You must log in or register to comment.
They don’t pay teachers enough and sometimes it shows.
Similar story of my own: Had a middle school computer teacher who told us to use “File -> Open URL” on Internet Explorer/Netscape (can’t remember which) which opened a prompt window with a text field to enter in a URL. And I pointed out that you can just use the address bar and do the same thing and she angrily told me that I had to do it the proper way. While I thought she wasn’t looking, I used the address bar anyway. She apparently had been trying to spy if I disobeyed, caught me, and told me that I failed the assignment (I did not even know I was being graded).
Another different computer teacher at my high school I had seemed to more or less admit she had no idea what she was doing (she originally taught a different subject, she seemed legitimately nervous/insecure about possibly losing her job) though she tried by just reading the text book to us verbatim for a few days. Eventually, she gave up and the students just taught each other computer stuff in her class, then when they ran out of things to teach each other they just played Age of Empires all class and the she let us.
Something about this reminds me of macOS’s default Finder settings that doesn’t let you manually type a path.
This is such a strange and irritating limitation of an other great OS.
Dude, School was the worst f’ing psyop.
Give me a straight question and answer on the material, and I’ll 100% it. No, we can’t do that… Here’s four answers that are all technically correct, choose the MOST correct one.
Ohh so it’s pros and cons of a situation and you need to pick the one with the most upsides or least downsides? No, they’re all just mostly ok, but we were REALLY thinking about answer B when we wrote the question.
School is like slavery in many aspects to be honest. Though it‘s really not a physical one, but a mental one.
You can not do much without getting permission from an authority figure first, including relieving basic biological needs such as eating or using the bathroom. You are not allowed to leave the facilities without permission. You are classified into different groups based on your performance on tests, and eventually seperated based on that (usually at high school/university level). You are trained for at least 12 years in this way to obey arbitrary rules and procedures, which are designed to get you ready for the capitalist hellscape that awaits you. Some countries even use this period of time to push another agenda on you, usually one related to religion &\ nationalism. At last, you come out of it (while probably having forgotten many of the things ”taught” to you) and you are immediately put into mandatory military service, or you come to the point of needing a service job just to survive.
Autodidacticism definitely rocks, and homeschooling would be a better idea if one was qualified for it and the child’s social needs could be met elsewhere.
Kinda unrelated to your example, but I just wanted to expand on your psyop comment.
That’s a solid take. The difference I’ve noticed, though everyone’s experience is different, is with homeschooling. From what I’ve seen, quite a few parents take it on despite not really being suited for it. Some seem to have their own forms of indoctrination, the kind that even public schools won’t entertain, so they choose to keep their kids out entirely.
My son has a handful of friends who are homeschooled. (We kept him home a bit longer during Covid while he did remote learning, and he kept a lot of those friends.) His friends span the full spectrum: a couple are pretty middle-of-the-road, you’d never guess they were homeschooled. One lives under really strict, almost militant control, and another seems to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.
I hate the crap that goes on when the establishment runs the game, but I also hate what happens when nutjobs run their own game. It’s like we need some kind of framework to keep everyone on the same page, where kids just learn and excel. We should get nominal discipline, learn self-control, but also not be pigeonholeed with a lot of redtape used to protect schools from legal action. Some kind of common sense brigade :)
Homeschooling works best for the kids when the parents aren’t working and are well educated. Most parents don’t meet these requirements, the ones that do usually do and the kids to private school because it costs about the same.
Average autism experience tbh
That, and teachers really fucking hate being called out on something for some reason.
All my teachers were fine with it honestly :3 at least after primary school… if you corrected them they might’ve given you extra credit
But the general notion of saying something correct and people saying that that’s wrong, and not knowing why still stands
I asked my science teacher why and how the periodic table was setup like it was, I got “that’s how it’s setup”
But why, there as to be a reason
That’s just the way they made it
Yeah because they have to have gone by something what is that something
That’s just the way they did, stop asking questions (please don’t fucking learn in here)
Godamn that pissed me off.
Really? We got a detailed breakdown of why the periodic table is the way it is
Yeah, turned me off to science at that age too which sucks because I was pretty into it.
in case you still care: the periodic table is arranged primarily by the chemical properties of its elements (mainly electronegativity, i.e. how much energy it takes to add/remove an electron to/from the atom) and also by their mass.
