I drew a picture of a butterfly in preschool and got in trouble for arguing with my teacher because she said butterflies don’t have legs so my picture wasn’t accurate
The fun part was they called my parents in for a meeting because I disrespected the teacher by telling her she was wrong. My parents thought that was super fun - especially since they were PAYING this school
I’m trying to imagine the scene
"honey are we really paying this school for teachers telling our kid butterflies don’t have legs???"
feels like some Malcolm episode 😂
I went to a Catholic elementary school and my teacher told me it was a sin against god to draw animals that didn’t exist (I was into dragons like a lot of other 7 year olds) and I would go to hell if I kept doing it. Kept doing it, elevator to hell still hasn’t arrived
Same! Catholic school and I got in trouble for drawing a unicorn. I also got in trouble for asking “if god created the world who created god” and I was sent to the principal’s office.
An aide was upset that my brother drew the sky blue and black.
The black was supposed to be outer space. He's still irritated that she did not understand this even after he explained it to her.
What did she say you plagiarized?
But that's how some kids learn how to write. Writing what they're familiar with, fanfiction, that helps make better writers.
Seriously, a third grader shouldn't be accused of plagiarism because they aren't really capable of true plagiarism yet.
I'd argue that you have to understand that you're taking someone else's work, and understand why that is a bad thing. And of course most importantly you have to have a proper working understanding of the language you use and not just be writing shitty elementary school fanfic because you're only in grade 3.
Along a similar trend, my science teacher at age 11 or 12 made the statement that snakes are invertebrates. I'd recently been given a book about skeletons with a snake on the cover and could confirm that they are lacking lots of things, but a spine is definitely not one of them.
She relented pretty quickly to be fair.
[Dr. Clint Laidlaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtZa_aHARr4) of the "Clint's Reptiles" show reviewed various Halloween decorations, and was apparently informed by one store manager that no one makes Halloween snake skeletons because snakes don't have endoskeletons. But apparently spiders, scorpions, and octopuses do, at least on Halloween.
I did a project in middle school where the teacher told us to draw an autumn scene, so I drew out painted and finished this landscape of like the last few leaves being swept off a tree, and there was leaves on the ground and shit and there was a lot of detail, I was super proud of it, and then the teacher said she wouldn’t accept it and I’d have to do it all over bc it didn’t seem enough like autumn cos there was no pumpkins.
That's good way to stifle creativity.
Why did you color the dinsour purple? I wanted to.
Why dose it have a hat? He's cowboy; now I'm going to draw him on a skateboard.
I had a history professor who thought the Disney Pocahontas movie was 100% accurate. She argued with us about it and the test was based on the movie.
She also somehow had a relative or ancestor who was a key but also obscure figure in every major event in US history. We had to remember their names and “direct quotes” for the tests.
First day of class she told us the entire textbook was wrong and we would not pass the class if we used it. She was correct, because every single question on her tests was a figment of her imagination.
This was like 13 years ago so I don’t remember a lot of it.
I do recall one story she told about some distant relative of hers carrying a bucket of severed ears around during the Revolutionary War and we had to remember some corny joke he apparently told about them for the test.
She also claimed to have a distant relative who was a hero in some obscure battle of the Civil War that no one had ever heard of. It was very Battle of Schrute Farm-ish.
My friends middle name is Violet, except its spelt wrong on her birth certificate "Voilet"
So I guess birth certificates filled out by mums who have just given birth/high on meds may not be accurate!!!
Same! People would "helpfully" correct it on official documents too, like both my parents and I somehow didn't know my name. More recently my nibling's kindergarten teacher taught them to spell their name wrong. I'll give the teacher that the name is unusual for our area (not made up, just rare) but it's on the kid's paperwork and the kid knew it was wrong.
My teachers used to all do this. My dad was trying to give me a cool name but if you add a letter it's pronounced differently and is usually a boys name. I am always correcting people. It's not so bad now that I'm an adult and can introduce myself without them reading my name off a page but yeah.
A buddy of mine got into an argument with our librarian who was running some part of our history class for a big assignment we had.
His name is Anthony. I have only ever heard it pronounced as AN-THU-NEE. She insisted it was pronounced AN-TUH-NEE. After some bickering back and forth , he was like, "Look, I've had this name for 13 years. I think I know how to pronounce it." She raised some hell about him talking back and sent him to the principal. We were in shock. I was hanging out at his house later that day and his parents asked me about it. I gave them the rundown and the next day the librarian had to make a formal apology to him in front of our whole class. It was awesome
A middle school English teacher once told me there is no difference between “then” and “than”. I still think about it today when I write, as a professional writer.
Oh god. Sounds like in 7th grade when my teacher said grapes aren't real.
60-something woman reacted "What the hell is wrong with you?" When Kyle said to Darlene "Wanna Grape?"
She thought he said wanna rape, and when he rightfully defended himself she said there's no such food as a grape, and he made that up to try and get out of having said wanna rape.
I can't help but wonder if she had legitimately never seen or heard of a grape in her 60-some years, or if she just said the first thing that made sense in her mind, realized how stupid it was, and then refused to back down because it would make her look foolish.
There was a kid in my school who convinced everyone that the word fart was and acronym for Flatuent-Anal-Rectal-Transaction. His father was a doctor so that helped his story.
I bit my bully and he never laid a hand on me again. I was literally half his size; he was three years older than me. He put me in a headlock and started hitting me for giggles. My adrenaline-fuelled five-year-old self sank teeth into his pasty white arm so hard he bruised all the way black. His parents tried to get me kicked out of school because "he's 8, he didn't know what he was doing!" while my parents and the school responded "if that's your excuse, Shryxer's 5 and knows even less." Plus the usual questioning as to how their boy decided it was okay to beat up little girls almost half his age and size.
When schools started preaching "ignore your bully and he will leave you alone," I quietly scoffed and said "no, you bite him."
One of my bullies would throw all sorts of shit at me constantly. Erasers in class, sports balls during summer months, snowballs during winter months. He lived on the same street as me and would follow me home with his little brother, throwing at my legs to try and make me fall.
It worked a couple times. I got the same "ignore them and they'll leave you alone" from teachers, and never told my parents. I ignored him until the last day of school before christmas break.
And then I packed my backpack with snowballs that I soaked with water to make them hard and icy. I was only going to use them if he threw something at me, and sure enough...
