Do Math and Physics Teachers or Industry Engineers Do More Hand Calculations? Advice For Students Choosing A Career
Last Wednesday, 10 minutes after the final bell of the day, I was wiping chalk dust off my hands and packing my bag when Javi leaned against the doorframe of my physics lab, crumpled notebook in one hand. He’s the kind of student who fills the back pages of his notebook with extra derivations just for fun, the one who stops me after class to argue about different ways to solve a kinematics problem. He pushed his notebook across my lab counter, the pages smudged with graphite, and asked the question I’ve gotten three times in the last two years from seniors like him: “If I love doing calculations by hand, which career should I pick? Do teachers or industry engineers do more of it?”
I told him I could answer that from experience. I worked five years as a mechanical engineer at a small firm designing commercial HVAC systems before switching to high school teaching, so I’ve lived both sides. When I first took that engineering job, I was convinced I’d be filling pages of calculations every day, just like we did in my college physics and math classes. I was wrong. Almost all the heavy lifting was done by specialized software. We’d plug in building dimensions, required air flow, and local climate data, and the program would spit out pipe sizes, load calculations, and cost estimates immediately.
The only time I pulled out a pencil and paper was for a quick two or three line check when the output looked off. Once, the program gave us a pipe diameter that would have cost the client an extra $10,000 for no reason, so I did a full pressure drop calculation on a napkin during a lunch meeting to prove it was wrong. That was the longest full hand calc I did all year. Most days, my legal pad was full of meeting notes and to-do lists, not equations. All told, I did maybe two full sets of hand calculations a year.
Now? I do more full hand calculations before 10 a.m. most days than I did in an entire year as an engineer. Yesterday, I walked through three derivations of the work-energy theorem on the board, worked through four practice problems step by step with small groups, graded 27 handwritten problem sets that required me to rework every calculation to check for mistakes, and answered three after-class questions that required me to work through full examples from start to finish. That’s easily 15 full calculations by hand in one day. It’s not just me, either; every math and physics teacher I know spends a huge chunk of every workday writing out calculations by hand, because that’s how you help students see the steps, catch mistakes, and understand why the math works, not just what answer you get.
That’s not to say all engineers do almost no hand calcs. I have a college roommate who works as an aerospace research engineer at a small lab developing new rocket fuel injectors. He does more hand calcs than I did as an HVAC engineer, because he’s working on problems that don’t have existing software models. But even he told me last month that 90% of his heavy calculations are run through code he writes, and he only does hand calcs to check his assumptions or work through the basic model before he codes it. He says he does maybe three or four full hand calcs a week, which is still way less than the 10 to 15 I do most weeks.
A lot of parents I talk to worry when their kid says they’d rather study education than engineering, even when the kid says they love math. They worry it’s a waste of talent, or that the kid will get bored. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that teaching puts you in direct contact with the thing your kid loves most—working through the math step by step, by hand—every single day, in a way most industry jobs don’t.
For students and parents walking through this decision, there are a few concrete, low-effort steps to figure out what fits. First, shadow both for a full day, not just a 30-minute office tour. Javi shadowed a lead civil engineer at our town’s public works department a few weeks back. He said the engineer spent two hours in a meeting about road drainage, three hours reviewing CAD drawings, and did one five-minute hand calc to check a slope calculation. That was it for the whole day. When he shadowed me, he counted 12 full hand calcs before lunch. Second, when you shadow, ask to see the person’s scratch pad or notebook from the last week. Count how many full hand calculations you see. That’s a simple, concrete way to see what the job actually looks like, not what you learned in college or saw in movies. Third, if you can’t decide, test the middle ground: take a part-time tutoring gig or a night class teaching position while you work in industry, or do a summer internship in engineering while you’re studying education. That way you get to try both without committing right away.
Javi is still deciding. He’s leaning toward applying to education programs right now, because he likes that he gets to spend every day working through the math and physics he loves by hand, and he likes talking through it with other people. But he’s also signed up to take a research internship at the state university’s engineering department this summer, to see if a research role gives him the hand calc time he wants. It’s not a neat decision, and there’s no one right answer for everyone. If you love building things that people use every day, you can still be an engineer even if you love hand calcs—you just have to know the hand work will be a small part of your day, not the main event. If you love the process of working through calculations step by step, and sharing that process with other people, teaching will give you more of that than almost any engineering job out there. Javi’s taking his time, testing both, and that’s the best any of us can do.
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