Anon describes experience
11mon 16d ago by lemmy.ml/u/LifeLemons in greentext@sh.itjust.works from lemmy.ml
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.
Have a look through the history section. The concept of periodicity substantially predates the quantisation of the atom. The modern table certainly considers atomic orbitals to be key, but the groups were absolutely created based on common properties.
The table that does it that way is a complete mess but I guess it was a good idea and got some things right.
They first started doing it with valence shells in 1864, Mendeleev had a pretty close one based on atomic weights in 1871 and correctly predicted that there were missing elements based on valences + weights. The atomic numbers which determine the valences appear to have been discovered about 40 years later.
I guess you are correct but I think the question was about the modern table.
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
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.
El lizardo is a great name for a male strip club tho!
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
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.
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.
it happens with bad teachers, and "good" parents will take the students side when the teacher's being an idiot.
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
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.
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 == 0.0 in 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
There’s not much worse as a kid in a learning environment, or even with your parent(s), to be shut down painfully for being right about something that they don’t know or don’t think you know. Really crushes the satisfaction of nailing a win and turns it into bitterness and starts the lifelong process of keeping your mouth shut when you’re right and letting others win when wrong.
On the other hand, its a crash course in reality of just because you're right it doesn't mean anyone gives a shit
I will make them give a shit with my loud voice and this gun I found!
So the school did its job just right then. High five, I quietly let people be wrong too.
I had an elementary school teacher who insisted that gravity came from the earth's rotation, and that if the earth stopped spinning there would be nothing holding us down.
I had a math teacher at my stem highschool claim that the touch screens on the ipads worked by heat and that if you touch them too much the screen will get too warm and stop responding
She also told students their computer was slow because they had too many desktop shortcuts, or hadn't emptied their "trash" files.
There was also an argument we had over whether something was actually a 3d vector or multiple 2d vectors but I don't wanna dredge my memories for the exact details, it was dumb.
So, there is some jank in how Microsoft handles the desktop that results in more shortcuts on in using more resources. It always has to have all the images and icons loaded at all times.
But with the increases in baseline RAM I'd be shocked to find anyone with more than 4GB experiencing slowdown from it, even in the most extreme situations.
Similar thing with trash/recycling bin. Are you already low on storage space? Then yeah, clean it so your PC has enough spare space to work, or to use for swap (effectively extra, slower RAM by way of using drive space). But that was also far more likely to be a problem on the old drives measured in MB.
Yep, too many icons was a thing in Win95 in 98. Can't remember if XP cared.
Huh, thank you for the additional info!
I had a math teacher at my stem highschool claim that the touch screens on the ipads worked by heat and that if you touch them too much the screen will get too warm and stop responding
I think the only way this could be any stupider is if she said it has cameras under the screen looking for where your fingers go.
Lol, yeah somehow that would sink even lower. It fucking drove me up the wall when I was a kid
I had an 8th grade social studies teacher/football coach tell us black people had an extra bone in their leg and that's why they were so good at sports. He was pretty well liked teacher tbh, we watched Oliver Stones "JFK" in his class. During lectures he'd come around and sit on the front of his desk to seem more relatable. He ended up on the school board eventually.
dam, that teacher probably invented a new more racist theory of why the NBA is majority African American
If anything would it not be the opposite due to centrifugal force? The faster the earth spins, the more you should be pushed away.
Did your teacher believe in the hollow Earth theory?
She clearly had no idea which way the vectors point on the outside of a spinning sphere
I wonder if she ever played on a roundabout, being spun fast enough that holding on is barely enough
funnily enough i've heard people say the same thing irl
it kinda baffled me how people would even think that way
I can believe this. Not fake, not gay. The math teaching of the past was so dumb. Even now, I have 2 kids who never got a bad math teacher and still love math; two who did (one teacher who actually thought women ought not get higher education) and those two do not
And a good math teacher is a treasure beyond words. Mr. Galing, if I could have had you teach my kids through high school I would have taken them anywhere.
how many kids do you have?
4 I gave birth to plus 5 step kids - when we married 3 were already grown and 4 were in high school, only 2 were small (and we doubled up on birth control) so we didn't have an impossible household situation. Enough kids to draw conclusions about the school system though.
That's a lot! Props to you for keeping your sanity.
Can I ask what your cultural background is? Mormon? Indian? Catholic? South-east asian?
