Not my story but from my boyfriend. In English class they were supposed to write a review about a movie. He wrote a negative one about The Last Airbender from M. Night Shyamalan. First she argued that "iceberg" is not an english word (this took place in Germany) and that he should instead use "icy mountain" they had to look it up in a dictionary to convince her otherwise and then she took points away because "why would you write a review about something and not recommend it".
I forget if it was on the day or day after, but while the events of 9/11 were unfolding or coming to light I had a social studies teacher claim the plane that crashed in the field was an attack on our agriculture.
Remember when that stray bullet hit the side of that Honda? That was a clear attack on the american plexiglas industry
Not a teacher, per se, but the senior dev on my old team once said something that left me scratching my head. We were trying to troubleshoot an inconsistent bug in our software, and I said, "Maybe it's a race condition," to which he replied, "There's no such thing."
Still trying to figure out what he meant by that.
Maybe he meant there's no such thing in the context of that application?
Probably! He was a very smart guy (way more formal education in computer science than I), so I've always assumed there was some truth to what he said, but he didn't elaborate further and I didn't like bothering him with unnecessary questions, so I never followed up on the topic despite my confusion.
Our physics teacher and our chemistry teacher had an ongoing civil riff on whether or not electrons exist.
We'd hear one side of the argument in Chemistry and then parrot it to him in Physics, and he'd give us a rebuttal and we'd parrot it back to her in Chemistry. This went on for about two weeks.
Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure they discussed it in the staff room beforehand, but at the time it felt like a real smackdown.
Wait, what were the arguments for electrons not existing? And by whom? It's generally accepted that electrons exists and neither of their fields would work if they didn't. You'd have to go really deep down into "well actually, everything is a wave" terretory to even get that idea and even then it doesn't make sense.
Yeah that rings a bell, I think it was something to do with its position being a probability density function rather than anything deterministic that orbital mechanics could offer
I have 2 of the same teacher. She was an elderly history teacher and I wished I could say a good one.
-
She wants to watch a Columbus movie after the exams. We were pretty hyped because watching movies is chill. The movie starts and something graphical happened, she immediately skipped a couple minutes. If you have any understanding of the history of Columbus, you can see how this ends... The next graphical scenes come and go in a quick skip. At one point, Columbus was in America, Columbus did Columbus things and she skipped so far forward that he was back in Spain. And in the end, we "watched" a 2 hrs movie in 30/40 minutes. She asked how we finished the movie so quickly. I know what happened in the movie because I know history but I don't know the movie at all.
-
It is summer. No Aircon. Big glass windows. In lunch break, people leave to buy 1,5 liter bottles of water for insanely cheap. Everyone! Has! These! Bottles! Everyone is drinking their water in the lunch break. Class starts. Everyone is paying attention and is working. Someone asks "hey, could I go to the toilet, please?". Teacher allows them. Everyone else is reminded that toilets exist and how much water they have drunk. A bunch of people ask one by one if they could go to the toilet and the teacher allows it one by one. At some point, literally everyone who had to visit the toilet but 1 person went to the toilet, and she exclaims "stop asking! Just go when no one is already on the toilet!". The student gets up immediately and walks to the door and before they had the chance of opening the door. She screams "what are you doing?!!??" They respond "I want to go to the toilet." And she screams "don't you know that you have to ask!???". We were very confused.
-
That all women should be in the kitchen and all black people should be slaves again.
Was a very interesting English class from a black woman...
A middle school teacher asked for an analogy about something, I don’t remember what specifically, but I raised my hand and excitedly said “Oh! Like how math can help you understand music and music can help you understand math?”
The teacher looked at me like I was a total fool and said “music has absolutely nothing to do with math, how could you possibly think that?”
Since I was a snarky little punk, and I knew I was right, I said “have you heard about the circle of fifths? Let me tell you about it” and I proceeded to explain the mathematical beauty of music to the entire class. I even had sheet music in my bag from my piano lessons, so I pulled it out and showed it to everyone to explain the bars, tempo, and time signature, all of which are based on mathematical principles.
She was not happy to be proven wrong in front of a class of fifth graders.
Lol. Pythagoras - considered one of the gods to maths teachers - explicitly talked about the mathematical beauty of music. Where was this person trained?
Goood question. I hadn’t thought about her in ages, but it’s funny how random memories of her class are coming back now. She was a shitty teacher, she clearly didn’t want to be there.
music has things that can be described mathematically in ways that are largely historical, but not axiomatic in a math sense. but if learning music helps you learn math and/or visa versa, power to you.
8th grade Earth Science teacher. I shared a fun little factoid I had just learned: if you’re standing on the North Pole, every direction is south.
