Mike, it's the teacher's answer that's important here. A friend's son (a 4.0 student) asked a similar question of his high school teacher regarding some math exercise he was forced to go through. Her absolutely most stupid answer in the world was, "so that you can do more advanced math classes." As a teacher, I would always provide practical applications for exercises in math or electronics. If you can't come up with a half-way decent reason for doing something, then that something isn't worth doing, whether it's math, illegal drugs or cliff-jumping. That put's math in the same category as polital science, history or physical education. About the only thing you can make a living at with those types of degrees is teaching other that same claptrap.
I still have my VTVM, VOM, RC bridge and slide rule. All with analog scales, some logarithmic, some linear. And I can still use them all and do. Granted, the slide rule is more for funzies since an electronic calculator is much faster and less error-prone, but warm-up time or not, I still love my VTVM. Ever see a run-of-the-mill DMM measure over 20M ohms? A VTVM can measure up to 1000M ohms! There are still uses for "antiquated" electronics, especially after an EMP hits.