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Maaaaaan, I’ve been holding this in for almost 3 decades and it’s time to vent lol…
When I was in middle-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!
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.
Wisdom is knowing when to say “fuck it” to save yourself the pain.
No Child Allowed To Be Ahead
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’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.
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.
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…
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
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
it happens with bad teachers, and “good” parents will take the students side when the teacher’s being an idiot.
I got this in school, it happens. Or happened in the 90s.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The autistic experience summarized
