Greentext

This shit happened to me, but in kindergarten. I grew up in a bilingual house. I spoke English and Spanish equally. I went to the school with my mom to get assessed. She said I could read and was bilingual. The teacher didn't believe it and made me read from one of their books.

To add insult to injury, when they had Spanish class, the fucking teacher taught us that "purple" was "porpuda" and "lizard" wad "lizardo." Shit like that... My mom put me in another school.

I'm 48 and still laugh about lizardo. How absolutely stupid.

The worst part is that he was grounded by the parents. When I was younger a teacher told me I was wrong for saying that Portrush was in County Antrim, not Londonderry like she told the class. My mum brought it up at the parent teacher conference.

Same teacher also marked me wrong when asked to list loughs in Northern Ireland and Iisted Lough Beg. I was right, but it wasn't on the list that SHE gave us.

The bajillion stories in the comments about horrible experiences with math just reinforce the fact that I've made the right career choice.

I became an elementary teacher as a second career specifically because so many elementary teachers are absolutely terrible at teaching math. (Mostly because they don't actually understand the math that they're teaching. In my university cohort, almost 50% of my classmates failed the math entrance exam the first time. There was nothing more complex than 5th grade math on that test.)

Students should be allowed to use the strategies that work for them, and they should definitely never be punished for knowing math from higher grade levels.

If a student in my class knows something more advanced, I will challenge them to use grade-level-appropriate strategies to prove that their answers are correct. And if they demonstrate that they can do both, I'll give them more advanced work to help them grow.

There’s not much worse as a kid in a learning environment, or even with your parent(s), to be shut down painfully for being right about something that they don’t know or don’t think you know. Really crushes the satisfaction of nailing a win and turns it into bitterness and starts the lifelong process of keeping your mouth shut when you’re right and letting others win when wrong.

I can believe this. Not fake, not gay. The math teaching of the past was so dumb. Even now, I have 2 kids who never got a bad math teacher and still love math; two who did (one teacher who actually thought women ought not get higher education) and those two do not

And a good math teacher is a treasure beyond words. Mr. Galing, if I could have had you teach my kids through high school I would have taken them anywhere.

I'm pretty sure a currently 4yo nephew of mine will suffer some sort of bullshit like that in the coming years. Little bud is already able to read big numbers like 368 (also in english no less!) and full words despite the preschool not teaching either.

Why are you going to be learning negative numbers while you are 8? Edit: Reading the comments I see that your schools are pretty shit compared to my public school was way better (even when the building was on the verge of collapsing for like the whole time I was there)

Did I write this fucking greentext and then forgot or something, because this exact same thing happened to me, except they took my yugioh cards, not pokemon csrds

Had a similar experience around age 10. Learned that cucumbers generally have a higher water percentage than seawater, 97% to 96.5%. Tell that to a friend of the same age, he says that can't be true because all the oceans have more water than all the cucumbers in the world, we begin debating and then start fighting about it and a teacher comes by to stop us and asks what's going on. I explain and the teacher immediately looks at me like I've lost my mind, pulls my friend to the side and asks him to leave, takes me to a room and sits down to try to explain how I'm wrong and that I can't start fights over things that anyone can prove is untrue. A week after I'm sent to a kind of mental health meeting, she immediately understands and looks it up, sees that I'm right, tells me to keep away from talking about "stuff like that" with friends and others my age and also teachers and parents of other kids because it doesn't matter if I'm right or not, just that I have to think about how others perceive me...

I'm not still mad about it, but can't deny that it feels wrong and weird.

I still remember my teacher bitching me out in front of the class when we were learning negative numbers because when he asked me how I figured out the correct answer I said that the positive numbers and negatives cancelled each other out. Like -4 and positive 5, the negative 4 cancels out 4 on the positive side and you are left with 1. Maybe that wasn't the correct verbiage but it gave me the correct answer every time. He was a dick about correcting me though.

Wisdom is knowing when to say "fuck it" to save yourself the pain.

Americanized versioned, but with a match teacher it went something like this:

Teacher: Whoever can solve this will get an A.

me: I have a solution.