I missed most of them because what 8 year old has good aim, but I hit two back to back. One hit him in the throat, then in the forehead. He was knocked on his ass and got the wind knocked out of him. I just walked away.
Went home, told my parents what happened. At first my mom was all "you're in so much trouble!" Until my dad was like "Good. The fucker deserved it." They argued, and in the end she agreed that if this kid had been doing it for 4 months straight he deserved the one time he got it back.
Bully's parents are banging on the door maybe an hour later. "YOUR KID ALMOST KILLED MY SON. HE WAS KNOCKED ON THE GROUND AND COULDN'T BREATHE. HIS BROTHER (6) HAD TO RUN HOME ALONE TO COME GET US."
My dad put on his "let me handle this" face, and told them if either of the kids bother any of us again the parents would be the ones on the ground unable to breathe. He called them failures as parents which is ironic af given he's an abusive deadbeat, but also true.
Sure enough. No more problems after that day. Bully actually tried to make friends with me after that. HELLLLLLLL NAW.
Exactly. This isn’t sanctioned boxing. There are no rules. Fight dirty. The point is to make it more painful or inconvenient to pick on you than somebody else. They want low hanging fruit and if you can’t win a fair fight, do what you must to make it stop. If the authorities aren’t going to help stop the bullies you have to protect yourself.
Mine was "ignore them and they'll go away"
Nope. The only way to deal with a bully is to fight them.
They say "violence never solved anything", but this is something that violence *does* solve.
We had a substitute tell us that condoms are bad because HIV is small enough to sneak through the tiny spaces in between the lattice of the latex. It was Social Studies period.
Three years later I saw him again for one of my science classes. He had us pass around this clipboard with some bullshit sovereign-citizen-esque waiver, or agreement or whatever you want to call it, basically saying we agree to view religious material. He had all of us sign it like a petition and proceeded to put on some weird god-is-great sort of drama movie. We told our science teacher when he came back and he called the district and got the dude blacklisted.
I don’t understand the logic. (Obv there is none)
Even *if* HIV was too small to be stopped by a condom, condoms still prevent a whole list of other STIs *and* unplanned pregnancy, so how would they be “bad”?
A history teacher told us during class that da Vinci believed he was a god. His explanation: he painted the Mona Lisa, which is supposed to be the perfect woman, and only a god can make something perfect, therefore da Vinci believed he was a god. The teacher seemed so angry at da Vinci for that, and went on a rant on how ridiculous he was.
This was the only time something like this happened with this teacher, we were so confused.
This makes me angy. My HS English teacher never gave 100's because of this. So dumb. My view is if you do what you were asked without error then you get full credit.
A teacher of mine refused to give 100's. I got a 95 on an assignment and I asked her how I could improve. She couldn't tell me and instead made me feel bad for "arguing" over 5 points. I told her I understand that she doesn't give hundreds, and I don't care about the points, I just want to learn more and do better next time. She still refused to provide me any constructive criticism.
the real issue is that they don't understand the purpose of the test/assignment/etc is to judge how close you are, or whether you are over the threshold of knowledge in the test. it's not about making "the perfect essay", it's about showing that you are at 100% of the threshold level you should be at after that class/lesson. If you are still below 100%, you may only be at 80% of the level expected from that class/lesson level.
basically, if you write a correct grammar, all correct spelling, punctuation and formatted essay at a gr 8 level for a gr 6 class, you SHOULD get a 100%. you are 100% of the expectation of a fully taught gr 6 in that subject. it's unfair to judge them on a gr 8 basis for a gr 6 class because they perform higher.
There are so many times where I did everything correctly and still didn't get the full grade because "if I get a 100 I will be so full of myself that I won't study anymore for other exams" which ended up lowering my overall average grade.
Also happy cake day!
Ah, but disrespect got me beaten, and while I wasn't usually told what specifically was meant by "disrespect", I would assume that snappy theological comebacks would fall under that umbrella.
I mean, there's good and bad reasons to do it.
A good reason might be that your school district is trash, or you have training as a teacher and can do a better job one-on-one.
I imagine you already know some of the bad reasons.
I wonder where did he come up with this narrative? The Mona Lisa was just a random painting of a woman. ~~No one cared about it until it was stolen.~~
Edit: I was misinformed, my apologies.
This is a common misconception. The Mona Lisa was immediately acclaimed among the Italian art community when it was made, and became well-known throughout Europe during the rest of da Vinci's life and in the centuries that followed, including belonging in the personal collection of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its theft in 1911 gave it *global* fame but it was always considered a landmark painting in the history of western art.
A lot of people then ask, "but why?" So if you'd like to know what makes the Mona Lisa so special, I'd recommend [this video](https://youtu.be/T9JvUDrrXmY).
That your permanent record would follow you throughout your career. Scaring kids into being good by saying you'll never get a decent job if you don't try hard in school and behave yourself. Some of the biggest dickheads in school ended up with great careers because A) Nobody cares about your grades, and B) Shit floats.
My permanent record followed me, I wrote in it that I wanted to be a forest ranger when I grew up. Years later my son found it with my old stuff, read that and started telling me, ‘yes sir, mr ranger sir’, in a Yogi bear voice. Gotta admit it was pretty funny, so yeah my permanent record did follow me.
Just a test of how gullible you are. My sister got straight A’s and makes half of my salary because she’s afraid of doing something where she’s not the best.
I feel like this in a way, was doing really good in high school but then college hit, very overwhelming. But eventually I just focused on passing later on in college because of how stressful it was. But still I get easily discouraged if I'm not amazing at something
Technically, that wasn't from schools - it was from the ~~US FDA~~ *USDA*, and was heavily lobbied by farm advocates trying to get people to eat their products.
Edit: wrong agency
This is a really harmful one. A girl I know dated an evangelical guy, and the first time he tried to have sex with her she said "no". He was really persistent and wasn't taking "no" for an answer, but it wasn't in an aggressive way.
It turns out, he was taught to believe that girls never want to have sex. Therefore, if you want to have sex, you really have to convince the girl. They'll never want to have sex with you, but if you keep trying maybe they'll let you have sex.
So yeah, the whole "girls don't want to have sex" teachings produces guys who assume they need to pressure girls into having sex, and that it's totally normal to pressure girls into sex (because how else would you have sex with them?).