Ha! Not religious, but yes from Catholic background both me & husband. I do like kids, and they are all glad now to have such an extensive network of siblings. White mostly by way of Southern Europe on my side, husband mostly by way of Eastern Europe.
Sounds like there were a lot of fights growing up but now they're at somewhat peace with one another
How many loaves of bread have you eaten?
16-24 slices per loaf, I have eaten on average 1.39‰ six dozen loaves today
Me, but it's a job site and the teacher is my manager and I'm 28. Had a possibility to leave in contrast to this 7 years old child
You got a trade? Self employment is a wonderful thing, lemme tell you
Can confirm. Nothing beats not having a boss.
Can confirm. Nothing beats not having a boss.
Life pro tip. A machete and a shovel are very useful tools in achieving this state.
I still remember my teacher bitching me out in front of the class when we were learning negative numbers because when he asked me how I figured out the correct answer I said that the positive numbers and negatives cancelled each other out. Like -4 and positive 5, the negative 4 cancels out 4 on the positive side and you are left with 1. Maybe that wasn't the correct verbiage but it gave me the correct answer every time. He was a dick about correcting me though.
You understood numbers intuitively and that piece of shit could not even comprehend that someone can understand it this way.
The bajillion stories in the comments about horrible experiences with math just reinforce the fact that I've made the right career choice.
I became an elementary teacher as a second career specifically because so many elementary teachers are absolutely terrible at teaching math. (Mostly because they don't actually understand the math that they're teaching. In my university cohort, almost 50% of my classmates failed the math entrance exam the first time. There was nothing more complex than 5th grade math on that test.)
Students should be allowed to use the strategies that work for them, and they should definitely never be punished for knowing math from higher grade levels.
If a student in my class knows something more advanced, I will challenge them to use grade-level-appropriate strategies to prove that their answers are correct. And if they demonstrate that they can do both, I'll give them more advanced work to help them grow.
There's good out there too. I was good at maths in school and was encouraged to do more advanced stuff
Seeing several of the most brain-dead people I knew in high school going into teaching really made me lose a little respect for teachers. Don't get me wrong, I've had some great teachers, but this really explains all the shitty ones.
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?
"Impossible" would be a more mathematically accurate answer than "zero".
It's not a matter of accuracy even, if for any two natural numbers x < y it holds x - y = 0 then x = y, which is a contradiction. So this is basic consistency requirement, basically sabotaging any effort to teach kids math.
Depends on how your mathematical system is defined. In the mathematics system this teacher is using, negative numbers simply do not exist. The answer to 5-6 is the same as 5/0: NaN. Is this mathematical system incomplete? Yes. But, as has been thoroughly proven, there is no such thing as a complete mathematical system.
The answer would still not be 0 as 0 is clearly still well defined within that system. NaN, undefined, etc. would be acceptable answers though. Otherwise you define:
for x > y, y - x = 0
Which defines that x = y
Resulting in the conditional x > y no longer being true
Also x/0 isn't NaN. It's just poorly defined and so in computing will often return "NaN" because what the answer is depends on the numbering system used and accidentally switching/conflating numbering systems is a very easy way to create a mathmatical fallacy like the one above.
Also x/0 isn't NaN
you clearly haven't read IEEE 754
Have you?!?! IEEE 754 defines NaN, but also both a positive and negative zero (+0, -0) in addition to infinities such that x/+0 = ∞, x/-0 = -∞ and the single edge case ±0/±0 = NaN
I was under the impression that there is in fact such a thing as a complete mathematical system (if you take "mathematical system" in the broader sense of "internally consistent system"), but such a system would be pretty limited and therefore rather useless.
Yea, or “the first twenty are free but the remaining five you don’t have to give are a problem”.
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
Had a similar experience in what I think must have been my second year of primary school.
I was asked to go through a math problem that was written out, something like "4 + 7 = ?".
I said "Four plus seven equals eleven".
The teacher said that was wrong and said "Four add seven is eleven".
I'm like, what is the difference? She says, we aren't onto "plus" and "equals" yet
Six year old me spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how their was some difference between plus and add. She just could have said "they are the same, but please use these words to describe them in our lessons".
The other children are not familiar with that concept yet. Saying that will confuse them!
They have to be taught step by step.
