No we don’t.

I mean, go ahead and lie about how I spent 6 years of my own life to my face. Memorizing proofs and working endless assignments of just…equations. Here is an equation. Do thing to it. Solve it, simplify it, factor it, graph it. I plugged and chugged so many numbers into the quadratic equation, I don’t think I was ever told what that’s for. Some chapters had token word problems.

A lot of the math I actually know I learned in physics class, where you’d do unit math. That 25 meters traveled in 5 seconds means a velocity of 5 meters/second. Science class math comes with sniff tests that math class math doesn’t.

The way I was introduced to order of operations was, the teacher wrote a long expression on the board, this plus that divided by such minus thus times such plus this times that. Spend a second solving this. Okay, who got 7? Who got -23? If you got -23, you’re right.

That is FUCKGARBAGE teaching. It may be the flight instructor in me, that my classroom is an actual airplane that we fly over actual people and their homes, but few things piss me off as deeply as setting up your students to fail. Because introducing the subject this way separates your class into two groups: Those that already have a functioning understanding of the topic whose time is being wasted, and those who don’t already understand it and need you to teach them this skill, who now feel tricked, confused and frustrated.

This teacher went on to explain Order of Operations as a series of rules you follow because following rules is what you do. “You do parenthesis before exponents before multiplication/division before addition/subtraction.” PEMDAS, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. This was taught with the same “This is how nature is” attitude as the planets of the solar system or how ionic bonds work, except algebraic notation is artificial. It’s manmade, like the English language. It’s a method of communicating ideas, except it was taught as a series of rules and procedures that you were supposed to memorize how to do without understanding the goal, and fuck your life if you lacked the vocabulary to describe what about it you didn’t understand.

That’s the one.

That reminds me of something my flight instructor told me as a teenager. If you lose your engine at night, aim for a dark patch, because lights mean structures. Set up for an emergency landing as you usually would, and as you get down to short final altitude, turn your landing light on. If you don’t like what you see, turn it back off.

You can become a private pilot with an airplane or helicopter rating in 40 hours. 250 is for commercial pilots.

And this shit does happen.

If it’s marketed to trained pilots, it’s a “helicopter.” If it’s being marketed to untrained pilots, it’s a “flying car.”

Students asking “why do we need to learn this” or worse graduates who proudly proclaim “Day 19,337 of never using the quadratic equation” are a symptom of teachers who haven’t read their Thorndike.

Learning is an active process. It takes effort to do. People do not like being made to waste effort. Students will be much more effective learners when they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “You never know when this will come in handy” is not good enough. This is Thorndike’s principle of readiness. And especially high school teachers are bad at satisfying it.

Math teachers get it very often, because for some reason we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians. Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples and teach math as a series of rules to be applied to contextless problems, and to the student it feels like years of pointless busywork.

And while I can’t claim to have ever factored a polynomial in my daily life since leaving school, I did recently come up against the order of operations. I calculated the width of some cabinet doors, and I factored in the gaps between them wrong. 3 doors, 4 gaps between the doors. I did door_width = opening_width / 3 - 4 * gap_width. When I needed to do door_width = (opening_width - 4 * gap_width) / 3. In the first case, you end up subtracting all 4 gap widths from each door. I would be better at math today if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12.

I’ve seen cats just reach up the chute and work the mechanism manually.

For further context, see the movie Cashback.

Or would you see the photons that are present where your eyes are at the moment, and by moving around you see the photons that already were where you just moved, still approximating normal vision?

I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.

When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it’s what schools are highly geared toward doing.

An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that “convective” means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word “convective” it’s basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You’ve probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:

Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?

A. Upslope Fog

B. Thunderstorms

C. Stratus Clouds

Okay, what should a pilot do about thunderstorms? Are they bad? What about a thunderstorm is bad? A student who can answer those questions, who can explain that thunderstorms contain strong turbulence and winds that can break the airplane or throw it out of control have reached the Understanding level.

