My daughter is a senior in high school and she is taking advanced placement statistics which sparks a daily debate in our house.  When will I actually use this in real life?

I use math daily is my usual response.  For example, I use the common math word problem continuously on the road:

The jerk in front of me is driving ten miles under the speed limit and the car in the opposing lane is driving 55 mph.  Based upon my depth perception, she appears to be a half-mile away, at what speed will I have to accelerate to overtake the jerk and not hit oncoming car in a head-on collision.  This is life or death so I would so math is pretty important.

I also look at my dash panel and see how many miles to remaining until I reach an empty gas tank  whereby an advanced word problem calculation occurs:

Given my great american truck gets 17 miles per gallon (come on Prius build a truck that gets 50 mpg for regular sized people to fit in then I will be impressed with your hybrid) and I have 300 miles until empty how many trips to work at 60 miles round trip will I be able to get until I get paid again next Friday?  Which leads to the calculation of how much do I have remaining in my bank account in order to subsidize the sheik’s newest harem?

That does not even include licensing for servers and software which requires a Ph.D. for Microsoft and VMWare, but luckily I do not do that on a daily basis.  So, yes kids math is important unless you want to die in a head-on collision or be stuck on the side of the road without gas. 

Enjoy your weekend everyone!