence can be used despite violence from opposition. With that being said, in a famous letter from MLK, he stated that it is moderates who were in the way of equality. A man despised in his time as an extremist turned out to be fighting for a righteous cause, interesting
have my physical chemistry final next week and really connected to this episode about being lost with derivatives
3blue1brown has a great series of videos on this (eigenvectors and eigenvalues). If you represent the transformation as a matrix (M), M * v maps a vector v from its old value to its new value. This new position could be anywhere and depends on M. The neat thing about eigenvectors is that the direction of the vector after applying the transformation remains unchanged, so the new value is just a scale factor off from the old value. This scale factor is the corresponding eigenvalue.
for the first time i actually wanna be a patron - for the nile fanfic
Former history major here. While I switched my major to a science from history, I still believe teaching kids history is important, primarily because it is beneficial to be politically knowledgable and having an extensive knowledge of history is key to being so. To address William's comment, of "What power do i have to do what hitler did," while, no you may never be Hitler, it was people like myself and anyone reading this who brought Hitler to power. The saying "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," is significantly deeper than most percieve.
I think the reason none of us remember history from primary school is that it's taught in the most miserable, boring, tedious way imaginable. Lately I've been watching a lot of Extra History videos over on the Extra Credits channel and it's goddamn _delightful_ and I wish _that's_ how we'd been taught. History isn't just about warnings of past wrongs, it's also about celebrations of past victories, and it _is_ valuable to see what we've overcome and how... it's just easily the most boring subject in school because it's taught primarily as just rote memorization. ...At least that's how _I_ was taught.
Safety Third, in the middle of november: Proceeds to spend 3 hours talking about fireworks
the worst quote I've heard was "fuck knowledge, don't go to college"
As a nurse, watching medical shows is tough. The only one I can watch is House and I view it as a detective show, not a medical show.
My highschool was clearly different from yours. While they weren't wildly promoted my school had many classes that taught real world skills.
I learned how to household electrical work, DC wiring, the classic woodshop stuff like chairs and end tables, we built 4 sheds in a trimester, and installed them. There were classes that I didn't get to where you would build and race small electric cars and they converted a motorcycle to electric (this was in the early 2010s)
We also had a "Tech Center" nearby that was a school you could go to for a few hours and learn a trade. Anything from robotics, medical, car repair, anything IT related, graphic design, and so much more. I even got to take a moderate level C# college class for free there where I got try out Microsoft's Hololens when it was released.
I knew I went to the "rich" school for a rural school in the Midwest but damn school should at least teach you how to be an adult a little bit
Learning history in a US high school would have stressed me a lot tbh. Because in my country we were taught *mostly* local, regional and European history, but every year we learned about different periods, starting with 500bc or so. So we never really repeated stuff "over and over", but because we had so much to go through, there was some stuff we were forced to gloss over every year. T-T
In my school in America I only got US history twice between year 6 and 12 and then we had different regional history. I think these dudes just had terrible schools.
australia is fun because we just don't have enough history to fill more than 2 units. you got aboriginal history and the frontier wars, the gold rush, federation and then world war one (where we spent like 5 lessons learning about conscription laws).
my schools history was so luckluster outside that because half of the year instead of history we had geography which was two terms spent learning about aquifers. like we learnt about the spanish conquest of mexico, just mexico and just the conquest. and then like a bit on ancient egyptian society. i knew nothing about anything coming out of that and had to learn basic stuff completely on my own, stuff like "poland was invaded by germany at the start of ww2"
@@duskpede5146 omg that sounds awful, I'm sorry 😭 I thought they'd at least teach you some history of South-East Asia or the Micronesia
@@JordiVanderwaal australia is pretty disconnected from south east asia. while technically close, in practice there's a massive desert and an ocean sitting between them and where 99% of the population live.
there is some entanglement between us, there's a not insignificant Vietnamese, chinese, indian and indonesian diaspora here. we owned papua new guinea for a while, enough where a few of my aunts and uncles were born there because my grandparents lived there. in ww2 the pacific theater had some action by australians like with the kokoda trail in new guinea, i personally don't know anything about it but most australians do. we were also in the vietnam war along side america. oh and the island of bali in indonesia constantly has australian tourists going there for beaches and stuff.
thats it, thats all the involment australia has with south east asia. new zealand is given more cultural awareness because they speak english and we have an intertwined history. but we watch american media and follow american news. we're in the eurovision contest despite being on the otherside of the world. 90% of the population is white. if you got the right guy doing the talking you could probably convince the eu to let us join.
so us not learning about the history of south east asia in school isn't all that surprising, given that we barely learned about european history.
