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> Were they trying to prepare you for a world without paper or computers

Yes, most high schools spend a few months teaching “trigonometry” as a system for simplifying formulas that was primarily useful historically to save time for human calculators working with pen/paper and a printed lookup table. In the modern world this is entirely anachronistic and the content could be profitably compressed down to a couple weeks, with the saved time spent on something else. The main remaining utility is as rather cumbersome, unpleasant, and unenlightening algebra practice.



I think it would be enlightening but rarely done in school, is focus on the geometry of it and how the relationships are connected, such as https://math.wikia.org/wiki/Unit_circle?file=Unit_circle_ind...




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