Problem: Sitting in the classroom talking about something is NOT flying a plane. I’ve had students who can explain why thunderstorms are dangerous fly right toward an anvil-shaped cloud without a care in the world, because they didn’t recognize a thunderstorm when they saw one. Living in a forest, people around here don’t get a good look at them from the side; the sky just turns grey and it rains a lot and there’s bright flashes and booming noises. If you can get a good look at one, it’s a tremendously tall cloud that flattens out way up high and tends to have a bit that sticks out like the horn on an anvil. Even in the clear air under that horn you’ll get severe turbulence. A student that can identify a thunderstorm and steers to avoid it can Apply their knowledge, and have thus reached the Application level.

It’s a sign that you’re ready for your checkride if, upon getting a weather briefing that includes convective activity, the student makes wise command decisions to either reschedule the flight for a day of safer weather, or for isolated storms plots a route that steers to the safe side of the weather and plans for contingencies such as turning back or diverting to alternates. A student that alters his navigational choices based on weather forecasts has reached the correlation level.

It’s difficult to go beyond the understanding level in a classroom with textbooks and paper tests, which is too much of what K-12 and college is like.

…And still gets its ass handed to it because they show up and are like “Well now what?” Because the Klingons are perfectly invisible.

She also has a lasso, so she’s not the only one in her stories to get tied up.

Or the end boss of Half Life

fun fact: Undiscovered Country features the only instance of Kirk’s Enterprise arriving to a battle in fighting trim amd ready for combat.

Start with Wrath of Kahn.

Sure. It’s a sequel to a Franchise: The Movie. It is also a direct sequel to a random episode of the show. It is a self-contained story; I don’t think it bothers to mention the events of The Motion Picture, it does a good job establishing the antagonist because this movie came out in 1982, it’s entirely possible that even a Trek fan in the audience missed that one episode of a 20 year old TV show so there’s a whole sequence where Kahn puts Chekov on his knees and recites “I am the very model of a vengeful space antagonist, I blame the death of my wife on the deeds of the protagonist. I quote from Melville’s Moby Dick completely unironically. I grapple thee, I stab at thee, I spit to my last breath at thee.”

Beyond beating the audience over the head with its literary references (to the point of showing a copy of Moby Dick and Tale of Two Cities on screen YOU FUCKING HACKS) it does a reasonable job of world building, and the rest of the franchise refers back to this movie a lot…to the point of remaking it twice.

It’s a self contained plot that comes to an end…even though it has two direct sequels. Search for Spock is where we get fully formed modern Klingons complete with their language, and The Voyage Home is weird, but also kind of cool, and probably the most Star Trek of the TOS era movies…I also believe Voyage Home has the best soundtrack of a Trek film.

I might still be young enough to pull that off for a few more years yet.

The way I would implement that is to day one set a date for elections of a congress and my own retirement. I’m imagining a Mars Attacks scenario in which the ak ak ak aliens blow up congress and the government of the United States consists of the President’s teenage daughter and a mariachi band. If through some set of goofy circumstances no meaningful government exists above me and I am in full command, we’re gonna do shit my way for, say, four years, and then we’re calling a congress. At which time I retire to a small estate somewhere in the Carolinas with only ceremonial powers, like I reserve the right to throw out first pitches of baseball games.

You mean constantly calling for his imprisonment and murder?

it depends on how it’s stored, and a lot of the problems will come from the cork rather than the wine.

I don’t think anything you just said is correct.

I cannot find anything about a tape format called “LP-2000” that came out in 1970.

Phillips released the VCR format in 1972, and a successor Video 2000 in 1979. Most people on earth have not heard of these, because they weren’t nearly as successful as Sony’s Betamax format which lost the format war to…

VHS. Made by JVC, Japan Victor Corporation, at the time owned by Matsushita…and/or Panasonic? Not Phillips.

The first VHS deck was released by JVC under the Victor brand name in 1976, three years before Video 2000. If VHS is a successor to anything, it’s U-Matic.

There was actually a tape format called VCR. Made by Phillips, I believe it was the first video tape system that recorded a high quality signal in color available to consumers. It was test marketed in the PAL regions, proving to have reliability issues, and then JVC launched VHS later that year and Phillips gave up.