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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.
My English-as-second-language teacher hated me because I kept correcting her spelling and vocabulary. But it was okay because I hated her right back and took every opportunity to annoy her (for the sake of rigorous accuracy, of course). Fortunately she couldn’t actually harm or sabotage me because I aced almost all of my tests and had good scores in national ESL competitions, and a sudden drop in grades would likely have been too obvious.
The point where I’d had enough was a test about the anatomy of vehicles. She had crossed out my answer to “left side of a ship” because I’d written port or larboard (not that I expected someone with a master’s diploma to know the etymology of nautical terms*, or not to confuse larboard with starboard because they looked similar), but what made my blood fucking boil was when she crossed out my answers of hood and trunk because I’d used the American words instead of the British bonnet and boot, and when I pointed out that she’d marked those same answers as correct in others’ tests, she went back and fucking changed the scores on the other tests. I told her it was “deplorable conduct for a teacher” (approximate translation, and as polite as I was going to get that day) and she dragged me to the principal for disrupting the class.
That was the third year of high school (I think “junior” is the American equivalent). I took an option to graduate one year early from ESL, in part out of spite. I’m sure she was glad to be rid of me.
* I knew “larboard” and “starboard” and the names of individual sails from Assassin’s Creed 4. Much of my vocabulary comes from games (including some Russian from STALKER, Metro, and MGSV).
edit: A resurfaced memory! Still regarding sailing – she thought “in distress” meant that things were calm and safe because “di-stress” was the opposite of “stress”. I swear I’m not making this shit up!
this reminds me of a time (similar situation, english as a second language, and i knew english better than the english teacher) the teacher was talking about past tense, and trying to find a word that ends with a “y” to show an example of adding “ed” to the end.
the example? buy turning into buyed. i corrected her, saying the past tense of buy was bought. she gave another example: fly turning into flyed. i corrected her again, saying it was flew, but she just gave up and used flyed as the example anyway
When we started learning about past tense (primary school, probably 6th year, amazing teacher), the first thing we learned was a list of irregular verbs. We spent at least a week just memorizing them before the regular -d/-ed verbs were even mentioned. I’d like to think it was a deliberate choice, to condition us to consider irregular verbs first when using past tense.
That same teacher also taught us how to write and read the international phonetic alphabet. Again, she was amazing.
i wish i had that teacher at school. thankfully i had a pretty good teacher in an english course i did for a few years
this is all really surprising. what were the native languages here? it was in the uk right?
Europe, but not an English-speaking country. No native speakers were involved.
Why are you going to be learning negative numbers while you are 8? Edit: Reading the comments I see that your schools are pretty shit compared to my public school was way better (even when the building was on the verge of collapsing for like the whole time I was there)
I would understand “unsolvable” or something but 0 just hurts. Later you learn to specify “within natural numbers” and it’s totally reasonable to stay within the number range you have learned so far and it would be fine to tell the kid “you’re not wrong but let’s keep it simple”. Just don’t teach things they have to unlearn later.
My brother was in a similar situation where he said the square root of -1 is i and the teacher was impressed and it was discussed as a positive thing at home
Speaking of not teaching things kids have to unlearn later, I’ve often wondered why we don’t just start teaching math with the expectation that you solve for “x”.
i.e. Instead of
2 + 3 =Write
2 + 3 = xThis would prime the child to expect that math is about finding an unknown and you’ve already introduced the unknown that will be most prominent in their academic career. This will also reduce the steps necessary when teaching how to balance an equation as you no longer have the “well actually you were always solving for ‘x’ we just didn’t write it, so you didn’t know, also we’re never going to use ‘x’ for multiplication again.” stage.
But I’m not a teacher, parent, or child psychologist and this is just my blathering hypothesis based on watching my peers struggle with math for years.
The former has the advantage that you can just write the answer in the same line on the worksheet. But you could maybe introduce the latter early as an interim stage to avoid learning everything at once.
2 + 3 = x x =Might confuse first graders but work at a later stage. My only expertise is that I’m a former child so take this with a grain of salt
I’ve taken accustomed to writing
2 + 3 = ___or2 + ___ = 5and then later seamlessly transitioning to “2 + 3 = z, write downz:” or “2 + t = y, wherey= 5. write downt:”because it just seems so natural to identify these letters with natural things, such as numbers of beer bottles or cookies. kids typically giggle over these things because they think i’m making it up to be funny for their entertainment.
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°
This thread should be called “how kids get traumatized by school teachers causing them to hate school”
Anon gets traumatized by teachers
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.
School really does prepare you for real life sometimes, it seems …
The time I told the story about how I had mud pies for my 5th birthday and said they used Oreo crumbs to make it look more realistic …. I was stood in front of the entire kindergarten and made to say the word and what it meant.
Idk why I don’t like attention 40 years later
What word? Oreo?
realistic
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.
Well this didn’t happen.
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.
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.
There’s good out there too. I was good at maths in school and was encouraged to do more advanced stuff
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
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
“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”.
