"Medieval armies didn't use crossbows when attacking castles."
My hand immediately shot up. "What are you talking about? Of course they did."
My elderly history teacher replied "no, they didn't."
Me "Why do you think that?"
Her "because crossbows fire in a straight line so they would just shoot over the castle."
I looked at my classmates, hoping they would see how insane this is. They were looking at me like I grew a second head.
Me "that's not true. At all."
Her, getting slightly annoyed, "how do you know?"
Me "well for one, I've fired a crossbow, I know how they work. For two, they had GRAVITY BACK THEN, the bolt comes back down!"
Her, and some of the class "ooooh!"
...
Her "well anyway...." And continues the lesson.
This was a college class.
I remember a bunch of things in science class in middle school, because I was really into science and it bothered me that they oversimplified everything to the point of being straight up false. Like a definition of "animals" being "something with eyes and a mouth". I mentioned several examples of animals without eyes, like corals, but the teacher just exasperatedly said that they did have small mouths. Ok, but your definition said eyes and a mouth, not or.
I also remember a question in a test about astronomy being "what is the biggest object". I thought about it for a moment and then wrote "the universe"; which I'll maintain to this day, was right. But it was marked wrong. The expected answer was the sun. I talked about it to the teacher, because it wasn't like I pulled the existence of objects bigger than the sun from my personal knowledge only, we'd explicitly talked about bigger stars and galaxies. But the teacher said "It was implied 'biggest object in the solar system' ". Implied how? It definitely wasn't written. I still want my point back.
I got a question right on an electronics quiz about finding the resistance in a curcuit (I have verified I was right).
My science teacher who didn't know how to do it in the first place and was just looking at the (incorrect) answer schedule said I was wrong. I just said "I don't think so but ok" even though I knew I was right as I did not want to argue. As she was walking away I explained to my friend why I was right, my teacher overheard me and came storming to the table saying:
"WHEN I SAY IM RIGHT I AM RIGHT! AND WHEN I SAY YOUR WRONG YOU ARE WRONG!"
At the top of her lungs.
I was just a kid so it put me off science for a bit tbh.
I used the word poesy in a written assignment, as in the art of poetry. The teacher didn't recognize it as a real word and deducted points from my grade. She had a policy that we could correct and resubmit for half points, so I did that but didn't change the word, I just helpfully gave her the definition in a footnote.
Shocked, naive, innocent little me didn't not know what to think when she took that as an insult. I was only trying to help her, didn't she get that?!?
This was one of a handful of events when my sister started implying I might have a neurospicy brain. IDK, maybe, but I was just being accurate so I didn't really see that as anything I needes to address. I thought the overly-sensitive and factually incorrect teacher was the one who needed to self-reflect.
"Respect your elders, because they are always right"
alt text
Post by stimmyabby:
Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won't respect me I won't respect you” and they mean “if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person”
and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
End of post.
Reply post by do-as-youre-told:
This is so well put I am stunned
Source: flyingpurplepizzaeater
End of reply post.
In 8th grade my family had to leave my home state of wisconsin to be in Mt.Ida, Arkansas for 9 months or so. During that time I had to attend the local public school and I remember the science teacher saying "matter cannot be created nor destroyed." I've always loved science and was a huge nerd during that awkward time in my life and I knew well it was ENERGY and figured she just said it by accident. Easy mistake. I said that it was energy, not matter, that can't be created nor destroyed and she argued with me and was dead serious when she insisted it was indeed matter.
I said something along the lines of hydrogen turning to helium inside the sun, and wouldn't ya know it, she didn't believe the universe was old enough for that to be true and only god can create matter... Yup, she was a 7-day creationist who wholely belived the universe was 5000 years old teaching science in a public school in bumfuck Arkansas. I gave up and a lot of things she said before finally started making sense but in all the wrong ways.
This bumb bitch was a fundamentalist Christian. The rest of the brief time I was there, and for the first time in my life, I didn't give two shits about a class that was usually one of my favorites.