Huh? It’s sorted by number of electrons/protons (atomic number) the mass is dependent on that and the number of neutrons.
The eight main groups are based on the number of electrons missing for the atom to reach a full valence shell. Once it is full (8th group, noble gasses) it starts a new Period (row). I’m not sure how the other groups are chosen (probably some quantum physics that I never had in chemistry class). After looking it up Wikipedia says it just keeps going that way.
Electronegativity describes how much it “wants” to attract negative charges and doesn’t affect the order (Flourine has the highest and is in group 7). I think you may have confused it with ionization energy which would certainly match my understanding of the top half of the periodic table and probably does work for the lower half too now that I think about it.
The groups tend to have similar properties but that is not why they are sorted that way. Hydrogen for example is quite different from other elements in group one. The colours are probably better for finding common properties.
I do friend, I ended up looking into a few years later/have other teachers explain it but I never had that spark about it again
Too proud to say “I don’t know, I’ll look it up and tell you tomorrow”.
Yeah, that wouldve been a great opportunity to get me further interested.
I have never been in a job where “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer, but I’ve always been in a job where “I don’t know, but I can find out for you” always is.
Once I got into Gifted teachers were like that. My first couple years in normie classes suuuucked.
Then in Gifted the bullies got much smarter. Fun times.
You had an extraordinary school experience.
Maybe :3 I think my school wasn’t that highly ranked nationally, but I don’t know how others were in terms of the teachers so can’t compare… It definitely had a lot of other issues tho haha
Teachers and parents. So many tend to double down when you point out their mistakes.
“I’m the adult so tnat means I’m right and you’re wrong”
All they got in life is their self-declared superiority over literal children
Really? Seems like.a very shit teacher and school. Dont think a 7 yr old getting upset by that is unusual. Id be furious of that had happened to my kid.
Its kind of a perfect example of how mediocre has become acceptable and even celebrated. And the attidues of don’t question, or don’t challenge. Scale that up and you start understanding how the world is as it is, particularly in the US.
They need you to feel like less so they can feel like more. Their comfort trumps your reality. Bystanders are more comfortable appeasing bullies than caring for victims.
Yep, am autistic, can confirm.
As with Union of Kobolds, I eventually got into the ‘gifted’ program… they even had me as a 2nd and 3rd grader basically being an unpaid tutor for 4th and 5th graders, sitting in the hallway, helping kids with reading difficulties (in all liklihood, undiagnosed dyslexia) read through kids books.
But, there’s always classes and teachers not part of the gifted program, and they’re often difficult and wrong and rude for no reason.
I still remember a chemistry teacher getting very angry with me for even bringing up quantum scale electron clouds as a model of atoms.
Not allowed to go beyond the Rutherford-Bohr model, even in discussion, always dismissive and rude, incapable of saying just ‘yes that is a more accurate model, but it is far too complex to go over without understanding Rutherford-Bohr first’.
Union of Kobolds
wait is that a thing?
oh wait nvm that’s another user’s username
… Or just a smart kid. Me and my friend in school were also early in learning about negative numbers, but our teacher was positive about it and encouraged us to use them in the problems even though the other kids didn’t need to.
Absolutely not
Maaaaaan, I’ve been holding this in for almost 3 decades and it’s time to vent lol…
When I was in
middle-school(lol) primary school we were doing a quiz on space and the Earth and I recall the question: how long is a year?I’d remember reading in my “Magic School Bus” book that a year is closer to ~365.25 (that’s where we get the extra day in the leap years) and the class and teacher mocked me for not putting 365. I’m still salty about it!
Julian = 365.25 days
Gregorian = 365.2425 so you also loose a day every century but this is cancelled every 400 years.
Farnsworthian = exactly 3
Units are weird. I just say one orbit
Sidereal, tropical or anomalistic?
Similarly I got accused of plagiarism in ninth grade on a 3 page essay, because I used big words.
This was before the days of the internet. I suppose I could have used something like Encarta, but I don’t even remember if you could copy and paste into ClarisWorks from it, and it was about a fictional book we’d read anyway.
My brother got accused by the same teacher 3 years later. He had an even better vocabulary than me and went on to study theoretical physics.
