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You won’t always have a calculator with you.
They used to deliver this line with so much sass
I was told this while wearing a calculator watch.
i wonder if this ever keeps any math teachers up at night. how wrong they were about this
I’m in first year of university and we use calculator for everything except math, but math we do is actually easy that you don’t need calculator.
My class was repeatedly threatened for using more than one finger on a calculator to solve chemistry equations. “If I see those Nintendo thumbs…”
Yeah, this line survived a lot longer than it should have.
I was carrying not one but two programmable Casio GFX 9850 graphics calculators with me pretty much all the time. You could write some kind of Basic-ish code on these things. Neat machines, considering their age.
Can play games on them to, including clones of pacman, Doom, Super Mario land and pong.
Yeah, we wrote a racer game for that thing. Loved it!
Yes, I’m currently typing on a device that can function as a calculator
Maths teachers should really be saying that they’re teaching us how to do maths on a calculator
I’m horrible at maths though probably because of my autism spectrum disorder
I’ve only improved in areas of maths where I’ve self taught myself mental shortcuts to do it in my head
School helped somewhat with the Autism accommodations here in Australia but not that much, I find making my own accommodations and self teaching myself years later is way better than the accommodations provided by my school
They really should take student feedback in a lot more
There’s checks and balances in our government
I mean, there are, but they don’t always work, if ever.
There used to be. The checks and balances have basically been eroded to nothing.
The checks are going to Musk and cronies and the balances are in the spreadsheets and databases.
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.
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?
Latex condoms have been around longer than the AIDS crisis. They have another job.
The virus simply respects your decision to not want to be infected and doesn’t leave.
For the kids it’s lambskin condoms that have pores larger than HIV
We had that taight in our high school too!
(And as a totally unrelated fact I’m sure, our biology teacher was a major figure in our local church and was pro abstinence. Completely unrelated, of course)
“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
“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.
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.
Or they have a degree as Winfrey does have a degree
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 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 was just a kid so it put me off science for a bit tbh.
And isn’t that a fucking shame? I mean, science can be such an interesting thing that can improve and enrich your life and can even become a career, but or just takes one bad teacher to let all that go to waste.
I had a guy teach biology and chemistry, and he was… well just not a good teacher (but a very decent human outside of class, to be fair). Made me really hate his classes and subjects. It took quite a long time for me to get more interested again.
On the other hand, I had a teacher in computer science teach is the basics of relational databases and object oriented programming in Borland Delphi (yes!), and now that I’m almost 40, I STILL feed on that knowledge, have become a sysadmin, have helped a dozen of co-eds in uni pass their programming test by tutoring them… He’s just a huge part of what I’ve become as a person. One teacher really can make a difference, one direction or the other. Thank you Mr. Barchmann, wherever you are.
I also have to thank some of my later science teachers for re-sparking my fascination in the scientific world, three of them were excellent teachers and made the class so entertaining you couldn’t not be fascinated.
Oh boy, this reminds me of one test in college where there was a question that had a logical circuit diagram, I don’t remember what it asked exactly but my answer was marked wrong, I went to the teacher the next day and told him I thought that was the right answer and he said “well, it’s not, I’ll demonstrate” and he wrote the question on the board called attention for everyone saying he would show the right answer to the test question, and started answering it. I saw him start to answer and immediately he made a mistake, I raised my hand to point that out and he told me to let him finish. He got to the end of the thing, showed a different result, and said “see, this was the correct result” to which I said “You missed the NOT at the beginning of the circuit”, he looks at it, rewrites some stuff, and gets to my answer to which I said “and that’s what you marked as the wrong result on my test”. He still tried to claim that was wrong because he got the question from book X, and a colleague (who I suspect had also given the right answer) produced the book, looked up the answer and said loudly “the second answer is the one on the book”. Defeated he had to give me (and whoever else had the right answer) at the point for that question. Completely unrelated story, that guy was also the coordinator of the course I was coursing and after months of waiting for recognition of some classes that I had taken at a different college coincidentally the very next week they got denied which meant I would have to take 14 extra classes (so at least a year and a half extra) to graduate, and that some of the classes I was taking that semester would have to be dropped and retaken after coursing the prerequisites (which I was trying to get recognized), one such class was the one where I got the question right… What a coincidence, right?
I should thank that guy, because of him I dropped out of college, moved to another city, and started at another college where I met my wife.
She sounds like she had a short circuit.
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.
My English teacher (in Germany) did not know the word “evil”. She concluded I meant to say “devil”, but then the whole sentence didn’t make sense anymore, so she deducted even more points for that.
Had the same with an english teacher (in germany), that probably had a smaller vocabulary than me. Whenever I used words she didn’t know I had to argue with her and pull out a dictionary
neurospicy brain
Hey I have one of these. Maybe not in the typical way, but still. So don’t worry.
For reasons like you describe where neurotypicals aren’t always exactly known for being critical, sometimes I think of how accurate it might be under some definitions to say neurotypicals are the faultily-minded ones.
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?
It doesn’t matter if I’m a good person, if I don’t believe in god, I’m going to hellll.
In my tradition at least, character matters a lot more than adherence, which isn’t even a strict requirement.
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.
I mean when writing an essay you should really be sourcing from the original source not Wikipedia, good thing Wikipedia lists the original source the info came from so you can just use that. (Unlike some websites the teacher said were better then Wikipedia which were just full of unchecked bullshit)
But for everything else Wikipedia is great
They should have always been teaching to use Wikipedia as a beginning of research. Go to wiki, follow the cited sources and follow those cited searches if anything was referenced.
There was always a double standard though compared to something like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Pre-internet, for practicality, you couldn’t really check the cited sources on Britannica, so you took it as word of god. They’re a major publication! Huge money and people who wear suits and monocles wrote it! Posh British sounding name! How could they be wrong?
Except that when researchers compared Britannica to Wikipedia for inaccuracies, they found Britannica to contain a much higher rate. So why did Britannica keep being held in higher regard? Pure appeal to authority.
Some wikipedia articles have been edited by science/history deniers/fascists/liars and it is difficult to determine if whats written at any point is true or edited. Thats where the statement comes from.
It’s never difficult. Wikipedia cites sources. It’s very easy to check if any piece of information has citations and what those citations are.
There have been some very long lived hoaxes on Wikipedia, but they’re basically the exception that proves the rule. Nothing is infallible.
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.
When I was 11, an entire class of students and the biology professor were adamant that snakes do not have skeletons. I knew for a fact this was false because I had seen one at the museum.
Did they think snakes were like giant fucking worms or something?
Sidenote, I had only ever seen a snake head and out of curiousity just searched up a snake skeleton just now and i am pretty scarred.
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.
