• lugal@sopuli.xyz
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    3 days ago

    Why would you ask “How is this possible” when you expect the answer to be “it’s not”?

      • Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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        3 days ago

        Or teacher didn’t even see this, handed it to a high school student and said “grade this stack of papers”

        I had that happen several times in science classes in 3rd-8th grade. Eventually I started arguing with the teachers in class, and boy did they not like being corrected.

        Sorry Ms Avery, you not knowing that “Pb” is the abbreviation of the Latin word “plumbum”, where we also get “plumbing” from due to its use in piping in rome, doesn’t mean I got the answer wrong. To her credit, she looked it up and changed my grade before the end of class.

        Ms hoschouli from 7th grade can get fucked though, a parallel circuit increases amperage load, not voltage load. I knew more about electronics in 7th grade than a college graduate who teaches science class, which in hindsight isn’t that impressive considering it was general science and not electronics specific… But in 7th grade, as far as I was concerned I was hot shit for knowing more than the teacher, and getting detention for calling her out in the middle of class. Never got the grade changed and I only got out of detention because my parents called the school.

        • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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          3 days ago

          I had a teacher mark my answer incorrect because I said women can have hemophilia. They said you can’t because it’s a sex-linked disease. I said sure, but what happens if you have two X chromosomes with that gene on it? Still didn’t get the point. This was in the 80s, and I couldn’t just look it up on the internet and prove how wrong they were.

    • ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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      3 days ago

      Because these “teacher is dumber than a child” pictures are always fake. I’ve never seen a teacher write corrections on a student’s paper. Are they doing that for every wrong question on every paper? That would take forever!

      • 5ibelius9insterberg@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        This happens all the time, at least in Germany. My teachers did it, and I do it too.

        The picture is probably still ragebait.

      • Signtist@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        You can’t teach if you don’t identify where the students are getting things wrong and correct them. It’s one of the major reasons why teachers deserve so much more pay. My wife used to be a teacher, and she worked 2-3 hours past the end of school correcting students’ work pretty much every weekday, and spent several hours every weekend planning out her lessons for the following week. She got paid significantly less than me working in a basic entry-level 9-5 office position.

        • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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          3 days ago

          Teachers absolutely don’t get paid as much as they should.

          Also, I was kinda curious about what states have the strongest teacher unions and surprise surprise, it maps very closely to education quality, with Montana and Massachusetts probably being the biggest outliers.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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          3 days ago

          Still, here in France it’s fairly common to hear people say teachers are lazy because they have a lot of vacations. In reality they do work more than many other jobs it’s just that they get a lot of “homework”.

          My mom was every evening working at least 2 hours and that’s just after work. And as the head of school you already have to leave late your job. So if that’s just a chill job why isn’t more people going for it? It’s because it’s badly paid on top of long hours that can be very exhausting with kids. Also it’s a lot of responsibility to handle to just be in charge of so many children at a time.

          So basically, I’m the son of a teacher, I love sharing knowledge but there is no way I will even try to do this job. Well at least not before exhausting most of the other options.

          Just think about where you will be in life without going to school. I don’t think my life would be half as comfortable if a succession of teachers taught me how to learn, how to behave socially, how to share, how to argument, how to create…

          Right now a lot of countries are beefing up their military and it’s often at the expense of the schools/teachers… Which make me really sad. I expect teachers to be less skilled as time passes simply because there won’t be much people to accept that kind of job so only the “worse” teachers will get it.

      • Zwiebel@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        How are you supposed to learn if they don’t tell you how to do it better? Not writing corrections seems like bad teaching to me.

        One of my teachers demanded we fold our paper in half and leave one half empty for his corrections, another one demanded a third of the page, and the rest squeezed their comments on the edge of the page

        1000090825

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Some people become teachers because they love to educate children.

        Some people become teachers because they have no control in their life and want to be the boss if something.

      • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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        3 days ago

        Are they doing that for every wrong question on every paper? That would take forever!