I had so many experiences like that. I was a voracious reader as a kid. I was reading books in English (my second language) about topics such as aeronautics and space exploration. I was reading far, far above the level of any classmates. And that lead persisted all through college.
Every time a new teacher would give us an essay assignment, I’d get called out to stay after class once they graded it. And they’d casually accuse me of plagiarism.
My usual response? Quiz me, right the fuck now, on any paragraph you want from that 20 page paper. And ask me the definition of any word you’re unfamiliar with. That shut them up right quick.
A large vocabulary is its own reward, but not so much when those who’re supposed to teach you are lacking in that department.
My reading journey mirrors yours. When I entered the professional workforce, I was consistently met with vacant stares when I’d use whatever words I thought perfectly fit whatever I was describing. I came to find that using “big” words like that (examples I can recall: superfluous, inimical, vacuous, cogent, avuncular) made people think I was trying to show I was better than them. I had to pare my verbal vocabulary back to the most basic form so I could do my actual job.
Granted, I was in a “white collar” job surrounded by blue collar folks.
I understood three of the five big words. :3
Let that be a lesson. Truth comes from authority, not the evidence of your senses.
That’s just bad teaching. If you’re not allowed to use negatives then the teacher shouldn’t be asking questions where negatives are the answer. 20-25 is NOT equal to zero whether you’ve learnt negatives or not.
It’s just a greentext. It’s fake.
Also gay.
Mostly it’s a fetishization of being the minderstood smart kid with scenarios that aren’t true but feel true.
Pretty fake. Pretty gay.
I don’t really like the slur I’ve been using here, but authenticity requires it. Oi moi.
Maybe this instance is fake, but this does happen: my primary school teachers went as far to refuse that negative numbers exist.
She got angry if someone hinted at them.
I literally had a teacher once “correct” me for saying the area of a circle is πr² instead of πrr. I was told “you’re not wrong but that’s for future classes”. On another class, I had a teacher correct a short story by removing repeated words, whereas I used repetition for emphasis, but used a comma instead of ellipsis. Think “I saw it, saw the thing” instead of “I saw it… saw the thing”. Both was in early elementary, no higher than 3rd grade.
So, believe it or not, things happen to other people even if they didn’t happen to you.
The worst thing about calling this fake is that it’s not even unbelievable, it’s a perfectly possible and mundane thing that most likely happened to millions of children as they grew up, yet everything in the internet is fake, right? No one just happens to record people for no reason, no one’s smart enough to make funny jokes in the spur of the moment and get a reaction from strangers.
EDIT: Added context.
I got this in school, it happens. Or happened in the 90s.
I went to a lot of different primary schools (UK here, that’s up-to-11-years-old) and there absolutely were ones where this happened. There were also good ones.
Well that’s just upsetting. What’s the point of even asking trick questions like that if you’re just gonna provide an inaccurate answer? Like, it’s absolutely terrible teaching. If you’re not comfortable teaching the concept of negative numbers just… don’t ask questions where the answers are negative? Completely batshit
it happens with bad teachers, and “good” parents will take the students side when the teacher’s being an idiot.
Depends on what we’re subtracting. If I have a basket with 20 cookies and I give it to a class of 25 students, I’ll have 0 cookies. I won’t be in a 5 cookie debt, the cookies are distributed on a first come first serve basis. If you didn’t get one too bad, I never signed anything. And fuck them slow kids anyway, they’re probably last because they’re fat and can’t run too fast, they don’t need any more calories, loose some weight lil’ shitlings and be quicker next time.
You’ve got some weird teachers. My teachers were all pretty keen to nurture curiosity. When we’d just learned about combustion and how fire needs oxygen, I asked my teacher after the lesson about the sun and how it could be burning without oxygen, and she just explained nuclear fusion and what the sun actually was, and that the words “burning ball of gas” is a bit of a misnomer because that’s not what’s happening.
Yeah, my public schools were considered some of the better ones in the country, and Im quite sure any of the teachers would just use that as a launching point, or at least give a cursory explanation and say it’ll be covered later. So this a good example of the differences.
This shit happened to me, but in kindergarten. I grew up in a bilingual house. I spoke English and Spanish equally. I went to the school with my mom to get assessed. She said I could read and was bilingual. The teacher didn’t believe it and made me read from one of their books.