Americanized versioned, but with a match teacher it went something like this:
Teacher: Whoever can solve this will get an A.
me: I have a solution.
Teacher: come out and explain it.
Me: I do just that.
Teacher: that is correct, but you didn't use the method we just learned, no A, sit down.
My experiences were to answer correctly, and then they go 'well, yes', and then don't ask me questions in the future.
same. i guess they want to make sure to ask people who don't already know everything, sothat everybody has a chance of learning.
One day I'm going to frame a coloured drawing I still have from year one. The following event is also still ingrained in my mind: We had to colour in a picture with several animals, one of which was a small spotted reptile in a puddle of water. Clearly a salamander.
The teacher crossed it out in red pen and screamed that I am old enough to know lizards are green and there is no such thing as a black and yellow animal on this earth.
I know this is about reptiles and amphibians, but uh...bees, wasps, and hornets would like to meet this teacher and have a...pointed...conversation with them before the spotted salamander walks all over the afflicted areas.
I'm pretty sure she didn't consider those to be animals, only "bugs"
Right...because bugs aren't types of insects and insects aren't part of the Animalia Kingdom...OH WAIT!!!
How the fuck do these types of people get their education degrees‽‽‽
What about tigers? Also some cats. Rhetorical question btw, i'm sure you tried to argue something similar at that point. I think the stories on these comments are making me angry
My English-as-second-language teacher hated me because I kept correcting her spelling and vocabulary. But it was okay because I hated her right back and took every opportunity to annoy her (for the sake of rigorous accuracy, of course). Fortunately she couldn't actually harm or sabotage me because I aced almost all of my tests and had good scores in national ESL competitions, and a sudden drop in grades would likely have been too obvious.
The point where I'd had enough was a test about the anatomy of vehicles. She had crossed out my answer to "left side of a ship" because I'd written port or larboard (not that I expected someone with a master's diploma to know the etymology of nautical terms*, or not to confuse larboard with starboard because they looked similar), but what made my blood fucking boil was when she crossed out my answers of hood and trunk because I'd used the American words instead of the British bonnet and boot, and when I pointed out that she'd marked those same answers as correct in others' tests, she went back and fucking changed the scores on the other tests. I told her it was "deplorable conduct for a teacher" (approximate translation, and as polite as I was going to get that day) and she dragged me to the principal for disrupting the class.
That was the third year of high school (I think "junior" is the American equivalent). I took an option to graduate one year early from ESL, in part out of spite. I'm sure she was glad to be rid of me.
* I knew "larboard" and "starboard" and the names of individual sails from Assassin's Creed 4. Much of my vocabulary comes from games (including some Russian from STALKER, Metro, and MGSV).
edit: A resurfaced memory! Still regarding sailing -- she thought "in distress" meant that things were calm and safe because "di-stress" was the opposite of "stress". I swear I'm not making this shit up!
this reminds me of a time (similar situation, english as a second language, and i knew english better than the english teacher) the teacher was talking about past tense, and trying to find a word that ends with a "y" to show an example of adding "ed" to the end.
the example? buy turning into buyed. i corrected her, saying the past tense of buy was bought. she gave another example: fly turning into flyed. i corrected her again, saying it was flew, but she just gave up and used flyed as the example anyway
When we started learning about past tense (primary school, probably 6th year, amazing teacher), the first thing we learned was a list of irregular verbs. We spent at least a week just memorizing them before the regular -d/-ed verbs were even mentioned. I'd like to think it was a deliberate choice, to condition us to consider irregular verbs first when using past tense.
That same teacher also taught us how to write and read the international phonetic alphabet. Again, she was amazing.
i wish i had that teacher at school. thankfully i had a pretty good teacher in an english course i did for a few years
this is all really surprising. what were the native languages here? it was in the uk right?
Europe, but not an English-speaking country. No native speakers were involved.
No Child Allowed To Be Ahead
No child escorted forward.
Thanks Dubya
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
I had a similar experience with square roots, writing both the positive and negative answers. It's wild for a teacher to actively reject correct answers because "that's not what we learned today" (the negative answers, in my case).
That's bs and also reminds me of a joke about two mathematicians at a bar:
longish math joke
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math.
The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.
She repeats "one thir -- dex cue"?
He repeats "one third x cubed".
She says, "one thir dex cuebd"?
Yes, that's right, he says. So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, "one thir dex cuebd...".
