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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.
What did the council of seven end up being?
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.
“Life sciences” teacher in middle school at a Christian school told us evolution was impossible because genetic mutations only cause a loss of information. Sneaky assholes
“Irreducible Complexity” is a (the?) cornerstone of the pseudo scientific creationist rebuttal of evolution. Or at least it was when I was young and impressionable enough to believe it.
That “electricity” was a service
Without context, it is a good.
It’s like natural gas. It is a good.
It’s like saying “milk” is a service because the milk man brings it to your house
She wouldn’t give me my damn point back on the quiz
Never heard a science teacher explain a scientific process in business terms before.
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.
You’d think the expectation would be that gases are hotter than liquids.
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.
That Wikipedia was unreliable
There is no such thing as negative numbers. “How do you take 5 apples from 3 when there are only 3 apples?” This was in elementary school in Wisconsin. The temperature regularly goes below zero. Pointing this out got me time in the corner. I’m still kinda salty about that.
Maths unfortunately is hard to teach all at once, 1 year there’s no negative numbers next year there is. Then they make it harder by adding letters. Get high enough, and you start doing stuff with infinite numbers, which I was also told can’t be done.
When you say “in the corner”, I’m guessing this was one of those really, really old small schools you’d see in Little House on the Prairie.
That Columbus was a good person.
Not so fun fact, he is said to be the first European to have syphilis as it was originally a Caribbean condition, and he was said to have caused it to spread in Europe, which also means he is the reason everyone started wearing powdered wigs as it went from a way to hide syphilis baldness to a fashion statement. So now you know what to expect (a version of George Washington who looks like Brad Pitt perhaps) if you ever go back in time and burn the Santa Maria.
Pores in latex condoms bigger than the AIDS virus.
Fuck a science class, that motherfucker shouldn’t have been allowed near the school.
Pores in
latexlamb skin condoms bigger than the AIDS virus.That’s probably what they were going for, but you’d think a teacher in that position would check their data if challenged.
How would they work if they were going to fail at their one job?
You should be enjoying the school years cause they’ll be the best of your life. Said by someone who very obviously peaked in high school.
They were kind of right and really wrong.
Im 40 and married now… remember how nervous tou were just trying to talk to someone you had a crush on? That level of “Powerline up the ass” intensity of feelings?
Yeah these days, firstly if I’m ever single again shit has gone seriously sideways… But I could without a sense of trepidation walk up to Charlize Theron in a coffee shop, tell her how amazing she was in Aeon flux, ask her how she got involved in executive producing Hyperdrive for netflix and then ask her if she would like to grab dinner sometime. Because these days you have to really go some lengths to get a rise out of me.
School was hell for me compared to other things.
“You need to go to college to be successful or you’ll be flipping burgers!”
So said teachers, parents, career counselors, etc. and here we are, I beat school, and no jobs. Should’ve become an electrician.
I couldn’t even get the burger flipping job starting out. Rude.
Most of the most successful people never went to college. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Simon Cowell…
I mean you’re looking at a few edge cases here. Most of us will tend to land in the average and never see that level of wild success. Yes, with the right skills you can get a well paying job without a degree but on the whole, people who get a higher education end up doing better financially.
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/education-pays.htm
They either had rich parents with rich connections, or had incredibly loyal, highly skilled friends, like Jobs had Wozniak.
I wondered that too, but then you have people like Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Rock on that list. And it’s not like Will Smith was that rich friend.
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.
The sun? The sun!? I guess your teacher didn’t know about Aldebaran, the size of galaxies… Supermassive black holes… Galactic filaments… And yes, the universe itself.
Who was your teacher? Aristotle?
The Greeks thought the sun was the same size as the Peloponnese peninsula.
Which is admittedly fairly big.
…wait, really? I know back then it was probably anyone’s guess, but that sounds like one of those oddly specific things that makes the moon being made of cheese sound like a down-to-earth conclusion.
I checked, and it looks like I’m a bit off: Anaxagoras estimated that the moon was the size of the Peloponnesus and the sun was somewhat larger—but how much larger depended on how much further away it was, which he had no means of guessing.
His estimate of the moon’s size was derived from observations of a solar eclipse, in which the path of totality was about the size of the Peloponnesus—but he probably missed a lot of places that experienced a partial eclipse and didn’t make note of it.
I mean his train of thought deserves credit, just not for factoring in everything. A good Greek philosopher was like the Sherlock Holmes of their day; I recall reading Aristotle saw the Earth’s shadow on the moon and how it curved and he was like “ah, so the Earth isn’t flat, it’s a ball” (though then he’d go on to say stuff like “other cultures are less prone to revolution, so they must be natural slave cultures”, which would be more like Half-Life 3’s hypothetical version of Sherlock Holmes).
That the civil war was fought over states rights.
State’s rights to slavery.
States rights as in civilian rights? Maybe my teachers just glossed over the history, but I thought it was fought because states with large slave owning populations were afraid of subtracting slavery from their economic equation.
So that’s the thing, it’s a lie of omission. The full line is ‘The civil war was fought over the states rights… to own slaves”. We were taught that north were not freeing slaves out of a moral standpoint, but to ensure monetary dominion over the south. Anyway, it’s carefully curated propaganda and white washing of history that is apparently still happening to this day.
I mean the “omission” understanding might depend on what a “right” is. An ethical right? Definitely not, as natural law makes all humans equal. Which makes the “it was fought over the states’ rights” sound like the biggest example of “but the constitution said I could do this” in history. You’d think all the people who care about rights would care as much about ordinary law to be fair.
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.
I was told a similar thing but the claim was that the person had invented an engine that ran on water haha.
My mom believes this one (she believes in a lot of crap…). Allegedly there was a dude who made a car run om water, but the evil oil company Shell bought the idea so that it would never come out!
That is of course ignoring the fact that the supposed guy wouid still have knowledge on how to build one.
Or… The simple fact that water can’t be used as a fuel like that.