To add insult to injury, when they had Spanish class, the fucking teacher taught us that “purple” was “porpuda” and “lizard” wad “lizardo.” Shit like that… My mom put me in another school.
I’m 48 and still laugh about lizardo. How absolutely stupid.
When I was in kindergarten, my mom got a call day 1 because I didn’t know how to count to 10 supposedly. Even though I did it multiple times. I just did it in Japanese cause they never requested I do it in English. Tbf, I’m white and not bilingual.
why does this gat dang kid keep complaining about his itchy knee?!?
san yon go roku shichi hachi kyu jyu!
…jyu-ichi jyu-ni jyu-san…
Ok I’ll stop now.
Ahem, not bilingual, but I definitely have a small chunk of Japanese drilled into my head after a decade + of Karate, haha.
I do have eczema, so maybe they did think that’s what I was saying.
Lol my ex girlfriend had a “karate” teacher growing up. He taught them a few “Japanese” phrases. It wasn’t until decades later she learned this dude just made it all up. I guess it was something you could get away with in early 90’s bumfuck Wisconsin. Like this dude just rolled into town, started “karate” classes, and just kinda went with it.
Thanks, now I have a plan for trolling my kid’s future kindergarten teacher.
Okay…
lol porpuda. was she trying to say púrpura instead of morado?
y más lagarto = lagardo = lazardo = lizardo??
poor kid
Exactly that. Porpuda is now a joke between my girlfriend and I and we intentionally use it wrong.
You had Peggy Hill as a full time Spanish teacher‽‽ She’s supposed to be a substitute!
Peggy makes me so mad. She’s exactly the sort of person who would correct her students incorrectly, and be smug about it too.
Was your spanish teacher called Senór Chang by chance?
No, but he was definitely a white dude who probably smoked a joint before class.
To add insult to injury, when they had Spanish class, the fucking teacher taught us that “purple” was “porpuda” and “lizard” wad “lizardo.”
That’s ridiculous! Everyone knows the correct world is lizarda! Spanish is a gendered language, the genders matter! /s
El lizardo is a great name for a male strip club tho!
When I went to Tenerife, the chip and pin machine said “numero secreto correcto” and I’m still not convinced Spanish is a real language.
The worst part is that he was grounded by the parents. When I was younger a teacher told me I was wrong for saying that Portrush was in County Antrim, not Londonderry like she told the class. My mum brought it up at the parent teacher conference.
Same teacher also marked me wrong when asked to list loughs in Northern Ireland and Iisted Lough Beg. I was right, but it wasn’t on the list that SHE gave us.
I really don’t get this attitude. I’ve taught many classes, and making mistakes is just part of teaching. Unless you’re just reading from a textbook (and even those can be wrong), you’re going to make some mistakes. I’m a human being; sometimes I’m going to get stuff wrong. I try to minimize the errors, and it’s not like I’m teaching subjects I’m unqualified to teach. But to err is human. Maybe it’s different because I’ve taught undergrad students rather than K12, but IDK. I just really don’t get the attitude of an educator that feels they need to conjure up an aura of unerring perfection.
if I make a mistake in some derivation, I’ll just admit it, usually with some self-deprecating humor. A few things I’ve said to address it when it happens:
“Whoops! Guess the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet!”
“Whelp, contrary to popular opinion, I am not infallible!”
“Well, I’m clearly not infallible, guess I’ll never be pope!”
<Delivered with obvious sarcasm.> "No, you see, that was intentional! i was just testing you to see if you would notice my error! Obviously it can’t be that I made a mistake!’
“Whelp, as you can plainly see, I am clearly drunk!”
I’ve said all these and other things in front of entire classrooms of students. I don’t make mistakes often. But if you teach enough, it does happen. And it’s always a bit annoying to the students, as they have to back up, maybe correct their notes, etc. And I try to lighten that annoyance with some levity. So I try to make my lectures as correct as possible. But when mistakes do happen, i just try not to make a big deal about them, I dismiss them with some light humor.
Honestly, I’m glad I make mistakes. I wouldn’t want to teach if I didn’t. Part of teaching is making students feel confident that they have the ability to wrap their heads around concepts that may be very challenging. And if even the instructor can make mistakes? Well then students hopefully won’t feel so frustrated and demoralized about the ones they make.
