15h ago

What's the wrongest thing a teacher ever told you?

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This one is a little different. On the first week of some college introductory economics class, the teacher was basically just reading from the textbook we all had, some historical figure who was a member of the "Council Of Seven" or something like that, when a student raised her hand - "Ma'am, what was the Council Of Seven?" - the teacher paused, and said - "Can you bring it tomorrow, as assignment?" - and actually giggled. This was in the 90s, pre-internet, looking up something like that was not a trivial task.
The teacher might have thought she was being cute and/or deflected her own shortcomings, but the actual effect was that we immediately lost all respect and trust for her, no one ever raised a hand again in her class, we all immediately went into rote robot mode for the rest of the semester, disengaged on a gut level.
- What did the council of seven end up being?

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

"Life sciences" teacher in middle school at a Christian school told us evolution was impossible because genetic mutations only cause a loss of information. Sneaky assholes
- “Irreducible Complexity” is a (the?) cornerstone of the pseudo scientific creationist rebuttal of evolution. Or at least it was when I was young and impressionable enough to believe it.

That "electricity" was a service
Without context, it is a good.
It's like natural gas. It is a good.
It's like saying "milk" is a service because the milk man brings it to your house
She wouldn't give me my damn point back on the quiz
- Never heard a science teacher explain a scientific process in business terms before.

She very matter-of-factly stated that steam wasn’t as hot as boiling water. This was a chemistry teacher.
Given, it was elementary school, so the “chemistry” was mostly super basic stuff like mixing dish soap and yeast with hydrogen peroxide. But still, I’m salty about that one because I had been burned pretty badly by active steam before she said that. I still have the scar and everything.
- You'd think the expectation would be that gases are hotter than liquids.

We'd all end up drugged with needles up our arms laying in front of the unemployment centers of we don't get better at chemistry. Like, all of us.
Joke's on him, I'm in IT now, so I'm of WAY worse.

That Wikipedia was unreliable
- 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

There is no such thing as negative numbers. "How do you take 5 apples from 3 when there are only 3 apples?" This was in elementary school in Wisconsin. The temperature regularly goes below zero. Pointing this out got me time in the corner. I'm still kinda salty about that.
- Maths unfortunately is hard to teach all at once, 1 year there's no negative numbers next year there is. Then they make it harder by adding letters. Get high enough, and you start doing stuff with infinite numbers, which I was also told can't be done.
- When you say "in the corner", I'm guessing this was one of those really, really old small schools you'd see in Little House on the Prairie.

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

That Columbus was a good person.
- Not so fun fact, he is said to be the first European to have syphilis as it was originally a Caribbean condition, and he was said to have caused it to spread in Europe, which also means he is the reason everyone started wearing powdered wigs as it went from a way to hide syphilis baldness to a fashion statement. So now you know what to expect (a version of George Washington who looks like Brad Pitt perhaps) if you ever go back in time and burn the Santa Maria.

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.
- 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.

You won't always have a calculator with you.
- 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.
- My class was repeatedly threatened for using more than one finger on a calculator to solve chemistry equations. “If I see those Nintendo thumbs…”
- i wonder if this ever keeps any math teachers up at night. how wrong they were about this
- They used to deliver this line with so much sass
- I was told this while wearing a calculator watch.
- 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
- Yeah, this line survived a lot longer than it should have.
- 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.

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.

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.

You should be enjoying the school years cause they'll be the best of your life. Said by someone who very obviously peaked in high school.
- They were kind of right and really wrong.
  Im 40 and married now... remember how nervous tou were just trying to talk to someone you had a crush on? That level of "Powerline up the ass" intensity of feelings?
  Yeah these days, firstly if I'm ever single again shit has gone seriously sideways... But I could without a sense of trepidation walk up to Charlize Theron in a coffee shop, tell her how amazing she was in Aeon flux, ask her how she got involved in executive producing Hyperdrive for netflix and then ask her if she would like to grab dinner sometime. Because these days you have to really go some lengths to get a rise out of me.
- School was hell for me compared to other things.

Pores in latex condoms bigger than the AIDS virus.
Fuck a science class, that motherfucker shouldn’t have been allowed near the school.
- 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)
- Pores in ~~latex~~ lamb 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.

“You need to go to college to be successful or you’ll be flipping burgers!”
So said teachers, parents, career counselors, etc. and here we are, I beat school, and no jobs. Should’ve become an electrician.
- I couldn't even get the burger flipping job starting out. Rude.
- Most of the most successful people never went to college. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Simon Cowell...
  