Teacher: come out and explain it.

Me: I do just that.

Teacher: that is correct, but you didn't use the method we just learned, no A, sit down.

I had an elementary school teacher who insisted that gravity came from the earth's rotation, and that if the earth stopped spinning there would be nothing holding us down.

Me, but it's a job site and the teacher is my manager and I'm 28. Had a possibility to leave in contrast to this 7 years old child

Oof, i can feel anon. Actually true probably, similar stuff happened to me. Also getting this writte in as bad behaviour as well. I started so many arguments with teachers because they were bullshitting. Maths is one thing, i was really into it as a child(still am) but i understand why a teacher has to teach things in order. Of course this could be solved with more resources, and more importantly, distrobuting resources better by having a bit more personalized education. But what i was on about is that its very common(in eastern europe at least) for teachers to spread actual complete fucking bullshit. The amount of times they took disciplinary action against me because i corrected their batshit insane claims is just sad. This mainly happened until 5th and 6th grade where i got to the conclusion that just discussing what we covered during the class, after the class, was a good way of clearing up the mess. Of course i knew way too much for a 10 year old(had an autistic sister who loved to infodump me, we still engage in it time to time ^_^) but the point is that if a 10 year old is constantly correcting his teachers theres a problem in the system. I hoped that more western systems would be better but actually i dont see (sweden in my case) being much better for children even with everyone hyping it up. Well sorry for the rant, idk what could actually solve these problems exactly as im not an expert but i really hope we adress it one day...

"Impossible" would be a more mathematically accurate answer than "zero".

Ah I recall my "science" teacher when I was 13 explaining to us that all materials expand when heated and shrink when cooled.

So I ask how ice floats, or how ice cubes swell above the tray.

God that teachers dumb.. Why even as the question? Why not just do 20 - 20 if you are going to be upset when a kid knows the answer. Simple! Don't ask questions you don't want the correct answers to. Teaching kids the wrong answers only messes them up the next year when they have to unlearn the bullshit you taught them.

Man... This sucks. I can't believe how many lemmings have had similar experiences. I'm just remembering one now where I was excited about math, went ahead in the curriculum to fractions, and answered everything in ratios. Instead of the teacher seeing the simple mistake, I just remember them being "wrong". How deflating.

Kids need connection before correction. I'm sort of glad my kid is glued to a screen doing adaptive math. It sucks in its own way, but better than unfeeling correction. Though, at least in my district, there's a big emphasis on empathy development so I think the teachers try to model that.

My experiences were to answer correctly, and then they go 'well, yes', and then don't ask me questions in the future.

My English-as-second-language teacher hated me because I kept correcting her spelling and vocabulary. But it was okay because I hated her right back and took every opportunity to annoy her (for the sake of rigorous accuracy, of course). Fortunately she couldn't actually harm or sabotage me because I aced almost all of my tests and had good scores in national ESL competitions, and a sudden drop in grades would likely have been too obvious.

The point where I'd had enough was a test about the anatomy of vehicles. She had crossed out my answer to "left side of a ship" because I'd written port or larboard (not that I expected someone with a master's diploma to know the etymology of nautical terms*, or not to confuse larboard with starboard because they looked similar), but what made my blood fucking boil was when she crossed out my answers of hood and trunk because I'd used the American words instead of the British bonnet and boot, and when I pointed out that she'd marked those same answers as correct in others' tests, she went back and fucking changed the scores on the other tests. I told her it was "deplorable conduct for a teacher" (approximate translation, and as polite as I was going to get that day) and she dragged me to the principal for disrupting the class.

That was the third year of high school (I think "junior" is the American equivalent). I took an option to graduate one year early from ESL, in part out of spite. I'm sure she was glad to be rid of me.

* I knew "larboard" and "starboard" and the names of individual sails from Assassin's Creed 4. Much of my vocabulary comes from games (including some Russian from STALKER, Metro, and MGSV).

edit: A resurfaced memory! Still regarding sailing -- she thought "in distress" meant that things were calm and safe because "di-stress" was the opposite of "stress". I swear I'm not making this shit up!