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°
Well this didn’t happen.
Let that be a lesson. Truth comes from authority, not the evidence of your senses.
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.
So the school did its job just right then. High five, I quietly let people be wrong too.
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!
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
Still with the lame pokemon. Shit was lame then and is lame now.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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 taht was your teachers point at all, but) couldn’t the fifferent formulas 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
This thread should be called “how kids get traumatized by school teachers causing them to hate school”
Anon gets traumatized by teachers
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 :(
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.”.