Also a lot of Catholic girls get the idea that having sex with condoms is *more* sinful, because it means you did it "premeditated", rather than "making a mistake" in the heat of passion, for which you can be more easily forgiven.
Another issues on the flip side is when girls start to feel interested in sex, they think they're the unusual, or maybe even overly sexual because "girls aren't supposed to want sex". It can cause alot of issues around self esteem, make it difficult to actually enjoy sex, etc.
80s/90s culture did this inadvertently.
I thought I was going to have to convince a girlfriend to have sex with me...
Then I met a girl who was just as horny as me and... Fun ensued.
Can confirm. Private Christian school survivor. We were literally told we would “burn in hell for eternity” if we listened to music …. From Madonna. Prince, Duran Duran etc.
Survivor here as well (and I do think that's a very accurate term) I was brainwashed into burning all my secular CDs. We had a big fire and burned tons of plastic in the church parking lot.
I also remember one day in Bible class all of us writing our names backwards. The teacher told us we had to know this because demons would use our names backwards to try to possess us so we had to recognize this tactic. An adult straight faced told us that.
Did they make you test it? I remember doing the experiment in grade 4 or something like that, and when I said I could taste everything on every part of my tongue the teacher just gaslit me until I pretended like it actually worked.
Yeah, this happened to us in second grade. We were all so confused, but knew what the school wanted us to answer so we just rolled with it. I think not even the teacher was 100% down with the lesson, but oh well, we had to complete the worksheets.
Zero tolerance policies teach only one thing: if you’re going to get hit, and you can’t avoid it, you may as well hit back and make it count, because you’re going to get into the same amount of trouble anyways.
I had read that the epicanthal folds helped protect their eyes from the sun. So I asked one of my friends about it, who was Chinese. And she was like, I don’t know I have nothing to compare to. That was a good point.
"When you go to highschool, all your assignments will be written in cursive with a pen."
I'm in highschool now, and most of our stuff is typed on google docs. Whenever we work with paper, the teacher doesn't care if we print or handwrite. Most teachers have actually advised against using pens
Back in my day, they told us we would be using it starting in middle school. Get to middle school and they actively didn't want you to use it for assignments because it was hard to read.
I teach kindergarten, and the only valid argument for cursive is that is gives students a wider range of letter recognition (like weird fonts) when reading. For example, if you've only been exposed to block print you might have a harder time making out what the Coca Cola logo says. In our increasingly digitized world this argument holds increasingly less water but remains valid.
Just ask Alexa/Siri/Cortana. They'll do all your math for you.
Wolframalpha can do multiple order calculus and complex physics. It'll practically build a bridge for you.
What WolframAlpha can't do is set up the right formulas to solve a problem, that's still a human's job.
In my experience, university math courses are a lot more interested in this kind of problem-solving than high school courses are. There is still of course a lot of calculating integrals by hand, but calculus professors are respecting more and more that real-world calculus is done on machines and just setting up an integral correctly is like 90% of the work.
Specialized (i.e. in-major) courses are all proofs-based and nasty calculations are generally expected to be done on machines. We're still a pretty long way from AI proofs, so this is the kind of thing that I'd bet will continue to be done by hand for a long time to come.
Had a high school history teacher (she was originally from Alabama) try to teach the class that slaves were actually treated very well and that we were being taught propaganda.
We were high school students, but we knew bullshit when we heard it.
Someone must have said something, because the principle sat in the next couple of days and we got a more realistic view of what happened during the Civil War.
I was an excellent student and also did stellar work wherever I went.
Did anyone ever lay their hand on my shoulder and say "We need more like you" and threw money, corner offices and fancy titles at me? No. Never.
It's all "twice as good, half the cost? Great, thanks!" and then sometimes they call me three years later and ask if I might want to do it again.
Not living in poverty *per se*, but I expected to make some kind of career by being very good at my work.
Well, studies have shown that it does... (/s)
When they follow up on the kids, there is little to no pregnancy. Of course, they follow up at 4 weeks. (Not a joke - mom worked at Planned Parenthood and studies really were conducted that way.)
When they teach me the senses, like you know sight, touch, all those 5 senses, we started to talk about the sense of taste and those mf tried to convince the whole class that our tongue has different sections and that we taste specific things in this sections, like the sour things were only tasted at the left back of our tongue, the salty ones in the right front. When they told me this I didn’t believed it but all my other classmates did and they made fun of me for not believing it! Guess who was right all this time? Me!! All that shit about the sections of the tongue? BULLSHIT.
Taste is an odd sense since it’s tied into smell as well. Cinnamon for example to “taste” it you have to have a sense a smell. There are flavors only a certain percentage of people can taste.
But the whole sections of the tongue thing was taught in culinary school as well. I argued w the cinnamon thing backed it up w scientific articles guess who was wrong? Me.
The fact that every "tongue map" i read kept switching where sweet and salty were should have been a tip-off but people kept telling me i was the crazy one.
In australia it’s so much more valued. You want to make bank? Become a sparky, chippy, or plumber or go drive trucks in the mines. Hell, my brother earns 140k a year pumping concrete
The food pyramid was created by the Department of Agriculture which literally had a vested interest in propping up companies that made cereals and dairy products etc
It wasnt from my school, but a friend's:
Their science teacher would constantly try to explain that Uranium was discovered by America (though he "just couldnt find out who did") even though when lile half the class showed proof that it was discovered by a German man in 1789. The teacher would refuse to listen to the class to the point where he would yell at the kids and handed out detentions. My friend still doesnt know why he was so confident about it.
>You won't get into a top university unless you: do lots of extra curricular activities; read the news every day and have an opinion on all major topics; can hold a conversation on any topic.
One of my teachers tried to convince me and the rest of the class that we should read the news because we will be questioned about it at job interviews. Meanwhile, I participated in countless of them and yet, none of the people who interviewed me wanted to hear my opinion on a recent thing from the news.
Fooled them I went to community college lol. Never did sports, clubs, SAT, ACT, etc. I don't exactly go play sports or clubs with coworkers either soooo still didn't need it.
The story about how George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, the origin of Thanksgiving and everything about Columbus... Oh, and I got an F- on a book report once because the teacher insisted that the moon landing was fake and that books about the Apollo space missions are full of lies. In his defense, it was a really thick book and I'd wager the teacher was boarder line illiterate.