Karl Marx was russian(by a history teacher)
Adults with autism dont exist, but kids with autism exist; the moon is an artificial satellite made by aliens; scientists are saying that 2+2=5 (by a logic teacher)
There is a conspiracy(organized by the jewish world leader) in romanian schools to trick children into starting HRT by saying to take some pills so they wont look pale right before going to act in front of an audience so they would become infertile and stop overpopulation(by a biology teacher)
I had a teacher confidently tell the class that Mt. Everest didn’t border China (well Tibet really, but that’s a battle for another day). I will say she was able to concede she was mistaken. I had another teacher hit on me when I was in high school while I was alone with her in the copy room. I had always heard some salacious rumors about her, but I always assumed they were just idle gossip until that day. That was a different kind of wrong. And no, I didn’t take her up on the advance.
I’m assuming English isn’t your first language, so just as an FYI, wrongest isn’t a word. “Most false” is probably the best fit in this instance. Just one of those weird quirks of this bastard language.
She very matter-of-factly stated that steam wasn’t as hot as boiling water. This was a chemistry teacher.
Given, it was elementary school, so the “chemistry” was mostly super basic stuff like mixing dish soap and yeast with hydrogen peroxide. But still, I’m salty about that one because I had been burned pretty badly by active steam before she said that. I still have the scar and everything.
We'd all end up drugged with needles up our arms laying in front of the unemployment centers of we don't get better at chemistry. Like, all of us.
Joke's on him, I'm in IT now, so I'm of WAY worse.
By the same civics teacher: All unions but teacher unions are obsolete. Welfare queens are having more kids just to collect more. Realestate only goes up. He also said that the Waltons(of Walmart) were second to fifth riches people in the world. I did fact check him with a Forbes printout on that one. I think there's more neo-con bs that I'm forgetting at the moment.
Computer teacher: Your muscles contain memory cells and that's now typists can type so fast. This was a very creative interpretation of "Muscle Memory".
Media teacher: AM radio travels in beams and can go farther then FM radio that travels in waves.
School therapist: If you get into that harder class, you may fail and feel sad. Guess what? Now having succeed at someone else's expectation, I feel sad all the time. That may have been the moment were I could have fixed the direction my life was taking if I pushed back. Chances are they would have come up with other reasons to deny me though.
I don't remember the specifics because it was damn near 40 years ago, but I had a teacher tell the class that everyone has a sort of 6th-sense sight through an invisible 3rd eye in the middle of your forehead. And her example was that blind people will pick out clothes by colors or tell someone they were wearing an ugly tie. Which I've never seen, at least not outside of some sort of Hallmark Romance Drama quality religious schlock.
I never had any problem correcting a teacher if they made some calculation error or misquoted something out of the book (I wasn't an asshole who corrected every single thing, just the ones that might be material to everyone else's understanding of the lesson).
But when confronted with a teacher spewing utter bullshit, I was at a total loss for a response. I can't imagine anyone else believed it, either, but what a fucking loon. My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.
I don't even know if that was the worst/only one, but that's the one that has always stood out for me.
I guess you could add that American Exceptionalism was taught as a legitimate point of view rather than nationalist bullshit.
This one is a little different. On the first week of some college introductory economics class, the teacher was basically just reading from the textbook we all had, some historical figure who was a member of the "Council Of Seven" or something like that, when a student raised her hand - "Ma'am, what was the Council Of Seven?" - the teacher paused, and said - "Can you bring it tomorrow, as assignment?" - and actually giggled. This was in the 90s, pre-internet, looking up something like that was not a trivial task.
The teacher might have thought she was being cute and/or deflected her own shortcomings, but the actual effect was that we immediately lost all respect and trust for her, no one ever raised a hand again in her class, we all immediately went into rote robot mode for the rest of the semester, disengaged on a gut level.
When talking about movements of the Earth in geography, we covered the earths rotation, the orbit around the sun, the usual stuff. I mentioned precession as an additional movement - I had read about it in a book just recently. The teacher completely ruled that out and called me stupid for that. Jokes on him.
Drafting on computers won't be long term.
The Russians/Soviets have guard towers on every block who monitor which rooms citizens are in at any given moment. Absolutely no true freedom of movement, unlike those of us in the free world. At the time, I figured people could trick the guards by just not turning on lights in the room when they moved about. As the years went on, two questions came to mind: isn't that prohibitively expensive? and why???
This one is funny, I innocently listened to Motley Crue when I was about 12, Girls Girls Girls in particular. You know that lyric about the menage a trois? There was no Internet in those days, so I just thought I'd ask my French teacher. She covered a smile and told me it meant three people were living in a house together.
