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Trigonometry
(thelemmy.club)
[Harold leaning back in his chair: Day 1209 of not using sin, cos or tan.]
I've been clean since 2002.
Weirdly enough I think that the majority of my use of trig since college has been for video games. That being said, I feel its squarely one of those "you probably wont need it much, but theres a chance you will someday for some random thing or will go into a profession that needs math that requires knowing trig to learn, and you wont want to have to learn it the first time right then." things. Its pretty foundational to other math and does have a lot of practical applications even if not for everyone, so might as well teach it to kids when theyre old enough to learn it.
That's not dissimilar from my experience, one of my favorite "I'm so glad I know how trig works" moments was for a data visualization class I had, I wanted to animate a little rocket ship orbiting the earth. I can't fully remember the exact math I used, but it was so gratifying to realize that I could use trig to convert rotational degrees per second into a point in space that I could draw my icon at (as well as the angle to tilt the image).
One of my hobbies is 3d printing and I do a bunch of my own modeling, so trig pops up there pretty regularly too.
I think that's the absolute worst reason possible. None of my homies remember anything about trigonometry other than that it exists and some of the more relatable concepts like the literal meaning of tangential and the name of the shape created when you shake a jump rope.
No, it's not actually good to teach things to children that are so abstract that it doesn't stay in memory without hardcore drilling. It is MUCH smarter to study trigonometry when you need it.
The trouble with that is, if youre going to go into a field that does need it regularly, theres a decent chance youre going to need it because you need math for which trig is like, foundational to the foundations of the thing you actually need. It would be a fair bit of a slowdown to go teach such basic things to all the engineers and scientists and whoever else may need such things before teaching them the math that builds on it, and you both do need those professions in a modern society and dont know in advance which kids will ultimately end up in them.
Also, abstract? It seems to me that, being generally related to and derived from geometry, trig is one of the less abstract bits of math, simply because you can draw out the circles and triangles and waveforms and relatively clearly see what the concepts represent and how they relate to eachother, rather than just writing out a sequence of symbols and remembering what to do with them all. If it takes hardcore drilling to stick around, thats in my view more a case of it being taught in an ineffective manner that prioritizes brute force memorization over actual learning.