  I mean you're looking at a few edge cases here. Most of us will tend to land in the average and never see that level of wild success. Yes, with the right skills you can get a well paying job without a degree but on the whole, people who get a higher education end up doing better financially.
  
  https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/education-pays.htm
  
  They either had rich parents with rich connections, or had incredibly loyal, highly skilled friends, like Jobs had Wozniak.

Had a science teacher back in middle school that claimed to have a buddy that "designed" a way to make gas engines more efficient by running the gas line over the engine to warm it up before entering the engine. Said that GM bought the "design" with no patent, and hid it away so that it wouldn't get out. Problem is, that's not how BTUs work and GM would obviously know that. Also that's a good way to destroy your engine by misfiring.
- I was told a similar thing but the claim was that the person had invented an engine that ran on water haha.
  
  My mom believes this one (she believes in a lot of crap...). Allegedly there was a dude who made a car run om water, but the evil oil company Shell bought the idea so that it would never come out!
  That is of course ignoring the fact that the supposed guy wouid still have knowledge on how to build one.
  Or... The simple fact that water can't be used as a fuel like that.

I remember a bunch of things in science class in middle school, because I was really into science and it bothered me that they oversimplified everything to the point of being straight up false. Like a definition of "animals" being "something with eyes and a mouth". I mentioned several examples of animals without eyes, like corals, but the teacher just exasperatedly said that they did have small mouths. Ok, but your definition said eyes and a mouth, not or.
I also remember a question in a test about astronomy being "what is the biggest object". I thought about it for a moment and then wrote "the universe"; which I'll maintain to this day, was right. But it was marked wrong. The expected answer was the sun. I talked about it to the teacher, because it wasn't like I pulled the existence of objects bigger than the sun from my personal knowledge only, we'd explicitly talked about bigger stars and galaxies. But the teacher said "It was implied 'biggest object in the solar system' ". Implied how? It definitely wasn't written. I still want my point back.
- The sun? The sun!? I guess your teacher didn't know about Aldebaran, the size of galaxies... Supermassive black holes... Galactic filaments... And yes, the universe itself.
- Who was your teacher? Aristotle?
  
  The Greeks thought the sun was the same size as the Peloponnese peninsula.

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 the civil war was fought over states rights.
- State's rights to slavery.
- States rights as in civilian rights? Maybe my teachers just glossed over the history, but I thought it was fought because states with large slave owning populations were afraid of subtracting slavery from their economic equation.
  
  So that’s the thing, it’s a lie of omission. The full line is ‘The civil war was fought over the states rights… to own slaves”. We were taught that north were not freeing slaves out of a moral standpoint, but to ensure monetary dominion over the south. Anyway, it’s carefully curated propaganda and white washing of history that is apparently still happening to this day.

I had a teacher confidently tell the class that Mt. Everest didn’t border China (well Tibet really, but that’s a battle for another day). I will say she was able to concede she was mistaken. I had another teacher hit on me when I was in high school while I was alone with her in the copy room. I had always heard some salacious rumors about her, but I always assumed they were just idle gossip until that day. That was a different kind of wrong. And no, I didn’t take her up on the advance.
I’m assuming English isn’t your first language, so just as an FYI, wrongest isn’t a word. “Most false” is probably the best fit in this instance. Just one of those weird quirks of this bastard language.
- You're right, it's my second language. My first/native language actually doesn't have official spelling rules, so yeah, it's a handful.
  
  Hey, OP, they're wrong. Not the wrongest they could have been, but it is indeed a word. A quick check with any online dictionary will confirm that.
  It might be considered poor style to use it in educated language, where "most wrong", "most incorrect" or "most false" might be better choices, which is probably the context they were thinking of, but it's definitely a word and people do use it.
  
  so, French? :D

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.

My middle school computer teacher once said that unwanted email was called "flame". I had never heard that term before or since used in the context of email.
- My guess is they got confused with the concept of "flame wars" and "flaming" from forums. It doesn't quite match their definition of "unwanted" messages exactly, but it's not entirely far off either.
- Gives a new meaning to "flame wars".

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
- Sounds like they weren't updating their knowledge. We discover a new major solar system body on an average of every ten years now (the last time it was either Ceres or Sedna).
  I wonder how the teacher will react to seeing the upcoming Planet 9 (or to them, Planet X) discovery (rumored to be a minor black hole, which honestly sounds terrifying).
- Oh I had a similar experience in elementary school. Our teacher knew and told us that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore but because the textbook was out of date, she told us that if it came up on our tests, consider Pluto a planet anyway.
  