@@duskpede5146 I guess it's more of a cultural and geographical disconnect, that prevents you guys from forming bonds with most of your neighbours, strong enough to care (=learn) about their history, maybe. But on Europe we suffer from this as well, maybe to a lesser extent. We don't talk much about the ancient/old history of Oceania, America and even Sub-Saharan Africa, unless when they gave us important dates (first settlers, first remains found, waves of migration to/from those regions thousands of years ago), which is something, but not much. And when it comes to Asia we always talk about the big Empires of the past, but those lessons still focused on the Mediterranean way more. Modern and Contemporary Ages were the messiest ones, where they taught us more about every continent, specially the wars.
Btw pls join the EU and stay in Eurovision forever.
6:56 I used to love America, I don't hate America now
As a European, that's actually very relatable. xD
Ah, this hits home so bad, exact same issues in school and with school system
i is actually a lot of fun in my opinion. if you're doing something like CAD in three dimensions, the math for adding the third dimension can get tricky because the values for different axes are interchangeable. when you're working with curves that relate to other properties in multiple dimensions like with electromagnetic waves it's very important. the specific properties of a number that is the square root of a negative are really unique and fit a lot of puzzle piece gaps in various places in math
This reminds me when I spent 30 minutes at a previous job explaining lefty loosie righty tighty to someone that has 3 PhDs
The thing is, I loved learning about the orbitals in chemistry, because it finally explained (somewhat) why chemistry works. Before that it was just magic: we mix these 2 chemicals and something happens, but these other identical looking chemicals do nothing. So part of a broad education is to expose different people to different parts of the knowledge, so they can find something they like and something that works for them.
Totally, I don't understand how Will is so anti this part of education.
@@roneyandrade6287 I think its a case of "I don't use it in my everyday life, so what's the use?". In the end it must have something to do with how different people learn and how they want to go about things
@@vke6077 Honestly that is the majority of people. Like why bother learning something if you are not going to use it every day of your life? Hell my 7th grade math teacher always got mad when someone said "I am not going to use it outside of school so why bother if it is not going to be practical to me?" and people usually say that after being caught falling asleep as math is fucking boring unless they show you practical applications for everyday life to go along with it.
Most of the stupid questions for the equations is something no one would ever think of, but practical applications that someone would use a lot in their life is what would make students want to care about the theory a little more or not and then just be like me knows no theory as who gives a fuck and knows only enough to not kill themselves when working on extracting the precious metals that they would then melt down and sell em, you know a practical application Money.
Before you ask gold is not worth rummaging around in old salvage er i mean electronics as copper is king as around $3.50 per pound of copper and copper is abundant in electronics especially power supplies that don't work anymore such as ones for a N64 as a example
@@JohnnyYeTaecanUktena I see your point, and I agree that should be the focus at least in middle school. In high school maths they should have some kind of rigour since you're the one that chose to do it, same for chemistry. In chemistry its especially important to have a sense of theory because it allows you to extrapolate your knowledge.
@@vke6077 i have no idea what extrapolate means as i don't even know how it sounds so ima just assume it is something to do with charts and graphs so statistics and not many normal Americans actually care about statistics even if they opted to take those classes as most of thwe time they thought they were going to do interesting things not pointless maths. Also i don't know what a rigour is as i am a American and when i look that up it just says "an episode of shaking or exaggerated shivering which can occur with a high fever."
I would actually be more receipted to maths of any kind if middle school did not try to fucking force it down our throats in every fucking class not just maths class, as my god what does art class have anything to do with maths? No one literally no one thinks of maths and angles when they are doing art they just do it for so long they learn how to draw not mathematically make perfect angels for good drawings like fuck that shit who cares. Good luck to those of us that was actually sick for most of the school year so they just send you home as you were court ordered to attend anyways and now the nurse is pissed off that you keep going to school sick with the flu or something else as flu shots don't stop you from getting the flu in fact they always gave me the flu either way i had to do make up shit with current shit so i just got so aggravated once i refused to do any work at school once
The teachers complained to my parents once and my Parents said "When he is at school he is your problem, more so since you never held him back when he needed it so now you are just bombarding him with so much shit he just refuse to do anymore and Johnny does what Johnny wants to do"
My mom even once said "Johnny has flat out told a teacher before that he is choosing to do schoolwork not that he is being made to do the work and he only does homework he finds interesting"
oh yeah can't wait to listen to Mr. Nile "derivative is the area under the curve" Red and his buddies WOOOOO
Will keeps saying "but who wrote down that history??", ignoring the fact that living with poor eyesight is better than stabbing your own eyes out
Eigenvalues/vectors are the decomposition of a complex system in a very simple form. Given a system which applies a very complex operation, you can replace it with a decomposition in eigenvectors, multiply them by the eigenvalues, and compose again. Fourier is a good example: a filter can be computed as separating a signal in all frequencies (eigenvectors), then multiplying by the eigenvalues and ensamble all again.
