When will I use this in life?

      When I was in middle school and high school, math was not my favorite subject. I did not like it because I felt like most other kids in thinking "When am I going to use this in life?" My thinking on that question stemmed from algebra and trigonometry. I never thought I would need any of this in life. Man was I wrong. I am sure others have thought the same thing with math. This post is going to explore these two subjects and when I or others have encountered these in "real life".

      First lets talk about algebra. Algebra is basically finding the unknown. For example, given an equation that says 

3x-5=13

we can find what x is equal to which in this example goes as the following

3x=18

x=6

This doesn't exactly seem like it would be helpful in normal everyday living, but it definitely is. For example, lets say that somebody has 13 dollars and wants to know how many bags of candy they can buy for halloween. The bags of candy are $3 each and you have a coupon for $5 off any purchase at the store. You would end up setting up an equation similar to the one above and solving for x. This tells you how many bags of candy you would be able to purchase. This seems very elementary and basic, but I have run across people who do not know how to do this because they didn't pay attention during basic algebra.
      When I learned about trigonometry, I learned all about sines, cosines, and tangents. We used the unit circle and it was very confusing. I am sure thats how a lot of high schoolers feel when learning it. I never thought this would end up helping me down the road. It came clear to me when I was building a sound system for a mini van. The system contained 12 speakers and 4 subs and we needed to know how long each side was going to be when we angled the speakers. We needed to know if the speaker pieces would fit with the length of the back before we started to build them and waste materials. Well I saw that we had actually created a 30-60-90 degree angled triangle. So I used what I remembered from trig to figure out if it would fit. We ended up designing it so we had an extra foot of space available. So we put in an extra side piece to move the speakers further towards the back. The pictures below show the initial speaker set up and the completed project. The first picture is without the added piece and the second is with the added piece.

      Another example of this is when I was having a conversation with a coworker. We started talking about school and about how they should teach kids about things that will come up later in life like taxes and retirement accounts. We then started talking about how we used to think that we would never use things we learned in life. He told me he wished he had paid better attention in math class. He used to be a builder and he said he wished he understood the math behind certain shapes that he would use. He talked about a house that he had to build that had a regular hexagonal porch on it. He told me it took him way too long to figure out what angle he had to cut the wood to get a regular hexagon shape. 

      After my experience and talking to my coworkers and others, I am going to make sure my kids understand math throughout school. I now know that no matter which type of math it is, it could possibly come up later in life.