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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.
They don't pay teachers enough and sometimes it shows.
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.
Let that be a lesson. Truth comes from authority, not the evidence of your senses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This sounds like someone following a preprepared lesson plan without the skills or experience to adapt, and panicking.
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
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.
This thread should be called "how kids get traumatized by school teachers causing them to hate school"
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
No Child Allowed To Be Ahead
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.
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.
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)
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).
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?
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!"
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.".
Average autism experience tbh
That, and teachers really fucking hate being called out on something for some reason.
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".
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.