  Oh public school. Always a hoot. Haha

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.
- I wonder if she had heard of a (controversial) phenomenon called blindsight in which some very specific conditions of blindness some people are said to not consciously see but still have some sort of subconscious "sight".
  As in the eyes physically work and these people have damage to a very specific part of the brain, allegedly.
  Anyway she was obviously wrong but that just reminded me so I linked that.
- Your teacher was full of shit, but we do have more than 5 senses. You know the taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight. There are two more everyone has:
  Vestibular - sense of balance and movement in space (like falling).
  Proprioception - you can sense where your arms and legs are relative to your body without looking or touch.
  My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.
  There's blind and there blind. Besides actual damage to the eye itself, most definitions of blind are loss of connection of the optic nerve to the visual cortex (the part of your brain which takes nerve pulses and translates them into vision). However recent science has found that even if there is a break/damage to the visual cortex, there are certain visual things that blind person can "see". The optic nerve makes a couple of stops along the way from the eye to the visual cortex, specifically the Amygdala in the brain. Many that are "visual cortex" blind can still know where someone's face is and even determine what mood they are in from their facial expression. They can also sometimes dodge object thrown at them. Both of these are Amygdala actions. Its not like they actually SEE the face or SEE the object being thrown, but they "know" if someone is upset or happy without that person even saying anything if their facial expression tells the story. Here's the science if you're interested in more.
  Since reading these studies I've always been curious to talk to a blind person to have them describe their experience with this.
- How did she think colorblindness worked?

Drafting on computers won't be long term.

RAM is memory inside the computer, ROM is memory on the disk (5.25" floppy)
- That moment when I only know that's wrong because I've played Hyperdimension Neptunia.

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???
- They just had one guard in every room. It saved a lot on guard towers.
- Even North Korea never went that far.

Shakespeare's plays were never printed in his lifetime, they were compiled from people who saw the plays live, went home, and wrote down what they remembered.
- I wouldn't think there would've been enough literate people in those times to do that.
  
  Well, consider his audiences as well...
- Sounds more like how the Bible was written

"You'll enjoy ice skating, it's easy!" - the teacher who took our class to an ice rink... 😂
The moment I'm over the ice I become the human equivalent of a scruffed cat and people started pushing me around like I was a hockey puck and I was smiling pretending I was having fun but inside I was like
- Was it an extracurricular activity, a field trip, or an actual part of class?
  Sounds like my school and the local lido. "You'll get a grasp on what to do in no time" one could expect them to have said. Still waiting for "no time" to come and go.

The Milky Way leads to God
- Follow the milky brick road!
- Or even that there is a god at all

My 6th grade science teacher interrupted me while reading aloud after I correctly pronounced "tsunami". He goes "What's that?....tuh-soo-mee?". I said Yeah, he spends 10 seconds digesting it, and I continue reading aloud.
The next kid to read after me pronounced it tuh-soo-mee.
- I only pronounced つなみ like that with a t when I was young and first came across the word but then I learned the correct pronunciation
- They sound like they've never watched Toonami before.

If you study hard in school you can do anything.
- If this were true, I'd know more languages than I do now.
- Well, you can, you just won't be paid anything for it.

first day of a new school year "what are you doing in this class, didn't we made you fail last year?"
I had bad grades but mathematically good enough to pass just barely. She was the Computer Science teacher and I proved her wrong more than once in front of the class. So yeah, she had a grudge.
- "Made you" fail last year? Quite the wording...
- I had a friend whose computer teacher had such a severe grudge on him that when his brother (who was her favorite student) went to jail, she gave him a passing grade despite him failing, in order to get rid of him out of lamentation.

I shouldn't pursue further education
- A teacher told you that?
  
  Without context, it's hard to know. Higher education isn't the best choice for everyone.
  
  Yes

See you next year.
Edit: Oh, you mean actually wrong.

you gonna fail in life
- I believe in you!
- That's fucked

That x^0.5 is not the same as the square root of x
- Please explain :)
  
  X^3 = x•x•x
  X^2 = x•x
  X^1 = x
  X^0 = 1
  X^-1 = 1/x
  X^-2 = 1/(x•x)
  X^-3 = 1/(x•x•x)
  When the exponent is between -1 and 1, it becomes a root function:
  X^(1/2) = sqrt(x)
  X^(1/3) = cubic root(x)
  X^-(1/2) = 1/(sqrt(x))
  X^-(1/3) = 1/(cubic root(x))

It's not how big it is, it's how you use it.
- I wonder how much experience they had before saying that.

Not a Teacher, but my Boss. He advised me to clock in and out based on the system time, not GPS.
"The computer time is more accurate".

Linux is created by RedHat
- What's RedHat?

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