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Average autism experience tbh
That, and teachers really fucking hate being called out on something for some reason.
All my teachers were fine with it honestly :3 at least after primary school… if you corrected them they might’ve given you extra credit
But the general notion of saying something correct and people saying that that’s wrong, and not knowing why still stands
I asked my science teacher why and how the periodic table was setup like it was, I got “that’s how it’s setup”
But why, there as to be a reason
That’s just the way they made it
Yeah because they have to have gone by something what is that something
That’s just the way they did, stop asking questions (please don’t fucking learn in here)
Godamn that pissed me off.
Really? We got a detailed breakdown of why the periodic table is the way it is
Yeah, turned me off to science at that age too which sucks because I was pretty into it.
in case you still care: the periodic table is arranged primarily by the chemical properties of its elements (mainly electronegativity, i.e. how much energy it takes to add/remove an electron to/from the atom) and also by their mass.
Huh? It’s sorted by number of electrons/protons (atomic number) the mass is dependent on that and the number of neutrons.
The eight main groups are based on the number of electrons missing for the atom to reach a full valence shell. Once it is full (8th group, noble gasses) it starts a new Period (row). I’m not sure how the other groups are chosen (probably some quantum physics that I never had in chemistry class). After looking it up Wikipedia says it just keeps going that way.
Electronegativity describes how much it “wants” to attract negative charges and doesn’t affect the order (Flourine has the highest and is in group 7). I think you may have confused it with ionization energy which would certainly match my understanding of the top half of the periodic table and probably does work for the lower half too now that I think about it.
The groups tend to have similar properties but that is not why they are sorted that way. Hydrogen for example is quite different from other elements in group one. The colours are probably better for finding common properties.
I do friend, I ended up looking into a few years later/have other teachers explain it but I never had that spark about it again
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.
… 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
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 went to a lot of different primary schools (UK here, that’s up-to-11-years-old) and there absolutely were ones where this happened. There were also good ones.
Well that’s just upsetting. What’s the point of even asking trick questions like that if you’re just gonna provide an inaccurate answer? Like, it’s absolutely terrible teaching. If you’re not comfortable teaching the concept of negative numbers just… don’t ask questions where the answers are negative? Completely batshit
it happens with bad teachers, and “good” parents will take the students side when the teacher’s being an idiot.
Depends on what we’re subtracting. If I have a basket with 20 cookies and I give it to a class of 25 students, I’ll have 0 cookies. I won’t be in a 5 cookie debt, the cookies are distributed on a first come first serve basis. If you didn’t get one too bad, I never signed anything. And fuck them slow kids anyway, they’re probably last because they’re fat and can’t run too fast, they don’t need any more calories, loose some weight lil’ shitlings and be quicker next time.
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.
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.
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
funnily enough i’ve heard people say the same thing irl
it kinda baffled me how people would even think that way
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
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
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.
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.
“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”.
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 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.
No Child Allowed To Be Ahead