Isn't a single teacher or statement. But how I was generally treated by the institution.
I am somewhere on the spectrum and/or have some kind of learning disability that makes the formal learning environment very hard for me.
I was tested as a kid back in the 80's, but they said I didn't score bad enough to be diagnosed and that I was just slow essentially.
So the school system stuck me at a desk in the back corner of the classrooms with a divider between me and the the rest of the room and more or less treated me like a leper.
Whatever the official diagnosis, I ended up getting into computers and turns out I am really good at it. So now I make a six figure income doing something I am interested in.
The experience ingrained in me a deep hatred for formalized education, especially when it comes to my son (who is officially diagnosed as autistic). I have a very hard time taking anything my kids teachers say seriously and as anything more than the rantings of a narrow minded fool. Thankfully, my wife being the wonderful person that she is keeps me in check with that. And reminds me not to think my experience at my backwater school was the norm. And I think she has been right this far thankfully.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Had a science teacher back in middle school that claimed to have a buddy that "designed" a way to make gas engines more efficient by running the gas line over the engine to warm it up before entering the engine. Said that GM bought the "design" with no patent, and hid it away so that it wouldn't get out. Problem is, that's not how BTUs work and GM would obviously know that. Also that's a good way to destroy your engine by misfiring.
Brazilian here - once had an english teacher call xadrez, the chess game, "checkers" (to be fair to her, "xadrez" could mean either the game or a checkered texture, but the game of checkers is what we call "damas"). She also called bolinhos (muffins) doughnuts (or "dou-go-nu-ty", as she spoke), and rosquinhas (doughnuts) muffins. I called out that she got the two mixed up, she ignored me.
She was a terrible teacher. She even forgot to put the correct text for an exam once, I asked her about the text during the exam and she just said "if you read it, you'll find (the answers)" - it took another kid bringing the same point for her to bother reading the exam she prepared and realizing she fucked up.
I had a teacher tell me women couldn't get hemophilia because it's a sex-linked gene. True enough, but it's on the X chromosome, and what do you suppose happens if a woman has that gene on both of them... I lost points on a test because of that.
This was before the internet, so I couldn't easily find answers to prove he was wrong.
We had a teacher that said phones could give you cancer due to radiation and the classic 5G causes X conspiracy theories. Certainly wasn't the worst teacher imo though.
Not a Teacher, but my Boss. He advised me to clock in and out based on the system time, not GPS.
"The computer time is more accurate".
Not very important but I remember it strangely well.
I was 8 years old. My teacher asked "What is one hundred times one hundred?"
I raised my hand and said "Ten thousand!"
"No, it's one thousand. Ten times ten is one hundred, and one hundred times one hundred is one thousand."
"But... It's ten thousand. Can I show you on a calculator?"
"No! Sit down, it's one thousand. I'm the teacher, I should know."
I later got a calculator and showed her and she didn't apologise.
See you next year.
Edit: Oh, you mean actually wrong.
We watched an educational movie from the 1950s by Frank Capra, which my 8th grade science teacher had liked as a kid. He admitted they were somewhat dated, but still basically accurate.
In it, the scientist explained that they still don't understand how chloroplasts transform sunlight into energy. The cartoon chloroplast hid what she was doing and said something like, "The Russians don't know either."
I was pretty blown away by a scientist admitting they didn't know something, at that age, but when I looked it up, I discovered that scientists had pretty much figured it out, but it's very complicated.
Clip if you're interested: https://archive.org/details/our_mr_sun around 36:09
I'd surprisingly been thinking about this just a while ago. Definitely not the wrongest, but one of the weirdest things I have been taught was the theories of the origin of life. I remember being pretty confused by most of them (though the most accepted one made sense to me), but the one that said that life came from a meteorite from space was the one that tripped me up the most. AND WHERE DOES THE FREAKING LIFE THAT THE FREAKING METEORITE BROUGHT TO EARTH COME FROM?! It told me pretty much nothing.
I searched it up just to see if it really existed, and lo and behold, it is the seventh theory of the first result that I found which states exactly what I thought haha
You have a wonderful mind. Too bad you never use it.
Fuck you Pat Fisher.
