Today I actually used something I learned in school. Having completed 9 years of college (My parents said they would support me as long as I was in school. :)) and countless corporate training classes, seminars and certifications, I have to say that I’m been disappointed in how little training I’ve been able to apply in my work. In my opinion, our educational institutions just aren’t that in sync with the skills needed in the real world.
But today I got to use something I learned way back in high school geometry – how to determine the length of a hypotenuse of a right triangle. I know, not exciting, but I had the lengths of 3 out of 4 sides of an irregular-shaped property in Oakbrook Terrace I’m listing this week and I needed the length of the 4th side so that I can put all the dimensions in the multiple listing systems. I should also mention that this is especially important since the property is a teardown. The value is in the land, so the lot dimensions are critical. It turned-out to be almost half an acre.
Having taken high geometry over 30 years ago (and that would make me how old? ;)), I will admit that I had an idea of how to calculate the hypotenuse, but I couldn’t remember for sure, so I entered “calculate length of hypoteneuse” in Google and clicked the Google Search button. First, Google asked me “Did you mean: calculate length of hypotenuse?” Ok, so I didn’t get the spelling of hypotenuse correct. I thought it was a pretty good guess having not used it for over 30 years. I clicked on Google’s suggestion even though there were 2 search results for the misspelled version. If they can’t spell hypotenuse either, how do I know that they know how to calculate it?
The top search result was a page titled, “Trigonometric Tricks” by Cambrian College in Ontario, Canada. Who knew Canadians cared more than anyone else about geometry? 🙂 There it was, the Pythagorean Theorem, a2 + b2 = h2. “In any right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two other sides.” If Google had been around 30 years ago, maybe I could have skipped geometry.
Fran Bailey specializes in downtown Chicago, Lincoln Park and Lake View condos, co-op apartments and houses. She has shared home buying and selling advice since 2006 and written about over 130 Chicago high rises. To schedule showings for any listings, get a 