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic math. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks "what is the integral of x squared?".
The waitress says "one third x cubed" and while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder "plus a constant!"
I am like not really well informed about this but wasn't the square root symbol thingy (√ <- this one) always set to give the positive root? And the power of 1/2 would give both the positive and negative?
Yes, it is positive, and power 1/2 is, too. Two solutions emerge from solving equations, even primitive ones, like x^2 = C.
I had to look it up and it looks like you're right. If only my teacher had spent any effort at all explaining that.
God that teachers dumb.. Why even as the question? Why not just do 20 - 20 if you are going to be upset when a kid knows the answer. Simple! Don't ask questions you don't want the correct answers to. Teaching kids the wrong answers only messes them up the next year when they have to unlearn the bullshit you taught them.
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.
Absolutely not fake, nor gay
Oof, i can feel anon. Actually true probably, similar stuff happened to me. Also getting this writte in as bad behaviour as well. I started so many arguments with teachers because they were bullshitting. Maths is one thing, i was really into it as a child(still am) but i understand why a teacher has to teach things in order. Of course this could be solved with more resources, and more importantly, distrobuting resources better by having a bit more personalized education. But what i was on about is that its very common(in eastern europe at least) for teachers to spread actual complete fucking bullshit. The amount of times they took disciplinary action against me because i corrected their batshit insane claims is just sad. This mainly happened until 5th and 6th grade where i got to the conclusion that just discussing what we covered during the class, after the class, was a good way of clearing up the mess. Of course i knew way too much for a 10 year old(had an autistic sister who loved to infodump me, we still engage in it time to time ^_^) but the point is that if a 10 year old is constantly correcting his teachers theres a problem in the system. I hoped that more western systems would be better but actually i dont see (sweden in my case) being much better for children even with everyone hyping it up. Well sorry for the rant, idk what could actually solve these problems exactly as im not an expert but i really hope we adress it one day...
Reminds me of a time where I shortened the code for pointers in c++ at age 15, so quite old, and my teacher said it wouldn't work (we didn't have computers in that class, next class we would type the code and execute it in computer lab). Anyway I said it'd work, he said it would never work, I said well we can test it next class and teacher said we can't waste time in computer lab like that, and I said I will ask principal for extratime in computer lab after school to prove that my code works. I got sent to principals office anyway for rude and unruley behavior and not only did I get scolded for trying to embarrass my teacher, I wasn't granted extra time in the lab either. Next time in lab I managed to write the shorter code and get same results and I called teacher to show my code works, he just unplugged the cable and sent me to principals office again.
Luckily this time they called my parents and my mom unleashed hell on them threatening with talking to press and media and name and shame the teacher and principal for being stupider than a student is when they stopped harassing me.
And I quit paying attention in that class, I got bad marks for low class participation but hey I had already stopped giving fucks at that point.
Ohh lol i just wrote c instead of c++. It was so low level anyway that i could just write clean c and it usually compiled as c++. But thst was already in highschool for me where they actually gave a fuck about us unlike in primary.
Man... This sucks. I can't believe how many lemmings have had similar experiences. I'm just remembering one now where I was excited about math, went ahead in the curriculum to fractions, and answered everything in ratios. Instead of the teacher seeing the simple mistake, I just remember them being "wrong". How deflating.
Kids need connection before correction. I'm sort of glad my kid is glued to a screen doing adaptive math. It sucks in its own way, but better than unfeeling correction. Though, at least in my district, there's a big emphasis on empathy development so I think the teachers try to model that.
Are fractions not ratios?? I continue to be perplexed by the oddity of bad teachers' thinking :(
I think I used ratio sytax and did it a little differently (A:B vs A/(A+B)) So if someone ate 5 of the 8 pizza slices, it was expected to be expressed as 5/8. What I did was express it as 5:3, 5 eaten and 3 uneaten.
For as salient as this memory was, she was an otherwise sweet and wonderful teacher. I still remember her fondly despite my genuine dismay at trying and getting a red marked sheet back.
Ah I recall my "science" teacher when I was 13 explaining to us that all materials expand when heated and shrink when cooled.
So I ask how ice floats, or how ice cubes swell above the tray.