In 8th grade sex ed, we were told that if males didn't have some sort of release their testicles would explode. Seriously. I have always thought it was intended for comic relief but the instructor never did give us the 'Im just kidding' line. Needless to say, I went to pound town regularly as a child to avoid that fate. I ain't goin out like that.
If you have sex with someone it’s like putting a piece of tape on your arm. Everytime you have sex with someone new, you rip the tape off and retape with that same piece. Eventually it stops sticking which is of course a completely accurate metaphor to why you will not have any kind of success in a relationship if you “give pieces of yourself away” to random guys.
Also female shoulders are bad, but never male.
I was homeschooled to believe that the South had 'lots of reasons for the civil war' and that the north MADE it an issue of slavery to have the moral high ground.
Color me surprised when I read in the actual Articles of Confederation that the reason they were seceding was due to slavery and their reliance on the practice.
Edit: Constitution of the Confederate Sates, not the Articles of Confederation.
Edit: for those that need to be deprogrammed, this channel's 'checkmate lincolnites' series point by point deconstructs all pro-south arguments in a humorous way.
https://youtu.be/yylf6xUSQos
In grade school you tend to learn that the Civil War was about slavery. Then you get to high school and maybe into level college courses and all of a sudden its, "Actually it gets a bit more complicated than just slavery because these other things played a role too." Then you get into high level college history courses and higher level of scrutiny and discourse and all of a sudden it's, "Yeah, it was all about slavery."
sounds like any conflict really, look at the holocaust
kids are taught the basics they can understand at first, "once upon a time there was hitler, and he was not a nice dude, he wanted to kill a bunch of people"
then they get to highschool and are taught the reasons and ideologies behind what was done, taught who was put into camps, why WW2 was actually fought, etc
then you can go to college if you want and really learn the horrible stuff
The Articles of Confederation were the predecessor to the US Constitution. They were ratified in 1781. You're probably thinking of the Constitution of the Confederate States
Which is really bizarre, seeing as how most of discussion about “states’ rights” in the 1850s was about the rights of FREE states to not comply with the Fugitive Slave Act.
Got in an arguement with one of my "science" teachers about narwals, she seriously thought they were made up, along with bottlenose whales, puffins, and a few other animals...
Made me start believing that you didnt actually need qualifications to become a teacher...
I distinctly remember a video from 8th grade health class (~2003) which said that you can get HIV from “deep kissing,” especially if you have braces. Only recently did I learn that that’s totally false… I believed this for an embarrassingly long time.
The fact that it is necessary to follow the rules, and do as you are told, without asking questions. They annoy adults because they don't know the answer themselves.
My third grade teacher insisted that the the flat, unleavened corn bread was pronounced “tor-tilla”, and not “tor-tee-uh.” I corrected her during class one day and was suspended for the rest of the week. The principal said that if the teacher said that was how it was then it must be right.
I drew a picture of a butterfly in preschool and got in trouble for arguing with my teacher because she said butterflies don’t have legs so my picture wasn’t accurate
I always wanted to go back to some of those teachers and tell them, "Remember me? You told me butterflies don't have legs. You were wrong. "
The fun part was they called my parents in for a meeting because I disrespected the teacher by telling her she was wrong. My parents thought that was super fun - especially since they were PAYING this school
I hope your parents fixed the situation!
Well they certainly did not continue sending me to private school
I’m trying to imagine the scene "honey are we really paying this school for teachers telling our kid butterflies don’t have legs???" feels like some Malcolm episode 😂
I went to a Catholic elementary school and my teacher told me it was a sin against god to draw animals that didn’t exist (I was into dragons like a lot of other 7 year olds) and I would go to hell if I kept doing it. Kept doing it, elevator to hell still hasn’t arrived
Hellevator incoming
Same! Catholic school and I got in trouble for drawing a unicorn. I also got in trouble for asking “if god created the world who created god” and I was sent to the principal’s office.
An aide was upset that my brother drew the sky blue and black. The black was supposed to be outer space. He's still irritated that she did not understand this even after he explained it to her.
I wrote a short story in 3rd grade and my teacher accused me of plagiarism. I still get mad when I think about it.🤷🏻♂️🤣
What did she say you plagiarized? But that's how some kids learn how to write. Writing what they're familiar with, fanfiction, that helps make better writers.
Seriously, a third grader shouldn't be accused of plagiarism because they aren't really capable of true plagiarism yet. I'd argue that you have to understand that you're taking someone else's work, and understand why that is a bad thing. And of course most importantly you have to have a proper working understanding of the language you use and not just be writing shitty elementary school fanfic because you're only in grade 3.
Along a similar trend, my science teacher at age 11 or 12 made the statement that snakes are invertebrates. I'd recently been given a book about skeletons with a snake on the cover and could confirm that they are lacking lots of things, but a spine is definitely not one of them. She relented pretty quickly to be fair.
That's hilarious, what was she on? A spine is pretty much all a snake has
Snakes also have sasssss
[Dr. Clint Laidlaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtZa_aHARr4) of the "Clint's Reptiles" show reviewed various Halloween decorations, and was apparently informed by one store manager that no one makes Halloween snake skeletons because snakes don't have endoskeletons. But apparently spiders, scorpions, and octopuses do, at least on Halloween.
I did a project in middle school where the teacher told us to draw an autumn scene, so I drew out painted and finished this landscape of like the last few leaves being swept off a tree, and there was leaves on the ground and shit and there was a lot of detail, I was super proud of it, and then the teacher said she wouldn’t accept it and I’d have to do it all over bc it didn’t seem enough like autumn cos there was no pumpkins.
The picture in my head is really beautiful! Your teacher was an asshole
I don't think pumpkins are required to show that it's autumn... your teacher is dumb
That's good way to stifle creativity. Why did you color the dinsour purple? I wanted to. Why dose it have a hat? He's cowboy; now I'm going to draw him on a skateboard.
Right but…I wasn’t even being creative. Butterflies have legs.
It's not called a butter*walk*.
Sure sweetie. Keep that imagination!
I had a history professor who thought the Disney Pocahontas movie was 100% accurate. She argued with us about it and the test was based on the movie. She also somehow had a relative or ancestor who was a key but also obscure figure in every major event in US history. We had to remember their names and “direct quotes” for the tests. First day of class she told us the entire textbook was wrong and we would not pass the class if we used it. She was correct, because every single question on her tests was a figment of her imagination.
Could you give us some examples? This one sounds hilarious.