It’s a fine line to walk while teaching. On the one hand, you want to be an authoritative source of knowledge on whatever topic you’re teaching. On the other, you need to be human. And part of that is not trying to portray yourself as some infallible god. Because ultimately that’s not what you are. And kids are clever and perceptive; they can see through your bullshit. If you make a mistake and try to cover it up, they will see through it, and they will lose respect for you. Aside from a few reprobates, most kids have enough emotional intelligence to realize that ultimately you’re just a human being trying to do your best, and that some errors are inevitable. Students are perfectly willing to forgive imperfection. They’re far less willing to forgive dishonesty.
These teachers are just teaching from the same cloth they were taught from.
- The teacher is always right.
- If the teacher is wrong, refer back to rule number one.
The teaching goals in this system are to teach obedience, not information. It’s highly useful when training the next generation of factory workers, not thinking individuals. The teachers are teaching a mindset.
And it varies from school to school, locale to locale. It depends on what the admin views as productive and necessary, almost like a culture in a sense, and is the difference between an inner city school vs a private elite school.
We had computer classes where we had to learn about spreadsheets.
To do a number plus ten percent we had to put in A1+A1*10/100
I did A1*1.1 like a normal person.
She then went round to make sure everyone had put it in correctly. Got annoyed at me and changed A1 to something else to expose my folly.
Was visibly annoyed when it showed the right answer.
(I don’t think that was your teachers point at all, but) couldn’t the different formulas have produced different rounding errors due to floating point percision?
Excel has a 15 point float, a quadrillionth, which should be enough for anything you were using excel for.
yeah because excel does rounding stuff automatically for you
try entering
0.1 + 0.2 - 0.1 - 0.2 == 0.0in any programming language of your choice and see what happens.
Doubtful, but if anything mine would be more accurate. Fewer calculation steps to lose precision on. I think most spreadsheet software fudges floating point precision anyway. A computer programmer may accept that 0.1+0.2 is not 0.3 but an accountant or mathematician would not be having it.
I think she was just shit at maths tbh. As a kid you sort of assume all the teachers know more than you about every subject, and that’s not the case at all.
As a kid you sort of assume all the teachers know more than you about every subject, and that’s not the case at all.
same for chatgpt
I switched from a French immersion to an English school in grade 3, so pretty much coasted French class until one day we were doing some exercise where we would say our names. Friends name is Green and he read it out as Verde. The teacher was ecstatic, praising him for a job well done. Of course I knew this was incorrect that you don’t translate proper names and kept trying to correct them. I argued so vehemently that I got suspended for the day. Still hate French to this day.
Verde is Spanish
Haha wow, learning Spanish now so it must be taking over
Verte (feminine) or vert (masculine) in French, so pretty close. I’m assuming he chose “vert.”
It’s a weird coincidence how ofter this happens with kids and French teachers. I know at least 3 other people who have been through similar stuff and it happened to me too and we’ve all been to different schools
No Child Allowed To Be Ahead
School nearly managed to kill my curiosity.
Nooo you can’t learn about this physics stuff, you haven’t learned the math yet.
Yes, that’s a great question, hold it until next school year.
No, I can’t explain that, it’s not part of the subject matter.
I had one really good high school science teacher. He pushed the school to start a class with the curriculum of “what do y’all wanna learn.” I have never cared more about learning than trying to wrap my head around special relativity and the constant speed of light, or building rube goldbergs on the lab tables in the back. Imagine: kids want to enjoy learning! Fucking WOW! (little bit of spite there at the end)
Sounds like you had lame ah teachers. Some of my would take the time to explain relevant future concepts
In my school, the teachers would stop to listen to me retell complete sci-fi bullshit from the Discovery chanel.
They thought I was smart, because I liked watching that…haha…
Yeah, teachers should absolutely prioritize the kids that are a bit ahead over the majority of kids /s
I see your point but since I’m talking from my perspective, it would have done a lot if I wasn’t actively held back just because it didn’t fit my teachers’ schedule or whatever.
There’s a lot of examples of terrible teacher behaviour in this thread
yeah, but they shouldn’t hold the class back because of the idiots either
