Ask Lemmy

You won't always have a calculator with you.

There's checks and balances in our government

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.

Pores in latex condoms bigger than the AIDS virus.

Fuck a science class, that motherfucker shouldn’t have been allowed near the school.

"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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

It doesn't matter if I'm a good person, if I don't believe in god, I'm going to hellll.

That Wikipedia was unreliable

‘Skateboarding is unethical, immoral, and should be illegal…’

I wrote my next essay in highlighter after that, to make her suffer. She was the worst.

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.

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.

That the civil war was fought over states rights.

"Respect your elders, because they are always right"

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.

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)

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.

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.

I spent first 8 years in a Christian school, took me to adulthood to learn that evolution theory is not just a "unproven hypothesis"

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.

"Life sciences" teacher in middle school at a Christian school told us evolution was impossible because genetic mutations only cause a loss of information. Sneaky assholes

I don't remember the specifics because it was damn near 40 years ago, but I had a teacher tell the class that everyone has a sort of 6th-sense sight through an invisible 3rd eye in the middle of your forehead. And her example was that blind people will pick out clothes by colors or tell someone they were wearing an ugly tie. Which I've never seen, at least not outside of some sort of Hallmark Romance Drama quality religious schlock.

I never had any problem correcting a teacher if they made some calculation error or misquoted something out of the book (I wasn't an asshole who corrected every single thing, just the ones that might be material to everyone else's understanding of the lesson).

But when confronted with a teacher spewing utter bullshit, I was at a total loss for a response. I can't imagine anyone else believed it, either, but what a fucking loon. My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.

I don't even know if that was the worst/only one, but that's the one that has always stood out for me.

I guess you could add that American Exceptionalism was taught as a legitimate point of view rather than nationalist bullshit.

That "electricity" was a service

Without context, it is a good.

It's like natural gas. It is a good.

It's like saying "milk" is a service because the milk man brings it to your house

She wouldn't give me my damn point back on the quiz

That Columbus was a good person.

This one is a little different. On the first week of some college introductory economics class, the teacher was basically just reading from the textbook we all had, some historical figure who was a member of the "Council Of Seven" or something like that, when a student raised her hand - "Ma'am, what was the Council Of Seven?" - the teacher paused, and said - "Can you bring it tomorrow, as assignment?" - and actually giggled. This was in the 90s, pre-internet, looking up something like that was not a trivial task.

The teacher might have thought she was being cute and/or deflected her own shortcomings, but the actual effect was that we immediately lost all respect and trust for her, no one ever raised a hand again in her class, we all immediately went into rote robot mode for the rest of the semester, disengaged on a gut level.

I failed a test because I said there were only 8 planets and the "correct" answer was 9. The teacher didn't know Pluto had been demoted. Lol

RAM is memory inside the computer, ROM is memory on the disk (5.25" floppy)

When talking about movements of the Earth in geography, we covered the earths rotation, the orbit around the sun, the usual stuff. I mentioned precession as an additional movement - I had read about it in a book just recently. The teacher completely ruled that out and called me stupid for that. Jokes on him.

The Russians/Soviets have guard towers on every block who monitor which rooms citizens are in at any given moment. Absolutely no true freedom of movement, unlike those of us in the free world. At the time, I figured people could trick the guards by just not turning on lights in the room when they moved about. As the years went on, two questions came to mind: isn't that prohibitively expensive? and why???

Drafting on computers won't be long term.