They told us that for nursing school then it was all middle school level ratio and proportion (admittedly with multiple ratio steps like when you've ratioed the right volume of the dose but then you need to convert that to the gtt of your drip kit). The only real equations needed were three (maybe I'm forgetting one) that you could just memorize for the week then forget again until next semester. Two were °F to °C / °C to °F with one inverted ratio +/- the constant. The other one was BSA with two variables but you don't have to solve for one or the other they're both just measurements you get from the patient and plug in.

...but then you realize that the only acceptable score on that test is a 100% (some programs will drop you if you get anything less than a 100% on the drug dose test after two tries) and that what nursing school is actually looking for is both accuracy and precision. You're doing a relatively basic but fundamentally logical, and more importantly highly repetitive puzzle 25 times in a row in an hour and if you make even one error you fail. I had to create a whole specific mental technique to beat my ADHD into submission enough to 100% that test (honestly half of what nursing school taught me was ultimately ADHD / attention management techniques, which it turns out is actually also most of being a nurse). Like the EMR does basically all of the math these days but being aware of where my attention is and why and how to nudge it where it needs to be has been suuuper useful.

Edit: BMI! That was the equation I was forgetting about. Weirdly it's mostly useful in population health but also if you're under a certain BMI on admission the EMR starts suggesting a diet consult every time I open that chart until I either document a reason to permanently override it or just put in the consult so that the dietician can immediately decide whether or not to start loading them full of protein shakes. Really important for the seniors if they go into the hospital with 0 chub they're probably not coming back out alive.

Hmm... I think it was something like, "you need to be good at math if you want to be a computer programmer", and in some ways that remains true.

I mean, you don't need to be good at your times tables to learn javascript, but there are lots of transferable skills.

I'm playing around with some Geospatial data stuff presently, and the math involved is about as complex as it gets, but you don't really need to do the math just playing around with the data.

That seems like a more recent development. I think at least another generation and a half got in before that

Logic, or understanding math.

I never heard that one. No one gave a crap about computers at all.

I heard this line while wearing this in middle school

Did you keep it in your pockets? didn't think so, teacher was right then, uninstall your root drive now.

I had that watch while teachers told me that.

I almost wrote "calculator/sliderule/abacus" for that reason

Nope, even the earliest mobile phones have had calculators built in (talking about commercially available mobile phones here, nor the suitcase sized monstrosities of the 80s).

this phrase was really only plausibly used for about 33 years - the time between the first fully electronic calculator and the first smartphone.

Not even that long.

I went to middle school during the 80s, when calculator watches were a major hype (had one myself at some point).

Even back then, 40 years ago, none of my teachers would have used that phrase.
It was just too clear already, that technology was already overtaking the assumptions made by that phrase.

Even dumb phones had a calculator. Maybe around 1999 you should have stopped talking about calculators.

Mechanical calculators have been around since the 1700’s and widespread since the 1920’s, though. And before that we had the abacus and slide rule. Mental math has never been a flex, lol

Exacty. A calculator is useless if you don’t know how to structure the problem and what and how to calculate it.

I mean finger painting is taught to just know how to do it that way. There is merit to knowing how to do things with limited tools available. The basketball analogy falls flat though. that one is like doing math without numbers.

I grew up thinking I was horrible at math... till it became abtract enough that calculations were rare...

Turns out my handwriting is shit, and I cant manually calculate for my life. But if those two things are not a factor, I am really got at math.

Also. I had a "computational methods" class in uni, where we had to do algorithms with a calculator.... almost failed. Then went out off of that field and became a programmer. Im fairly sure if that class was actually computer base I'd gotten a perfect score.

You're part of my generation, we were the last.

Engineers with slide rules in their pockets

Born in '96.

I heard that a couple of times growing up; then my last math teacher in HS allowed me to write programs for solving problems on my graphing calculator and even use them during tests.

Teachers at my school in the early 00's were still saying it. One of the better maths teachers would add to it by asking if we really wanted to grow up to be stupid and unable to do such basic sums unaided.

From doing geometry in 12 year old classes in 2002, to algebra in 14 yr classes, our experience never called for offloading the math onto the calculator. Whenever I'm helping my son with math homework I try to ensure pencil on paper is the first step we exhaust before any magical math steps.

It sounds like obvious old man get-off-my-lawn energy, but when I was growing up the kids running games on TI calculators were the ones who were curious and also tutored sufficiently to not have any problems with math.

That was never me, of course. I was too broke and ignorant to have a TI-84 until college, and only used it in one math class.

I was in elementary school ins the late 70s and early 80s. Second grade. Mrs. Anderson said it. And it made sense because the calculator at home was the size of a brick and you had to plug it into the wall with a power adapter. And it cost like $800 adjusted for inflation.

I'm hardly 30 and my 2nd grade teacher told us we'd never have calculators in our pockets. I have brought it up with a few friends and most have heard the same!

I am newgen enough that I was raised shittily with a cell phone that had a calculator on it. It sucked but it was there. And I was doing worst in math. Forgot which grade.

Teacher dropped the line (different language), I went "I literally do have a calculator in my pocket" and pulled out my phone still running an "Are you sure you want to quit?"ed game of checkers with me literally doing random moves without understanding the game and still winning, then she went "well, what if you don't want to bring it, or forget it at home?", I dismissed it (but retrospectively she was right), and then I lost the argument with the teacher asking me how I would handle a social interaction with a store cashier.

I have specific memories of multiple math teachers telling me this from elementary school through high school, in the 90’s and early 00’s. Then I got to college and it was all “how good are you at making computers do all the math for you?” AKA computer science

Hey, before you go start gaslighting strangers that their memories are false (I also remember hearing the phrase in school in the 80s), consider a few things:

First, while calculator watches may have existed, I don't remember seeing them in my childhood. They weren't universal.

Second, teachers are adults, kinda set in their ways. Brand-new 'toys' aren't going to change their thinking on a dime. I can very easily believe teachers continuing to use the phrase even after circumstances have changed (see also the other poster mentioning hearing it in the 00s).

Third, the fact that you can "prove" the saying wrong with your arguments doesn't mean that all of our teachers have thought it through the way you did (and I think all of us have had teachers where the response to this debate would be "Quit talking back! Detention for you, buster!" instead of "Oh, yeah, interesting thought...").

I work in IT. Our apprentice students were complaining the other day about learning subnets the binary way. I laughed and told them, we all learn the concept. Then when we’re old and lazy we learn to spot the popular ones /32 /29 /24 /16 etc. For everything else there’s a subnet calculator

We were being told that many, many years before you were born, kiddo.

Did yours hate kids as much as mine did?

Especially for ascii Mario!

what class was the first to allow calculators? I wasn't allowed to use it in math until sophomore year of HS.

Yep and they make a lot more than calculators, as I found out the other day. Was recently looking up desktop DACs (basically audio processors and amps for your PC) and a bunch of them had Texas instruments chips in them, to my surprise.

They’re huge, but the calculators are the only thing they sell to consumers. Mostly they make wholesale components for other companies IIRC