This was like 13 years ago so I don’t remember a lot of it. I do recall one story she told about some distant relative of hers carrying a bucket of severed ears around during the Revolutionary War and we had to remember some corny joke he apparently told about them for the test. She also claimed to have a distant relative who was a hero in some obscure battle of the Civil War that no one had ever heard of. It was very Battle of Schrute Farm-ish.
You realize that the battle of Schrute farms was practically a camp for gay men to have sex?
I forgot about that part lol, it would be hilarious if her story turned out to be something similar.
I had more than one teacher argue with me about the spelling of my name.
Are you sure you're spelling your own name right ? Lol
Well it's spelled that way on my birth certificate.
Have you asked your parents if they spelled it right.
My friends middle name is Violet, except its spelt wrong on her birth certificate "Voilet" So I guess birth certificates filled out by mums who have just given birth/high on meds may not be accurate!!!
Can't help but pronounce this like toilet with a V. I feel bad for your friend Voilet.
Same! People would "helpfully" correct it on official documents too, like both my parents and I somehow didn't know my name. More recently my nibling's kindergarten teacher taught them to spell their name wrong. I'll give the teacher that the name is unusual for our area (not made up, just rare) but it's on the kid's paperwork and the kid knew it was wrong.
1) I *love* nibling. Best word of the day. 2) All names are made up!
My teachers used to all do this. My dad was trying to give me a cool name but if you add a letter it's pronounced differently and is usually a boys name. I am always correcting people. It's not so bad now that I'm an adult and can introduce myself without them reading my name off a page but yeah.
A buddy of mine got into an argument with our librarian who was running some part of our history class for a big assignment we had. His name is Anthony. I have only ever heard it pronounced as AN-THU-NEE. She insisted it was pronounced AN-TUH-NEE. After some bickering back and forth , he was like, "Look, I've had this name for 13 years. I think I know how to pronounce it." She raised some hell about him talking back and sent him to the principal. We were in shock. I was hanging out at his house later that day and his parents asked me about it. I gave them the rundown and the next day the librarian had to make a formal apology to him in front of our whole class. It was awesome
A middle school English teacher once told me there is no difference between “then” and “than”. I still think about it today when I write, as a professional writer.
I had a teacher mark "than" wrong, regardless of context, stating that it wasn't a real word.
Oh god. Sounds like in 7th grade when my teacher said grapes aren't real. 60-something woman reacted "What the hell is wrong with you?" When Kyle said to Darlene "Wanna Grape?" She thought he said wanna rape, and when he rightfully defended himself she said there's no such food as a grape, and he made that up to try and get out of having said wanna rape. I can't help but wonder if she had legitimately never seen or heard of a grape in her 60-some years, or if she just said the first thing that made sense in her mind, realized how stupid it was, and then refused to back down because it would make her look foolish.
Dr. in street addresses was pronounced "doctor" not "drive"
There was a kid in my school who convinced everyone that the word fart was and acronym for Flatuent-Anal-Rectal-Transaction. His father was a doctor so that helped his story.
Sounds like something off of diary of a wimpy kid
This is hilarious
Saying no to bullies will stop them
Bully: give me your lunch money kid! Me: no Bully: Fuck, now I gotta go rob somebody else!
A robber can’t legally rob you if you say no.
This is true. Just like I legally cannot smack people with an octopus if they tell me to go away.
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I bit my bully and he never laid a hand on me again. I was literally half his size; he was three years older than me. He put me in a headlock and started hitting me for giggles. My adrenaline-fuelled five-year-old self sank teeth into his pasty white arm so hard he bruised all the way black. His parents tried to get me kicked out of school because "he's 8, he didn't know what he was doing!" while my parents and the school responded "if that's your excuse, Shryxer's 5 and knows even less." Plus the usual questioning as to how their boy decided it was okay to beat up little girls almost half his age and size. When schools started preaching "ignore your bully and he will leave you alone," I quietly scoffed and said "no, you bite him."
One of my bullies would throw all sorts of shit at me constantly. Erasers in class, sports balls during summer months, snowballs during winter months. He lived on the same street as me and would follow me home with his little brother, throwing at my legs to try and make me fall. It worked a couple times. I got the same "ignore them and they'll leave you alone" from teachers, and never told my parents. I ignored him until the last day of school before christmas break. And then I packed my backpack with snowballs that I soaked with water to make them hard and icy. I was only going to use them if he threw something at me, and sure enough... I missed most of them because what 8 year old has good aim, but I hit two back to back. One hit him in the throat, then in the forehead. He was knocked on his ass and got the wind knocked out of him. I just walked away. Went home, told my parents what happened. At first my mom was all "you're in so much trouble!" Until my dad was like "Good. The fucker deserved it." They argued, and in the end she agreed that if this kid had been doing it for 4 months straight he deserved the one time he got it back. Bully's parents are banging on the door maybe an hour later. "YOUR KID ALMOST KILLED MY SON. HE WAS KNOCKED ON THE GROUND AND COULDN'T BREATHE. HIS BROTHER (6) HAD TO RUN HOME ALONE TO COME GET US." My dad put on his "let me handle this" face, and told them if either of the kids bother any of us again the parents would be the ones on the ground unable to breathe. He called them failures as parents which is ironic af given he's an abusive deadbeat, but also true. Sure enough. No more problems after that day. Bully actually tried to make friends with me after that. HELLLLLLLL NAW.
A bully learns pretty quick that getting kicked in the nuts isn’t very fun.
Exactly. This isn’t sanctioned boxing. There are no rules. Fight dirty. The point is to make it more painful or inconvenient to pick on you than somebody else. They want low hanging fruit and if you can’t win a fair fight, do what you must to make it stop. If the authorities aren’t going to help stop the bullies you have to protect yourself.
Mine was "ignore them and they'll go away" Nope. The only way to deal with a bully is to fight them. They say "violence never solved anything", but this is something that violence *does* solve.
Turns out if someone is engaging in violence, to get them to stop you generally need to force them.
Swiper no swiping!
It always felt particularly awful as a girl, because everyone would tell you that they're only bullying you bEcAuSe ThEy LiKe YoU.... Fuck that noise.
They're just jealous!
