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“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 think you’ll find that crossbows are a hitscan weapon 😏”
Did she think the arrow would just… fly in space for all eternity and never come down or something?
Yes, apparently.
I’m reading this and think, “Oh man… I wish I had shot a cross bow in 4th grade.”
This was a college class.
Ugh. Wait! Do 4th graders go to college… No. No they don’t.
Well, I grew up doing medieval reenactment so my crossbow experience was from about the 4th grade, so there’s that.
Lmao I guess nobody uses guns to take a fortress either.
LOL, show her 300.
“We will fight in the shade!”
They at least sound chiller than the people in the other examples.
I think it was the senility and the tenure
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.
For the kids it’s lambskin condoms that have pores larger than HIV
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.
School was hell for me compared to other things.
Best in that you don’t have adult responsibilities.
IDK being a kid was fun. Being an adult is more work.
We were in late high school, it’s not like we had no responsibilities. Pretty much every year after that has been better than middle/high school for me.
To be fair, there seems to be a lot of people who think childhood was the best time of their life. I’m ~50 and I think life was best in my 30s, but it’s still pretty great now also. Childhood, and highschool in particular, were the worst.
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.
“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.
There’s still time to become an electrician!
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
Employment doesnt necessarily mean “most successful” but education is obviously importer regardless if its self-directes or not.
And i love me a distribution graph. Thank you.
They either had rich parents with rich connections, or had incredibly loyal, highly skilled friends, like Jobs had Wozniak.
Or they have a degree as Winfrey does have a degree
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.
Your also looking at a very specific field. Some fields require a degree and others require talent and a nonstop work ethic to just get out there and do it day after day and push through those hardships.
Oprah Winfrey attended Tennessee State University and has a degree in communications
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.
As far as I’m concerned there are always letters. We just hide them or when they are young use a question mark.
2 + 5 = ?
Is super basic algebra if you just change the question mark to an X.
Science is the same way, but you can teach in a way that alludes to more complex subjects without denying those subjects. I actually called out my HS physics teacher when he kept having to correct grade school science lessons. He couldn’t disagree with me that it’s probably better not to teach incorrect lessons just because the correct lessons were more complex.
He was so scared of negative numbers he would stop at nothing to avoid them.
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.
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.
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 oversimplified: 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).
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.
Nah, she’d mentioned some of these things. The logic was just that since the other questions in that test had been about objects in the solar system, I should’ve known it was implied “biggest in the solar system” although it wasn’t written.
I had a Mormon science teacher who told us that there was a giant planet in the middle of the universe that astronomers could see and that was where god lived I never believed anything he said after that
Were they Mormon? Scientologist?
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.
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Yeah. The sad part is that this was back in 1997. Their public education system is in far worse shape than it was back then. Wisconsin had an excellent and well funded public education system so I went from getting a really good education to about the worst possible you can find in the US. So glad I wasn’t there long. Some of those kids are still there as adults, still holding out for a successful rap career and sending their little shit apples to the same school, repeating the cycle.
I’m guessing she didn’t believe in black holes either, since they destroy matter.
Why do you think black holes destroy matter? There’s an (unproven) argument that they destroy information, but I’ve never heard an argument that they destroy matter.
They don’t “destroy” it per se, but they presumably take the matter out of the universe, which, from the perspective of the universe itself, would effectually be the same thing as destruction.
That’s not at all what a black hole does. The matter is still there, you just can’t get it back out of the hole. There’s is no “removal from the universe”. In fact it still exerts gravitational force. That’s why they’re super massive black holes and just regular black holes.
That the civil war was fought over states rights.
State’s rights to slavery.
No, its not technically correct! I know the whole “state’s rights to what” meme is fun, but seriously, the south was trying to compel the Federal government to infringe on the rights of other states with regards to fugitive slaves. If they were the true bastions of states’ rights that lost causers argue they were, then they wouldn’t have had a problem with that.
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.
That Wikipedia was unreliable
Wikipedia is not a source. It’s fine to take information from Wikipedia. But if you are doing actual research. You need to cross reference that with the source cited to make sure it’s accurate.
Most Wikipedia pages have their sources listed so you can easily look them up and verify their validity.
If there are no sources cited. You should be cautious.
It is unreliable to an extent. If you have expertise in anything at all go look at the wiki for it and you likely will take issues with parts of it or more. That being said it’s good enough for a generalized overlook of something so I wouldnt 100% trust the minutae in a wiki but the general concepts are typically ok
The cool thing about Wikipedia is that if you have expertise in a topic and find something incorrect on it, you can edit the page to be more accurate. The trickiest part is finding and adding relevant sources. There’s a learning curve to it, but at least anyone who’s used to writing research papers should have experience with that already.
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.
what is it with history teachers always being so conservative?
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.
You’re right, it’s my second language. My first/native language actually doesn’t have official spelling rules, so yeah, it’s a handful.
so, French? :D
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.
She should have worded and explained her reasoning there.
Depending on the context, and parameters, she wasnt wrong. because as water boils, and turns into gas, it rapidly cools down again as it looses its heat energy to the (relatively) cold air until a certain point in which it cools to a certain point and turns into rain ( or sticks to the surface it hit that cooled it down ).
That means that the gas above the boiling water is colder than the boiling water itself.
… Its just only a few degrees off and can still burn you very god damn badly.There’s also the part where steam–under pressure–can be much hotter than boiling water.
Oh crap ye, i totally forgot about pressure being a parameter haha
That means that the gas above the boiling water is colder than the boiling water itself.
But if it’s colder then it’s not steam. It’s air mixed with water vapor. Steam is by definition hotter than boiling water.
You’d think the expectation would be that gases are hotter than liquids.
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)
Where did they think the autism went when kids grew up?
They probably insisted that kids with autism exist because i have autism and they knew that
What do they think happens to autistic kids when they grow up? Just snap out of existence?
Yeah, that’s almost what the research articles I read suggested a few years back. Like, it’s allegedly difficult to diagnose an adult who has modified their behavior over the years. So most people would need to have at least some indication of having had ADHD when they were younger to confirm their diagnosis as adults.
That’s not to say that adults with ADHD don’t exist, but the rate does significantly decrease to about half.
(Please let me know if I’m wrong, it’s been a while since my days of genotyping.)