And a good teacher would have told you that water freezing is one of the weird cases, as water has a less dense solid form than its liquid form. Although even water is less dense at 2° than at 20°
At the written maths finals in my country there's first a timebox where the teacher goes through all tasks to make sure that everyone understands what is asked. During that portion the headmaster is present and students are allowed to ask questions. After that the headmaster leaves and nobody is allowed to talk any more.
So the teacher shows us this one task, and it's a 3D geometry task. I look through it and notice that there's one angle missing. There's an infinite number of correct solutions with the given requirements. So I raise my hand and ask about that.
My teacher looks straight past me at the back wall of the classroom, completely stone faced and says "I am sure that the requirements are complete. They cannot be incomplete." I hold my tongue.
As soon as the headmaster leaves, my teacher all but runs up to my desk and asks me what he missed.
Turns out, I was right and he just put a random number on the chalkboard to be used as the missed requirement.
If he had admitted in front of the headmaster that the requirements were incomplete, then the whole maths finals would have to be postponed and redone.
The headmaster was testing the teacher, not the students.
Let that be a lesson. Truth comes from authority, not the evidence of your senses.

Did I write this fucking greentext and then forgot or something, because this exact same thing happened to me, except they took my yugioh cards, not pokemon csrds
If I didn't learn to shut the fuck up and keep my head down, it would have happened to me, too.
Did you change it to pokemon cards to protect your identity?
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
My parents got called to school more than once because i was "disruptive" and kept doing things like wandering around class talking to people or not turning up after breaks. I was bored. My parents said, if I've done the work and it's all correct can't they give me something else to do? So they made me answer the same set of questions again once I finished them.
thats how you promote and nurture aspiring gifted kids
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.
I would understand "unsolvable" or something but 0 just hurts. Later you learn to specify "within natural numbers" and it's totally reasonable to stay within the number range you have learned so far and it would be fine to tell the kid "you're not wrong but let's keep it simple". Just don't teach things they have to unlearn later.
My brother was in a similar situation where he said the square root of -1 is i and the teacher was impressed and it was discussed as a positive thing at home
Speaking of not teaching things kids have to unlearn later, I've often wondered why we don't just start teaching math with the expectation that you solve for "x".
i.e. Instead of
2 + 3 =
Write
2 + 3 = x
This would prime the child to expect that math is about finding an unknown and you've already introduced the unknown that will be most prominent in their academic career. This will also reduce the steps necessary when teaching how to balance an equation as you no longer have the "well actually you were always solving for 'x' we just didn't write it, so you didn't know, also we're never going to use 'x' for multiplication again." stage.
But I'm not a teacher, parent, or child psychologist and this is just my blathering hypothesis based on watching my peers struggle with math for years.
The former has the advantage that you can just write the answer in the same line on the worksheet. But you could maybe introduce the latter early as an interim stage to avoid learning everything at once.
2 + 3 = x
x =
Might confuse first graders but work at a later stage. My only expertise is that I'm a former child so take this with a grain of salt
I've taken accustomed to writing
2 + 3 = ___ or 2 + ___ = 5 and then later seamlessly transitioning to "2 + 3 = z, write down z:" or "2 + t = y, where y = 5. write down t:"
because it just seems so natural to identify these letters with natural things, such as numbers of beer bottles or cookies. kids typically giggle over these things because they think i'm making it up to be funny for their entertainment.
Had a similar experience around age 10. Learned that cucumbers generally have a higher water percentage than seawater, 97% to 96.5%. Tell that to a friend of the same age, he says that can't be true because all the oceans have more water than all the cucumbers in the world, we begin debating and then start fighting about it and a teacher comes by to stop us and asks what's going on. I explain and the teacher immediately looks at me like I've lost my mind, pulls my friend to the side and asks him to leave, takes me to a room and sits down to try to explain how I'm wrong and that I can't start fights over things that anyone can prove is untrue. A week after I'm sent to a kind of mental health meeting, she immediately understands and looks it up, sees that I'm right, tells me to keep away from talking about "stuff like that" with friends and others my age and also teachers and parents of other kids because it doesn't matter if I'm right or not, just that I have to think about how others perceive me...
I'm not still mad about it, but can't deny that it feels wrong and weird.
I told my friend that modern tanks fire cannon balls and when he told me I was full of shit, I doubled down on my fact-based superior knowledge that obviously surpassed his meagre ramblings.
That I still remember this is a testament to my genius.
