Shop Math = Trigonometry or Bust

I took math all four years in high school, but when I got to trig & calc senior year there were only (5) of us and we got stuck in with an 'advanced' class and the teacher did not have any time for us 'slow learners'. He spent all his time with the advanced students and none with us.
Then one fine day he shot his mouth off stating that we were indeed 'slow learners' and that we should have already taken the T&C classes Junior year and that he didn't appreciate wasting his time teaching basic math.
That did it for another student and myself and we gathered our books, left the class and headed down to the counselors office to drop the class.
The other three dropped the class the same day and then the 'advanced' class no longer had the needed (12) bodies in the class required to keep it scheduled.

Fast forward two years ('79) and I get tasked with "trig'ing" out drawings for the CNC Programmer to use to code parts on our large horizontal mill.
I was screwed.
A buddy who was a QC engineer got permission from his boss to teach me trig a couple hours a day for a week.
Thank you Jim! Saved my arse. Illinois Tool Works (ITW) had a booklet with the same charts above in #13.
Bought a Toshiba electronic calculator, thank goodness they were available.

A couple of years after that Sharp came out with their EL-5xxx series of calculators with available cassette interface.
Bought some TRS-80 math programs on cassette at Radio Shack and was able to adapt and hack them onto the Sharp.
Used it for years.

Nowadays I go the CAD route. I have LibreCAD on the Linux laptop out in the shop for 'quickie' stuff.
 
Suzuki4evr said:
I only like it when I understand it and works for me :big grin:
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And that's fair. I think that is my problem now. It wasn't easy, didn't need it THEN and now I don't have a classroom with a teacher to teach me and answer my questions. Is it fair to say it seems even harder now? Maybe it the lack of that structure making it so challenging..
 
I past by the skin of my behind in school, but got 79% in college, don't know how I did that though. As for teachers you need,you will get it right here at H-M (please don't ask me :laughing: ) and YouTube of course.
 
I’ve had a whole lot of years of math, so trig and algebra are natural and I use them in the shop all the time. I observe that the basic problem is that teaching math is done in a way that makes most people hate it. The problems they give you are uninteresting, meaningless and irrelevant. I wish I could get up the energy to teach a first year calculus class and make it extremely understandable and useful. We might have to review some basic stuff, but I believe anybody interested in machine tools has all the brainpower needed to actually enjoy this stuff. Yes? No?
 
Winegrower said:
I’ve had a whole lot of years of math, so trig and algebra are natural and I use them in the shop all the time. I observe that the basic problem is that teaching math is done in a way that makes most people hate it. The problems they give you are uninteresting, meaningless and irrelevant. I wish I could get up the energy to teach a first year calculus class and make it extremely understandable and useful. We might have to review some basic stuff, but I believe anybody interested in machine tools has all the brainpower needed to actually enjoy this stuff. Yes? No?
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This. So much this. I have exactly the same experience. If something like Khan Academy was available when I was at school, I think I'd have had a better time.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure advanced maths is appropriate to teach in mandatory mainstream education where tuition is freely available online. An overview such that you know what it is and does should you need to use it in your life or career might be much more effective, and time in class better spent explaining in detail the mathematics behind, say, credit/savings interest that's unilaterally useful in life. At the end of the day, the rigid educational model is a prehistoric anachronism in the modern world and needs looking at differently. Everyone is different, and it fails the majority of students as it is.
 
I found math to be rather boring. Memorize a bunch of formulas and just plug in the known numbers to get the unknown number. Never went past algebra II. The high school counselors didn't like that. You should have heard them scream when I wanted to take home ecc. I mean that's where the girls were. They never did let me take that class. Barely let me take advanced auto which I have used all of my life. They wanted me to take worthless liberal arts type classes like yearbook, journalism, poetry, etc.

Back before there were gps' I dabbled in spherical trig to help learn celestial navigation for boat navigation. Still have the sextant on the boat and use it occasionally. When I was out cruising on my sailboat I researched how the old time navigators from the 1600's, 1700's and 1800's solved the navigational triangle so they knew where they were. Created some worksheets to help plug in the numbers in the right places.

Math comes easy for me. What can I say.
 
I was never a math wiz, but as as I have a calculator and a Machinery's Handbook I can muddle through.
 
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