She disagreed and spent like 20 minutes explaining why that was wrong. I didn’t understand most of what she was trying to convey, but I do remember hearing “you can go north but in a southerly direction.”
WTF
Maybe by considering the difference between magnetic and polar north....
6th grade health teacher told the class that studies show evidence of increased breast cancer risk for those that have had an abortion. This was in a suburban Illinois school.
conspiracy theories involving aliens creating mankind, basically Ancient Aliens lore unironically like one in three lectures was talk about the process and how we must vibrate into some higher realm
Now, that's cool stuff. Much better than teachers parroting religious stuff.
I had a teacher who claimed that dinosaurs weren't real. She said that people just naturally love patterns so when we find random bones we arrange them into shapes we like. Someone in the class said what about skulls that are just one bone and she ignored it lol.
That was many years ago and it's still stuck in my memory as one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
Wow that’s wild. The thing that bothers me most about shit like this is that a good teacher would put aside their pride and take it as an opportunity to learn something themselves and show the class how to find out an answer to a question like this. Instead, you’ll always remember her as the dumbass who didn’t know what fossils are.
reminds me of my biology teacher who before teaching us evolution explained that she is being forced to teach it against her will so we can pass tests, but that she disagrees with it and that we shouldn't feel pressured to actually believe evolution ... this woman was teaching my AP biology class in senior year of high school, and previously had worked in the medical field and retired as a teacher
obviously Christianity was involved
Sixth grade English teacher telling me that simultaneous doesn't mean "at the same time."
Biomedical engineering professor teaching an entire course on how DNA in its natural state is not actually a double helix and that Watson and Crick were wrong. The guy spent decades of his career after getting tenure pushing this crusade of his. It was a great class and I loved it.
interesting, do you have any research papers about this?
Had a substitute teacher once who thought that the word Hell was a bad word even when referring to the location.
college instructor for Communication 101 went on several unprompted rants about how depression wasn't real because it couldn't be detected with brain scans
even though it, uh, absolutely can? also nobody asked you anyway dude???
I bet this person called themselves a Christian.
History teacher told us that NASA found alien machines on the dark side of the moon.
Midway through his speech he fell asleep in his seated walker, woke up shortly after and then the been rang.
He was neither physically nor mentally fit to be a teacher.
My chemistry teacher didn't understand why consumers complain about pesticides, since she claimed you could just rinse them off easily (which isn't entirely accurate). She got cancer shortly after.
My anatomy and physiology teacher told the class he believed the entire Middle East should be nuked, after showing the wikipedia article on Ross Perot and talking about how the country is in decline because Perot lost the presidential election.
He also body shamed women during class, and told women that if they are behind on cooking dinner they can just throw some garlic and onion in a pan and their husbands would smell the good aromas and not know any better.
He also required students to dance and he video recorded every dance, this was not optional and had nothing to do with the curriculum, but it was treated very seriously like an end-of-class thesis. It doesn't take much of an imagination to worry about what he was doing with those video tapes. This was at the same high school where it turns out one of the coaches was molesting the students.
The only agreeable thing here is that sautéed garlic and onions are yummy. The rest is some serious 😬
I thought you were talking about college instructors until you mentioned high school... especially because you referred to "women" instead of girls...
Ah good point, this was like junior or senior year, I guess I thought of them as women.
Had a history teacher insiste that people can't live without clothes on. As in, you actually fucking due quickly after getting naked.
To be "fair" I think that it was more a case of her being mad that I corrected her "pyramid of needs" than her defending her actual opinion.
I had a teacher during sex ed start yelling about how you gotta work on and please your lady not a “wham bam thank you ma’am”, his words. Now not in 7th grade sex ed it wouldn’t have been so weird. Same teacher had a diabetic fit and started yelling and writing E over and over while grading our tests.
Only boring people get bored.
Utter nonsense but it was said to my boy by a junior school teacher. Was an interesting conversation when I talked to her at parent teacher day.
Sounds like the words of a boring teacher who's incapable of meaningful self-reflection as to what they could maybe improve upon
I wrote a paper on the origin of the y chromesome in biology class in college and the professor docked me points with the note written in the margins "I don't think humans and papayas have a common ancestor."
then how do you explain the y in papaya? checkmate professor
I told my students to go flux themselves today
"No girl should get to the sixth form without having learned Latin "
Fuck you, Mrs Entwhistle.
My high school chem teacher, while explaining soap micelles, went on a tangent saying that we don't really need soap to wash ourselves and that he personally never used soap while bathing, I liked that teacher but TMI and gross.
I had a teacher who believed that the moon landing was fake.
College professor saying open source software is shit since "everyone can modify it"
My partner had a physics teacher tell her water can't get hotter than 100C.