        I work in education in Texas. Yes, they do. And yes, it does. Now, most things are digital, so they have kids make a copy of the Google Doc and then grade that and leave comments on it. But if they have paper assignments, they often leave notes on them. Leaving notes on assignments and tests/quizzes (which is likely what this was) is part of their professional review.

        Also, part of their regular professional review is whether or not they’re keeping proper documentation on student behavior. Different tiers of behavioral issues require different documentation/communication. So, not only are they writing notes on tests/assignments, they’re writing documentation on hundreds of students, contacting dozens of parents, creating lesson plans that have to be available in advance for parental review in case any parents want to dispute the materials, and they’re getting regular reviews.

        And then, when all the kids are off enjoying summer, the teachers are working their summer job to supplement their shitty pay. And they’re going to mandatory “Professional Learning” courses to keep their teaching certification, some of which they are required to pay from their own pocket to attend.

        In San Antonio, we don’t really have any “small” districts, so the numbers in the second paragraph assumes an elementary school of 300-600, middle school of 800-1200, or high school of 1200-2000 students.

        • Wolf@lemmy.today
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          2 days ago

          Lol,

          I was ‘taught’ by my 5th grade Geography teacher that Iceland used to be called Greenland, and vice versa and they switched the names during WW2 to “confuse the Nazi’s”. I thought that was interesting but never really took the time to think about it logically. I repeated this ‘fact’ to a friend when I was in my early 20’s and she laughed and called me an idiot. Talk about embarrassing.

      • AugustWest@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Because the teacher is wrong and it’s an idiotic question.

        The question asks the child to explain how Marty ate more pizza than Luis. “He didn’t” is not an appropriate answer to that question.

        We know that Marty and Louis didn’t eat from the same pizza, because Marty ate 4/6 of a pizza and Luis ate 5/6 of a pizza. We also know that Marty did eat more, because it’s right there in the question.

        The only logical answer is that Marty’s pizza is bigger, and so 4/6 of his pizza amounts to more pizza than 5/6 of Luis’s smaller pizza.

        The question should have been “Marty ate 4/6 of a pizza and Luis ate 5/6 of a pizza. Explain who ate more pizza.”

    • gloog@fedia.io
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      3 days ago

      Because they spent an entire math class period earlier that week explaining to the students what “reasonableness” was going to mean on their next math test, and in the context of (I’m guessing 3rd or 4th grade) arithmetic the important thing they’re trying to teach is that 5/6 is a larger fraction than 4/6. I agree that the question could be worded better (change the last two sentences to “Marty says he ate more pizza. Is this possible?”) but I strongly suspect that the missing context from their class - or maybe even at the beginning of the test - explains enough to get the answer the teacher was looking for here.

      Yes, one kid starting with a larger pizza changes the situation, but fundamentally that’s an algebra question, not a “learning fractions” question.

      • Saleh@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        Well yes it is a learning fractions question. Pizza is not a number. Pizza is not a specification of size. It is absolutely crucial for understanding fractions, that a fraction of anything but two numbers will be factored by the size or whatever metric of that thing.

        In the same wake you learn that “5” is not an answer to a typical physics calculation, as the unit is missing.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        We can understand the context of the curriculum goals and still realize that the question was asinine and the teacher is a dipshit.

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        3 days ago

        You could argue that it’s reasonable to assume that all pizzas are the same size but there are many pizza places that offer different sizes. You could as well argue that this is an attempt to make the kids think outside the box and come up with this explanation. How big a fraction is depends on how much the whole is is a good message you can’t learn too early. Understanding statistics is in large parts this. Many people will throw around percentages of pooling questions without ever questioning the pool of people asked.

      • wjrii@lemmy.world
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        I agree that the idea they were teaching was “is it reasonable for 4/6 to be larger than 5/6”, but it was too sloppy to be in a word problem with cultural context. Sometimes if you’re the teacher and a kid stumbles onto a loophole this big, you have to take the L and update your materials for the next year. Just add, “Marty and Luis ordered small pizzas at Joe’s,” and this goes away. This feels like the question writer had been in a groove with drafting more abstract problem sets, and didn’t do a good job when shifting gears into the word problem section.