Do you mean making simplifying assumptions to make a problem tractable? Of course it’s still going on. It has to be, otherwise you just cannot do anything.

> Assume the penguin's beak is a cone

It is impossible to consider the true shape of a penguin’s beak for several reasons:

- you’d need to go all the way down to the electron clouds of the atoms of the beak, at which point the very concept of shape is shaky

- every penguin has a different beak so even if you describe perfectly one of them, it does not necessarily make your calculation more realistic in general.

There is a spectrum of approximations one can make, but a cone is a sensible shape at a first order. It’s also simple enough that students can actually do it without years of experience and very advanced tools.

What do you think they should do instead?