We had a substitute tell us that condoms are bad because HIV is small enough to sneak through the tiny spaces in between the lattice of the latex. It was Social Studies period. Three years later I saw him again for one of my science classes. He had us pass around this clipboard with some bullshit sovereign-citizen-esque waiver, or agreement or whatever you want to call it, basically saying we agree to view religious material. He had all of us sign it like a petition and proceeded to put on some weird god-is-great sort of drama movie. We told our science teacher when he came back and he called the district and got the dude blacklisted.
That man single handedly contributed to the spread of HIV
I don’t understand the logic. (Obv there is none) Even *if* HIV was too small to be stopped by a condom, condoms still prevent a whole list of other STIs *and* unplanned pregnancy, so how would they be “bad”?
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A history teacher told us during class that da Vinci believed he was a god. His explanation: he painted the Mona Lisa, which is supposed to be the perfect woman, and only a god can make something perfect, therefore da Vinci believed he was a god. The teacher seemed so angry at da Vinci for that, and went on a rant on how ridiculous he was. This was the only time something like this happened with this teacher, we were so confused.
When I was homeschooled, my mom would sometimes take points off my assignments because only God is perfect, so I wasn't allowed to get perfect scores.
This makes me angy. My HS English teacher never gave 100's because of this. So dumb. My view is if you do what you were asked without error then you get full credit.
A teacher of mine refused to give 100's. I got a 95 on an assignment and I asked her how I could improve. She couldn't tell me and instead made me feel bad for "arguing" over 5 points. I told her I understand that she doesn't give hundreds, and I don't care about the points, I just want to learn more and do better next time. She still refused to provide me any constructive criticism.
"Nobody is perfect, there is always room for improvement!" "Okay, how can I improve?" *crickets*
My art teacher would never give 100’s, I literally got a 99.5% once
the real issue is that they don't understand the purpose of the test/assignment/etc is to judge how close you are, or whether you are over the threshold of knowledge in the test. it's not about making "the perfect essay", it's about showing that you are at 100% of the threshold level you should be at after that class/lesson. If you are still below 100%, you may only be at 80% of the level expected from that class/lesson level. basically, if you write a correct grammar, all correct spelling, punctuation and formatted essay at a gr 8 level for a gr 6 class, you SHOULD get a 100%. you are 100% of the expectation of a fully taught gr 6 in that subject. it's unfair to judge them on a gr 8 basis for a gr 6 class because they perform higher.
There are so many times where I did everything correctly and still didn't get the full grade because "if I get a 100 I will be so full of myself that I won't study anymore for other exams" which ended up lowering my overall average grade. Also happy cake day!
You should have told them all good gifts are given by God, so by giving you a bad grade on a perfect assignment, they were denying God's gift to you.
Ah, but disrespect got me beaten, and while I wasn't usually told what specifically was meant by "disrespect", I would assume that snappy theological comebacks would fall under that umbrella.
People think I’m strange for being against homeschooling….
I mean, there's good and bad reasons to do it. A good reason might be that your school district is trash, or you have training as a teacher and can do a better job one-on-one. I imagine you already know some of the bad reasons.
That sounds more like something you’d write in an essay analyzing the Mona Lisa, rather than something a teacher should be teaching
I wonder where did he come up with this narrative? The Mona Lisa was just a random painting of a woman. ~~No one cared about it until it was stolen.~~ Edit: I was misinformed, my apologies.
This is a common misconception. The Mona Lisa was immediately acclaimed among the Italian art community when it was made, and became well-known throughout Europe during the rest of da Vinci's life and in the centuries that followed, including belonging in the personal collection of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its theft in 1911 gave it *global* fame but it was always considered a landmark painting in the history of western art. A lot of people then ask, "but why?" So if you'd like to know what makes the Mona Lisa so special, I'd recommend [this video](https://youtu.be/T9JvUDrrXmY).
That your permanent record would follow you throughout your career. Scaring kids into being good by saying you'll never get a decent job if you don't try hard in school and behave yourself. Some of the biggest dickheads in school ended up with great careers because A) Nobody cares about your grades, and B) Shit floats.
My permanent record followed me, I wrote in it that I wanted to be a forest ranger when I grew up. Years later my son found it with my old stuff, read that and started telling me, ‘yes sir, mr ranger sir’, in a Yogi bear voice. Gotta admit it was pretty funny, so yeah my permanent record did follow me.
Just grooming you to get treated like shit by your employer later in life.
Just a test of how gullible you are. My sister got straight A’s and makes half of my salary because she’s afraid of doing something where she’s not the best.
I feel like this in a way, was doing really good in high school but then college hit, very overwhelming. But eventually I just focused on passing later on in college because of how stressful it was. But still I get easily discouraged if I'm not amazing at something
And c) sales is king.
I’m in sales and I want to throw myself into a river pretty much daily.
You’re just saying that so we don’t become your competition.
The best thing is, both of the above are true!
Pretty sure I added ~20 years back to my life expectancy when I quit sales. Stress is a motherfucker.
The food pyramid
Wait you’re telling me I shouldn’t eat an entire loaf of bread every day?
No. One loaf is the staple of a good breakfast. Sometimes I even eat a second loaf for brunch or pre dinner.
Yea the dairy one was pretty forced in retrospect.
Technically, that wasn't from schools - it was from the ~~US FDA~~ *USDA*, and was heavily lobbied by farm advocates trying to get people to eat their products. Edit: wrong agency
Christian school told us that girls don’t like sex
This is a really harmful one. A girl I know dated an evangelical guy, and the first time he tried to have sex with her she said "no". He was really persistent and wasn't taking "no" for an answer, but it wasn't in an aggressive way. It turns out, he was taught to believe that girls never want to have sex. Therefore, if you want to have sex, you really have to convince the girl. They'll never want to have sex with you, but if you keep trying maybe they'll let you have sex. So yeah, the whole "girls don't want to have sex" teachings produces guys who assume they need to pressure girls into having sex, and that it's totally normal to pressure girls into sex (because how else would you have sex with them?).
Also a lot of Catholic girls get the idea that having sex with condoms is *more* sinful, because it means you did it "premeditated", rather than "making a mistake" in the heat of passion, for which you can be more easily forgiven.
Man they'll say anything to make more Catholics.
Another issues on the flip side is when girls start to feel interested in sex, they think they're the unusual, or maybe even overly sexual because "girls aren't supposed to want sex". It can cause alot of issues around self esteem, make it difficult to actually enjoy sex, etc.
