How much we forget

I’m sure everyone at school did at least one subject where they thought "what’s the point? I’ll never use this in real life", and for me that was the case with most of them – even the ones I liked. The Maths I use in everyday life is basic, and I’m crap at it now without a calculator. In all seriousness, my addition was better when I was 10 than it is now. Many thanks to the Little Professor and a pile of cheap batteries.

My English skills are not as good as they once were either. I’m not going to blame spell checkers as I rarely use them, it’s simply that nobody’s checking what I write/type any more. More and more often I put a word down and wonder if how I’ve spelt it is actually correct. I didn’t have that problem 15 years ago.

Let’s not even touch on Geography and History. OK, then. Let’s. I never at any point in geography was taught where places were. I learned about what causes rain and stuff. Which is great. If I want to know what the weather’s going to be like, I’ll check a weather report. If I want to know if somewhere’s a potential earthquake zone, I’ll check the travel guide (once I’ve figured out where the hell it is).

All the history I was ever taught was politics and it bored the hell out of me. I know two people who went to two different schools in different parts of the country who got The Wild West, Castles and Medicine as their three modules. Lucky ********. Still, with the exception of being able to enjoy a dodgy cowboy or medieval film a little more due to knowing trivia, I don’t see the use. There’s no need for me to learn from all those other people’s mistakes – they didn’t make them with computers.

CDT (crafts) is an area best avoided and I do so by using what little I was taught in Computing to pay the bills so I can get someone else in to do the jobs involving hammers and stuff.

Biology, Chemistry and Physics just don’t get a look in at all unless I’m doing a pub quiz. Why else would I need to know the difference between a compound and an alloy, or which of veins and arteries take blood away from the heart? I certainly can’t recall ever checking a new car to see if the side panels would reflect beta radiation or how much energy would be stored in one of the suspension damper springs at full load.

There’s a reason all this has come up. I’m doing some coursework for the OU at the moment, and it’s an entry-level maths one. When I signed up for it, I looked down the checklist of topics it covered and it was full of "yup, done that" items. Which was fine. Until I tried to do them and realised that although I knew the names, I’d utterly forgotten how to do things with them.

In all seriousness, if I could find someone who’d got an A* in GCSE maths last year (nothing less – we’re talking equivalent to a D-grade from 10 years ago here. B-grade passes are soon to be as low as 17%), they could probably walk this material. I’m going mental.

I’m going to have to buck my ideas up though. Can you imagine how embarassing it’d be if I had kids and they could do sums in their heads quicker than me? I either have to re-learn everything or learn to bullshit more. And quickly. I read the term "quadratics" and started to wonder if they were the ones near the Balearics.

I haven’t even started to look at the Digital Comms stuff yet.