That teacher taught you a very valuable lesson: Appearances matter more than performance.
The most important thing is to look like whatever society's idea of a "succesful, good" person looks like.
I had a kindergarten teacher try teaching syllables by clapping them out while saying the word: 👏 ALL 👏 I 👏 GATOR! Alligator! 👏 ALL 👏 I 👏 GATOR! Three syllables.
Tried correcting her, she just clapped and said gator again.
I saw someone do this in teaching program evaluation materials once. Except the teacher did it with the word brown and stretched it into three syllables.
Br 👏 ow 👏 uh 👏 n.
I remember thinking to myself "America is doomed." Sometimes I still think about that teacher when I see people get tilted over dumb, made-up shit on social media and turn into reactionary morons around election time. Br 👏 ow 👏 uh 👏 n. America is doomed.
She would have been right with "CROC-A-DILE" though
I mean, clapping between words (syllables in this case, but who cares) automatically makes your claims the indisputable truth. Anyone with some internet experience can tell you that.
This thread should be called "how kids get traumatized by school teachers causing them to hate school"
Anon gets traumatized by teachers
They don't pay teachers enough and sometimes it shows.
Reading these comments is bad for my health (╥﹏╥) What are the reasons for them to act this way? Seems sometimes they're just ignorant, other times definitely power tripping.
I def had some weird experiences like this in school too, though not as extreme. I had a teacher once give me a zero on an exam because I used greater than and less than symbols to describe two lines intersecting. She thought I did them all backwards. Normally I'd be too shy to push back but zero on an exam was pretty extreme so I went to discuss one on one and she basically called me dumb saying I don't know how the symbols worked (this was like 9th grade, I def did and was pretty alarmed she didn't). Finally she said fine, she'll go ask a math teacher to come explain to me in front of the class if I'm so smart. She left, was gone for like ten minutes, and came back super upset. Slams the paper on my desk in front of everyone and says something like 'fine I guess you want an A now?'. Was traumatizing. But was actually a huge teaching moment for me in that I stopped seeing teachers as things/concepts, and started seeing them as people. Same as me/my classmates/some random on the street. No one has this shit figured out. I also realized I never wanted the experience she just had, and learned to always hedge my opinions. It looks like, I think, it seems to me, etc. Has saved me from looking stupid but also encouraged those that I teach to question my dumb shit. But yeah. Teachers are just people, have you met people?
Side note my math teacher was extra nice to me that afternoon - I also learned that the teachers don't necessarily like each other either. Apparently I had helped score points for the 'not batshit insane' crew
This sounds like someone following a preprepared lesson plan without the skills or experience to adapt, and panicking.
I'm pretty sure a currently 4yo nephew of mine will suffer some sort of bullshit like that in the coming years. Little bud is already able to read big numbers like 368 (also in english no less!) and full words despite the preschool not teaching either.
Fucking hell I feel validated rn, I had a similar experience at that age but it was in language/reading class. It's so frustrating to know that you are correct but you lack the terminology/ability to properly convey why you are right.
Learning vowels: aeiou and sometimes y. Ok
Quizzed on vowels "a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y"
"No psud, it's just a, e, i, o, and u"
if you had had the terminology to say it, they would probably just have gotten angry anyways over being exposed in class.
This happened to me in 6 grade and the teacher was like annoyed bruh when I confidently raised hand to give a more accurate answer. Maybe she thought I was showing off the way she reacted
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.
In fourth grade we would read short stories and answer multiple-choice questions about them. One such story was about romantically involved terrapins, and the question was "What would be a good title for this story?" The answers included
a) A turtle love story
b) Two turtles in love
I don't remember which one I picked but the correct answer was the other one.
Same here, elementary school. Teacher: "When water boils, it produces a lot of steam." Me: "One liter of water produces 1700 liters of steam under normal pressure conditions." Teacher: "Write down: When water boils, it produces a lot of steam.".
The autistic experience summarized
math fraud. top kek.
If math fraud was a crime, I would be the whole Yakuza
School really does prepare you for real life sometimes, it seems ...
Never stop fighting their lies
Failed a high school required class because I have poor writing abilities. (I word good.. just my penmanship is trash)
Literally got a 0 on a midterm because the teacher "couldn't read my writing"
Crap like the green text and my high school experience is why parents need to be involved in a child's education.
thats been 30 years ago.. I'm still bitter. But it'll make me a better father to school aged kids
Little did they know nearly no one needs to wield a pen now, or for the last couple of decades
Yep. Computer guy now as a trade. I touch a pen maybe once every 90 days.