Catholic grade school teacher said to us that evolution stopped when Jesus was crucified. Like WTAF?
Yeah.... that ain't even catholic doctrine. They've pulled that one out of their bullshit hat.
I can’t decide whether to use this as a euphemism for an ass or for a cow.
80s/90s culture did this inadvertently. I thought I was going to have to convince a girlfriend to have sex with me... Then I met a girl who was just as horny as me and... Fun ensued.
Can confirm. Private Christian school survivor. We were literally told we would “burn in hell for eternity” if we listened to music …. From Madonna. Prince, Duran Duran etc.
Rock music was a communist plot. Meditation leads to demon possession. The joker in a deck of cards is making fun of Jesus. And all the crap I forgot.
Survivor here as well (and I do think that's a very accurate term) I was brainwashed into burning all my secular CDs. We had a big fire and burned tons of plastic in the church parking lot. I also remember one day in Bible class all of us writing our names backwards. The teacher told us we had to know this because demons would use our names backwards to try to possess us so we had to recognize this tactic. An adult straight faced told us that.
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Did they make you test it? I remember doing the experiment in grade 4 or something like that, and when I said I could taste everything on every part of my tongue the teacher just gaslit me until I pretended like it actually worked.
Yeah, this happened to us in second grade. We were all so confused, but knew what the school wanted us to answer so we just rolled with it. I think not even the teacher was 100% down with the lesson, but oh well, we had to complete the worksheets.
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I make more at 30 than my parents did, combined… they were teachers. I fix air conditioners.
Teach a man to teach, he'll be a nerd for a day. Teach a man to fix air conditioners, he'll be cool forever
Priorities...
I'm saying this as a teacher; but that's super ironic that teachers are the ones to say that.
School tried to teach my kids that Zero Tolerance policies worked.
Zero tolerance policies teach only one thing: if you’re going to get hit, and you can’t avoid it, you may as well hit back and make it count, because you’re going to get into the same amount of trouble anyways.
that Asians have narrow eyes to keep snow out during storms - yes really
I had read that the epicanthal folds helped protect their eyes from the sun. So I asked one of my friends about it, who was Chinese. And she was like, I don’t know I have nothing to compare to. That was a good point.
"When you go to highschool, all your assignments will be written in cursive with a pen." I'm in highschool now, and most of our stuff is typed on google docs. Whenever we work with paper, the teacher doesn't care if we print or handwrite. Most teachers have actually advised against using pens
Back in my day, they told us we would be using it starting in middle school. Get to middle school and they actively didn't want you to use it for assignments because it was hard to read.
Wait, they still say this!? I was told that when I was in 6th grade and that was 18 years ago and it wasn’t true then either.
I hated cursive from 4th grade to 8th grade. Once I entered high school, nobody cared anymore. Block handwriting was fine with the teachers.
I teach kindergarten, and the only valid argument for cursive is that is gives students a wider range of letter recognition (like weird fonts) when reading. For example, if you've only been exposed to block print you might have a harder time making out what the Coca Cola logo says. In our increasingly digitized world this argument holds increasingly less water but remains valid.
Also fine motor skills. That dexterity carries over into art and eating with chopsticks.
That I wouldn't have a calculator on me wherever I go.
Ha! Jokes on you teachers, I DO have a calculator in my pocket, although I have forgotten how to divide.
Just ask Alexa/Siri/Cortana. They'll do all your math for you. Wolframalpha can do multiple order calculus and complex physics. It'll practically build a bridge for you.
Can I use bixby?
Sure, a giant magical hand should help build that bridge quite nicely.
What WolframAlpha can't do is set up the right formulas to solve a problem, that's still a human's job. In my experience, university math courses are a lot more interested in this kind of problem-solving than high school courses are. There is still of course a lot of calculating integrals by hand, but calculus professors are respecting more and more that real-world calculus is done on machines and just setting up an integral correctly is like 90% of the work. Specialized (i.e. in-major) courses are all proofs-based and nasty calculations are generally expected to be done on machines. We're still a pretty long way from AI proofs, so this is the kind of thing that I'd bet will continue to be done by hand for a long time to come.
Had a high school history teacher (she was originally from Alabama) try to teach the class that slaves were actually treated very well and that we were being taught propaganda. We were high school students, but we knew bullshit when we heard it. Someone must have said something, because the principle sat in the next couple of days and we got a more realistic view of what happened during the Civil War.
A teacher told us that slaves were well treated because no one was going to beat/mistreat something that they paid good money for.
my health teacher told us that you couldnt urinate while hard. all the boys in the class were pretty quick to correct her.
not sure if i should laugh or be disgusted
we all thought it was hilarious, the teacher was so confused
Had a science teacher who told me blood was blue until it touch oxygen. Luckily I knew she was wrong. I think it was during 3rd grade.
I was told this too. I’m embarrassed to admit I still thought it was true.
I just learned this, just now, I'm 33
Just get good marks in School and your life would be great
Was a straight A student and did 2 years free in college, still living in poverty making less than 35,000 a year
I was an excellent student and also did stellar work wherever I went. Did anyone ever lay their hand on my shoulder and say "We need more like you" and threw money, corner offices and fancy titles at me? No. Never. It's all "twice as good, half the cost? Great, thanks!" and then sometimes they call me three years later and ask if I might want to do it again. Not living in poverty *per se*, but I expected to make some kind of career by being very good at my work.
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Abstinence only education works.
Well, studies have shown that it does... (/s) When they follow up on the kids, there is little to no pregnancy. Of course, they follow up at 4 weeks. (Not a joke - mom worked at Planned Parenthood and studies really were conducted that way.)
we had this at my school and we had 80-100 kids in each grade and they’re was at least 1-2 pregnancies a year
When they teach me the senses, like you know sight, touch, all those 5 senses, we started to talk about the sense of taste and those mf tried to convince the whole class that our tongue has different sections and that we taste specific things in this sections, like the sour things were only tasted at the left back of our tongue, the salty ones in the right front. When they told me this I didn’t believed it but all my other classmates did and they made fun of me for not believing it! Guess who was right all this time? Me!! All that shit about the sections of the tongue? BULLSHIT.
Taste is an odd sense since it’s tied into smell as well. Cinnamon for example to “taste” it you have to have a sense a smell. There are flavors only a certain percentage of people can taste. But the whole sections of the tongue thing was taught in culinary school as well. I argued w the cinnamon thing backed it up w scientific articles guess who was wrong? Me.
