A little background. I'm the foreman of a small machine shop. Business has
been picking up greatly and we are in need of machinists. We are having very
little luck in finding qualified people and when we find someone that seems
promising, it generally turns out that they are no more than a machine
operator. Able to set up and operate a CNC (usually a vertical mill) but no
more, nor do they want to do more. We have gotten to the point of training
people into the position. We have gone through a number of them. Many, when
they find out that it is real work and they can't just stop thinking and
show up to work on autopilot after a month or two, either quit or become
worthless to the point that they get fired. We have two trainees in the shop
right now. One is female (extremely rare in this trade). She never made it
through high school but has a GED. I'm finding that she has a great learning
ability and enthusiasm. It is quite obvious that her problems in school were
due to boredom. To get her math skills up to par, I have been giving her
homework. She has been doing quite well now that she sees a need. To bad
someone couldn't have instilled a real world need in her in school. She'd be
that much further ahead. The other trainee, a male, just out of high school,
made a comment the other day that really struck me. He said "I took
trigonometry for two years and thought it would never be good for anything.
Then, the first job I get, I need it".

"Morris Dovey" wrote in message
...
F. George McDuffee (in )
said:


At another high school I was called in to take over for a math teacher
who was laid up in the hospital for several weeks following an
accident. I decided to take in a "show and tell" for each topic for
all of the classes to illustrate how the stuff they were studying was
used in the real world - and encouraged questions and discussions of
the applications. It was damn near magical! The kids - all of 'em -
decided that math could be not only interesting, but fun. The
eighth-graders (studying arithmetic and geometric series) took the bit
between their teeth and galloped into differential calculus without
having a clue that's what they were doing. I feel truly sorry for all
of the math teachers who miss out on having the kind of highs I
experienced. But the important point is that all it took was providing
links between the subject matter and the real world to "set the hook."