1:01:44 I disagree with them on this; I do feel like some people (~30% maybe?) in cal 1-3 are understanding the "intuitiveness" of what is happening when they do the math. It wasn't until the end of cal 3 (for me personally) that it started getting hard to understand. The business cal/cal1/physics cal seems to go well for most people since it's all about the relationship between functions and derivatives (like position, velocity, acceleration).
listening to this made me appreciate swedens education system way more. here we choose a field to study during high school, for example i chose the “nature” (stem) programme where we have like chem and physics but also history and religion and those. and we have sooo many like close to 20 different ones i believe with multiple ones in the same school. my school has like stem and technology and the builders and the economy people like we got it alllll, they even got art and dance and stuff.
and u guys have mentioned before that u never had proper handicraft lessons (i think thats the name…), which is INSANE to me because we have had those since 3rd grade!!!!! every single child in sweden has sewing (it’s more than just that but whatever) and woodwork (and a bit of metal) classes from 3rd - 9th grade. and i always had teachers who knew exactly what they were doing and they were very passionate. the subjects i lacked good teachers in were the actual important ones that i needed to know before high school (like physics 😞) but whatever. the school system here is so clever i believe and soooo many people complain but omg pls. it works so well like. we have so so so many options and u can even switch programme if u aren’t happy. u can add SO many courses like??? i go stem but am also an artist and love languages so i just added art and higher spanish courses.
we also have free school lunch and have had since kindergarten! it’s even free in high school even though high school here isn’t obligatory. i honestly love the system here and i hope u people get a better one 😔😔
btw our practical chem lessons are always introduced or briefly explained before we even do them. we usually do like calculations and stuff about the practical, before the practical. annndddddd everyone has to pay attention to these lessons bc there’s always questions abt them on the exams!! overall i think everything seems nicely thought out
also!!!!!
you guys just memorize stuff for history ?!?$??!!??$ poor students
your problem when talking about learning history and science is that you don't have in mind the fact that those are the assignments where you learn critical thinking for the most part
Love the podcast guys!
My favorite podcast! I love this cast of degenerates. You guys should get General Sam on as a guest. I feel like you guys would all vibe really well.
The fireworks talk was fun. In my part of Florida people love em, actually last week someone drove an SUV into a fireworks store about half an hour away from me and the whole damn building blew up
So I say this as someone who just finished their masters in physics, regarding imaginary numbers, they are "real" even though they're not "Real" numbers. (And frankly calling them imaginary has not helped with this). Basically, all maths is like, derived from definitions. And under the basic definitions of maths, the square root of -1 didn't have a definition, because no "Real" numbers could be the answer. So we defined it as i. But it does show up in plenty of real phenomena, especially regarding waves. The schrodinger equation uses it too. But in order to get a "real" probability, you effectively square the final result (I am simplifying here). And so, like, yeah, it no longer has an i in it, but i^2 is still part of the answer. So i exists in the same way any number "exists". They're all just constructed from rules and definitions really.
All this talk about the lack of experience among educators reminds me how thankful I was for how my Computer Science professors went out of their way to work in industry during the summer break. Made their insight seem so much more relevant than otherwise.
Teddy Roosevelt was the trust buster man he taught us how to fight the corporate man and the need to ensure corporations don't end up with cartels collusion and monopoly
In high school, we had a comp/sci and physics teacher who actually knew his shit; he was an Ivy League graduate with decades of experience, and he still did comp/sci challenges in his free time.
Thing was that he was _so_ qualified that he couldn’t really empathize with people who had less prior knowledge about a subject, so he failed to explain things well let alone answer the followup questions to his explanations.
His comp/sci class started out full with some students unable to get in. By the end, everyone except for me and one other kid had dropped it.
Watching this just after getting my college acceptance lol.
(I’ve been avoiding school for 3 years.)
As long as it is not arts, you will probably be fine. Make extra payments if you have student loans. Have a hobby.
Congratulations!
@@mf-- it’s for heavy equipment operation
The history talk highlighted to me the blatant difference between taking history in Canada vs the US.
Weird, I saw this video on front page before getting notification, even though I have "all" set as my notification preference.
That happens to me all the time. I usually don't get notifications for at least half a day after a video posts even for channels I am subscribed to with notifications turned on but if i am online when videos launch they usually show up in my recommended feed .
@@JoelCook good ol' TH-cam. These awesome new features work 60% of the time, every time.
Nigel's got it right about the "TH-cam Guru" thing. Requiring the TH-cam Guru to have their own successful channel before listening is like a "Healer, heal thyself!" argument. It's entirely possible to be able to diagnose common problems on someone else's channel and be unable to diagnose them on your own, simply because you're too close to the problem. Paddy Galloway, for instance, is mostly a TH-cam Guru guy; all of his videos are about what other TH-camrs are doing right. But he makes way more money consulting with TH-camrs than he does making videos, so that's where he spends the overwhelming majority of his time. Colin and Samir are another example; all they do is interview other TH-camrs about what that TH-camr knows about being a success on TH-cam; their potential market of viewers is tiny, so of course they'll never be huge massive successes on TH-cam. The only one who's going to watch them is other TH-camrs.
Ooh! New ep