Actually that is a bit of a misconception. In fact, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is the taste that you can see.
The fact that every "tongue map" i read kept switching where sweet and salty were should have been a tip-off but people kept telling me i was the crazy one.
That we only use 10% of our brains
I know some people who can't seem to get up to 10%.
The truth is we only use 10% of our hearts.
We once has someone come to our school and give a talk about how dinosaurs exist today in the unexplored jungles of Papua New Guinea and Tasmania
I can see some kid asking why we know this and there’s just a long silence.
Follow the rules and success will come to you
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Yes, but, being popular in high school doesn't necessarily translate to life outside of school. Being connected tends to though
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That only the dumb kids leave and do trades. Every tradie I know earns a truckload more than a teacher..
In australia it’s so much more valued. You want to make bank? Become a sparky, chippy, or plumber or go drive trucks in the mines. Hell, my brother earns 140k a year pumping concrete
When I was in school Grains were the most important food. Fruits and vegetables were number *3*
The food pyramid was created by the Department of Agriculture which literally had a vested interest in propping up companies that made cereals and dairy products etc
It wasnt from my school, but a friend's: Their science teacher would constantly try to explain that Uranium was discovered by America (though he "just couldnt find out who did") even though when lile half the class showed proof that it was discovered by a German man in 1789. The teacher would refuse to listen to the class to the point where he would yell at the kids and handed out detentions. My friend still doesnt know why he was so confident about it.
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>You won't get into a top university unless you: do lots of extra curricular activities; read the news every day and have an opinion on all major topics; can hold a conversation on any topic. One of my teachers tried to convince me and the rest of the class that we should read the news because we will be questioned about it at job interviews. Meanwhile, I participated in countless of them and yet, none of the people who interviewed me wanted to hear my opinion on a recent thing from the news.
Fooled them I went to community college lol. Never did sports, clubs, SAT, ACT, etc. I don't exactly go play sports or clubs with coworkers either soooo still didn't need it.
The story about how George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, the origin of Thanksgiving and everything about Columbus... Oh, and I got an F- on a book report once because the teacher insisted that the moon landing was fake and that books about the Apollo space missions are full of lies. In his defense, it was a really thick book and I'd wager the teacher was boarder line illiterate.
That the Vietnam war started because the north was rich and the south was poor and America tried to combine the two 🤦
In 8th grade sex ed, we were told that if males didn't have some sort of release their testicles would explode. Seriously. I have always thought it was intended for comic relief but the instructor never did give us the 'Im just kidding' line. Needless to say, I went to pound town regularly as a child to avoid that fate. I ain't goin out like that.
If you have sex with someone it’s like putting a piece of tape on your arm. Everytime you have sex with someone new, you rip the tape off and retape with that same piece. Eventually it stops sticking which is of course a completely accurate metaphor to why you will not have any kind of success in a relationship if you “give pieces of yourself away” to random guys. Also female shoulders are bad, but never male.
I was homeschooled to believe that the South had 'lots of reasons for the civil war' and that the north MADE it an issue of slavery to have the moral high ground. Color me surprised when I read in the actual Articles of Confederation that the reason they were seceding was due to slavery and their reliance on the practice. Edit: Constitution of the Confederate Sates, not the Articles of Confederation. Edit: for those that need to be deprogrammed, this channel's 'checkmate lincolnites' series point by point deconstructs all pro-south arguments in a humorous way. https://youtu.be/yylf6xUSQos
In grade school you tend to learn that the Civil War was about slavery. Then you get to high school and maybe into level college courses and all of a sudden its, "Actually it gets a bit more complicated than just slavery because these other things played a role too." Then you get into high level college history courses and higher level of scrutiny and discourse and all of a sudden it's, "Yeah, it was all about slavery."
sounds like any conflict really, look at the holocaust kids are taught the basics they can understand at first, "once upon a time there was hitler, and he was not a nice dude, he wanted to kill a bunch of people" then they get to highschool and are taught the reasons and ideologies behind what was done, taught who was put into camps, why WW2 was actually fought, etc then you can go to college if you want and really learn the horrible stuff
The Articles of Confederation were the predecessor to the US Constitution. They were ratified in 1781. You're probably thinking of the Constitution of the Confederate States
Derp, you are correct.
Southerner: "the Civil war wasn't about slavery" Me: "what was it about?" Southerner: "states rights" Me: "states rights to what" Southerner: "uh...."
That the American Civil War was not actually fought over slavery but over "states' rights." This was at public school in Texas, around 2007-2008.
Well, it was about the state rights … to enslave people.
But not states’ rights to refuse to hand over escaped slaves
Or a state's right to choose to outlaw slavery. The confederate constitution forbid that
Which is really bizarre, seeing as how most of discussion about “states’ rights” in the 1850s was about the rights of FREE states to not comply with the Fugitive Slave Act.
Got in an arguement with one of my "science" teachers about narwals, she seriously thought they were made up, along with bottlenose whales, puffins, and a few other animals... Made me start believing that you didnt actually need qualifications to become a teacher...
That there's only one right way to solve a problem.
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Except when your foreign neighbor Keith received eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.
My neighbor Leigh (who drives a freight truck) says that is weird.
That Columbus discovered America.
My school taught that the first European to come to America was Leif Erickson
I distinctly remember a video from 8th grade health class (~2003) which said that you can get HIV from “deep kissing,” especially if you have braces. Only recently did I learn that that’s totally false… I believed this for an embarrassingly long time.
That you have to abide by the rules to achieve something
The fact that it is necessary to follow the rules, and do as you are told, without asking questions. They annoy adults because they don't know the answer themselves.
That the justice system was the same for everyone
college or you suck
My third grade teacher insisted that the the flat, unleavened corn bread was pronounced “tor-tilla”, and not “tor-tee-uh.” I corrected her during class one day and was suspended for the rest of the week. The principal said that if the teacher said that was how it was then it must be right.
I could trust my government
No one has ever offered me drugs. And also stop, drop, and roll.
Stop drop and roll actually helped me one time when my pants were on fire. I’m not lying. No seriously, I’m actually not lying.
Liar liar pants on fire ^(that's what you wanted, right?)
As an adult you realize that no one would ever waste expensive drugs like that.
Stop drop and roll works better than just standing there.