Why are you going to be learning negative numbers while you are 8? Edit: Reading the comments I see that your schools are pretty shit compared to my public school was way better (even when the building was on the verge of collapsing for like the whole time I was there)
So every four weeks or so, maths teacher would give us a test at upper primary level. This was at pre-computer times. One of the questions was always "how long is this line" with a pen-drawn line underneath. Except, the pen he used always left a blot at the end of the line and sometimes there was a little flick from where he lifted his pen up.
Simple I thought, the line is 10.2cm - 10-3cm! Easy! But, it was always marked wrong. EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. Correct answer: 10cm. It wasn't like to be rounded to the nearest cm or anything, just "how long is this line". The ink blot counted. It counted!
I'm still bitter.
Factual incorrect, since teacher didn't state that the result has to be rounded. I only got barely through school, because of the tasks often being open to interpretation.
Wisdom is knowing when to say "fuck it" to save yourself the pain.
The time I told the story about how I had mud pies for my 5th birthday and said they used Oreo crumbs to make it look more realistic …. I was stood in front of the entire kindergarten and made to say the word and what it meant.
Idk why I don’t like attention 40 years later
What word? Oreo?
realistic
And now, I feel rage too. Be very afraid, unnamed teacher!
AI is coming for your job!
7 when the story happened, tells it 15 years later in 2020, so I'm supposed to believe this guy is 7 - 15 + 2025 - 2020 = -3 today. Something doesn't check out about this story.
What the actual fuck.
Seems like they had the same math teacher as Anon.
This or something similar has happened to everyone I know 🇨🇦
Ah yes, the American "educational' industrial complex, I know it well. It's also fond of literally leaving behind and moving on from and kids who are struggling, like happened to me in math. Then I got in trouble because my abusive, alcoholic mother thought I was slacking off. Therapy is your friend. So are antidepressants to keep me from killing myself, but that's only tangentially related.
Forcing people in education jails, would help solve our education problems. Once a year, they test you, and if you can't pass a standard test, they lock you away until you can, because you can't make good choices without education anyway.
I'm sure that would totally work without any problems whatsoever /s
This is always the case. Whenever you deal with any educational institution, they don't want you to give them the right answer ever. They want you to give them the answer that they told you that you should give; whether it's right or wrong
Well this didn't happen.
Still with the lame pokemon. Shit was lame then and is lame now.
I'll take "that happened" for 100, please.
I actually kind of believe it, because kindergarten/elementary teachers are often from arts & humanities backgrounds, and it's not at all rare to find one who never passed a high school STEM class and therefore prone to get flustered easily when called upon to explain the reasonings behind even simple things.
Can you fail all your STEM classes and graduate high school?
I literally had that experience in grade 2. The class was asked a negative numbers question, I answered the question correctly but the answer was “impossible”. I wasn’t reamed out but I was shut down hard so I wouldn’t confuse the other kids.
Also had a similar experience. 2 of us in class knew negative numbers, teacher told us our answers are wrong and that the answer is "impossible", plus "you're not supposed to know that yet".
and people wonder why schools get shot up...
they get shot up because of really poor mental health in large swaths of the population and non-existent gun control.
Guns were even more accessible years prior. So thats not the complete answer.
The rapid increase in school shootings coinsided with the expiration of the assault weapons ban.
So, no. They really weren't
Most shootings have been done with 'handguns' which has seen little regulations from the fed.
Not school/mass shootings, no.
Shootings in general, yes.
Not even an argument. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10682938/
Yeah we're clearly talking about different things here. This dataset does not seem to differentiate between shootings that occurred between specific individuals with a grievance, while technically on school grounds, but likely both outside, and outside of normal school hours, likely gang and drug related, and individuals who choose to go Rambo on nonspecific or at least a large group of people within the school, during normal hours. Which are very different scenarios with very different motivations and potential remedies.
How many adolescent gangs and drug dealers do you know?
...Who do you think gangs are recruiting? You know literally nothing about this topic, huh?
Funny how i was the only one to back my statements with sources.
taps the sign: "/s"
huh, an invisible sign