Cubing Math

So called “useless” information

Describe it-
When you are in a classroom and the teacher is talking about something that you think you will never use in life, be it Roman History or how to use a semi-colon. For me that was math, more specifically Sine, Cosine and Tangent. All through school I was in “advanced placement math” up until high school where they introduced me to these concepts. I was doing well until that unit and from there till the end of the class I had fallen behind to the point where I used that as my catch up on sleep class. I ended up taking the class again and passing the second time but only barely. That ended my attempt at math for High school. My first round at college I had to take that level course again since it had been so long. Again I did well until that unit where I then fell behind and wound up failing because I just could not get my head around how this could possibly useful. I would never have to use this in the real world for any reason. After I moved out of my parents house I got a job at a land surveying firm where it turns out that every time I take a measurement with the instrument those are the functions vital to the equations that made my job possible.   

Analyze it-
I am good at remembering random trivia, I do alright at retention of small things, but where it comes to larger concepts I have a very difficult time retaining them if I cannot link them to something functional in life. Math almost seems to embody this notion of stuff they are teaching you that you will never ever need to know how to do in the workforce. How many jobs actually require you to know how to find the long side of a right triangle, or mathematically be able to find a missing length with given angles. Now that I have the practical side of that down I know if I were to take it again I would have a much better time with it because I would be able to relate it to something functional and therefore force myself to retain it.

Argue-
You never know when something someone teaches you will come in handy. That rope knot used to pull a tarp tight, how to signal that you are turning on a bicycle, or how to set a splint. Some things you retain because you think they could be absolutely vital someday, others you remember by chance, but many are forgotten because they are deemed unnecessary for the life of the common man. Sometimes those ones you inadvertently forget are the ones that could turn out to be the underpinning of some major aspect of your life. Just because you can not see the use for it today does not make it useless.

Apply it-
One day while I had a lot of down time between measurements I decided that I wanted to try to figure out how the instrument could determine a horizontal distance based on a known angle off of a ninety and a known slope distance. I drew a diagram in my field book with all of the appropriate tools, the total station measuring device on top of a tripod, and a prism on top of a rod, and because I did know some geometry I knew to draw in a little triangle between the parts with the long distance being the slope distance and the known angle being my vertical axis. I then entered in known values and the true answers since the field calculator had done all of my work for me. From there I tried to work backwards to find out how the calculator arrived at the answers it had with the limited geometry I had retained. After about thirty minutes of filling the page with failing mathematical equations I gave up. About a week later I was going through the total stations manual for an unrelated issue and I came across the page that described how the total station did its magic. My old nemesis sine, cosine and tangent.