“Medieval armies didn’t use crossbows when attacking castles.”
My hand immediately shot up. “What are you talking about? Of course they did.”
My elderly history teacher replied “no, they didn’t.”
Me “Why do you think that?”
Her “because crossbows fire in a straight line so they would just shoot over the castle.”
I looked at my classmates, hoping they would see how insane this is. They were looking at me like I grew a second head.
Me “that’s not true. At all.”
Her, getting slightly annoyed, “how do you know?”
Me “well for one, I’ve fired a crossbow, I know how they work. For two, they had GRAVITY BACK THEN, the bolt comes back down!”
Her, and some of the class “ooooh!”
…
Her “well anyway…” And continues the lesson.
This was a college class.
“I think you’ll find that crossbows are a hitscan weapon 😏”
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
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.
We’re so doomed.
Yeah. The sad part is that this was back in 1997. Their public education system is in far worse shape than it was back then. Wisconsin had an excellent and well funded public education system so I went from getting a really good education to about the worst possible you can find in the US. So glad I wasn’t there long. Some of those kids are still there as adults, still holding out for a successful rap career and sending their little shit apples to the same school, repeating the cycle.
My Spanish teacher would teach us Spaniard Spanish and claim it was Mexican Spanish. One day I found out the hard way.
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.
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)
That “th” sounds like the letter “f”. It doesn’t but I’m nearly 40 and still can’t pronounce it correctly.
Instead of touching your upper teeth with your lower lip, use the middle of your tounge to touch the upper teeth. That’s all.
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?
My guess is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7
When our classmate stood at the front and read it from a piece of paper the following day, we were all already tuned out of that class for the rest of the semester, I wasn’t paying attention. In fact, I might be remembering the name wrong, I can’t be certain.
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.
Who said it was a science teacher?
She very matter-of-factly stated that steam wasn’t as hot as boiling water. This was a chemistry teacher.
Given, it was elementary school, so the “chemistry” was mostly super basic stuff like mixing dish soap and yeast with hydrogen peroxide. But still, I’m salty about that one because I had been burned pretty badly by active steam before she said that. I still have the scar and everything.
She should have worded and explained her reasoning there.
Depending on the context, and parameters, she wasnt wrong. because as water boils, and turns into gas, it rapidly cools down again as it looses its heat energy to the (relatively) cold air until a certain point in which it cools to a certain point and turns into rain ( or sticks to the surface it hit that cooled it down ).
That means that the gas above the boiling water is colder than the boiling water itself.
… Its just only a few degrees off and can still burn you very god damn badly.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.
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.
Science is the same way, but you can teach in a way that alludes to more complex subjects without denying those subjects. I actually called out my HS physics teacher when he kept having to correct grade school science lessons. He couldn’t disagree with me that it’s probably better not to teach incorrect lessons just because the correct lessons were more complex.
As far as I’m concerned there are always letters. We just hide them or when they are young use a question mark.
2 + 5 = ?
Is super basic algebra if you just change the question mark to an X.
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.
That Wikipedia was unreliable
Wikipedia is not a source. It’s fine to take information from Wikipedia. But if you are doing actual research. You need to cross reference that with the source cited to make sure it’s accurate.
Most Wikipedia pages have their sources listed so you can easily look them up and verify their validity.
If there are no sources cited. You should be cautious.
It is unreliable to an extent. If you have expertise in anything at all go look at the wiki for it and you likely will take issues with parts of it or more. That being said it’s good enough for a generalized overlook of something so I wouldnt 100% trust the minutae in a wiki but the general concepts are typically ok
The cool thing about Wikipedia is that if you have expertise in a topic and find something incorrect on it, you can edit the page to be more accurate. The trickiest part is finding and adding relevant sources. There’s a learning curve to it, but at least anyone who’s used to writing research papers should have experience with that already.
I mean when writing an essay you should really be sourcing from the original source not Wikipedia, good thing Wikipedia lists the original source the info came from so you can just use that. (Unlike some websites the teacher said were better then Wikipedia which were just full of unchecked bullshit)
But for everything else Wikipedia is great
They should have always been teaching to use Wikipedia as a beginning of research. Go to wiki, follow the cited sources and follow those cited searches if anything was referenced.
There was always a double standard though compared to something like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Pre-internet, for practicality, you couldn’t really check the cited sources on Britannica, so you took it as word of god. They’re a major publication! Huge money and people who wear suits and monocles wrote it! Posh British sounding name! How could they be wrong?
Except that when researches compared Britannica to Wikipedia for inaccuracies, they found Britannica to contain a much higher rate. So why did Britannica keep being held in higher regard? Pure appeal to authority.
Some wikipedia articles have been edited by science/history deniers/fascists/liars and it is difficult to determine if whats written at any point is true or edited. Thats where the statement comes from.