I was taught the old urban legend that “fuck” comes from an acronym for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” That was in 1985. I was also told that Labrador is part of Quebec; that was in 1982.
Teachers aren’t perfect; they don’t know every single fact there is to know. It’s ridiculous to expect them to never make mistakes.
The difference was this; the former teacher was an ass who refused to believe he was wrong. He was out of teaching three years later. The latter admitted she was wrong, and we then studied the history of the conflict between Quebec and Newfoundland over ownership of Labrador. First rate teacher.
Every time that someone comes along with a statement like this, or even a thread that claims, “the American education system is dying,” I just roll my eyes. Show me some proof that schools are substantially worse now than they were, “back in the day,” or was critical analysis of information just not covered when you were in school or where you at a doctor’s appointment?
My mom was a math-major in college and got a masters in mathematics specializing in statistics. By the end of high-school I had taken multi-variable calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra, which were topics that my mother didn’t even approach until her senior year or undergrad or even grad school. In a lot of ways I feel that people might be suprised with how well our schools are performing in some dimensions.
This isn’t exactly new. When I was a kid, the only correct answer was the one that was in the teachers edition. As an avid PBS and Nova watcher (my mom got tired of answering “why” all the time, so she let PBS do it), I was relatively up to date in my knowledge.
The worst I can think of was a discussion of bird migration in fourth grade. I was asked how and I brought up how birds can use the Earth’s magnetic fields to aid in navigation. I got this face. :eek: Color’s a bit off but the expression is dead on. She looked at the book and said “That’s not the answer that I have here.” I tried and tried, but it was no use. The worst part was that it was even in the article that we were supposed to read. Still, if it ain’t in the teachers guide, it ain’t right. :rolleyes:
I’m keeping a very close eye on what my daughter is being taught.
I practically have to BEG my students to tell me when they think I’m wrong. Too many of them just take my word or the textbook as Gospel truth, and don’t question things at all if they contradict each other. Since I teach Computer Science classes, and technology changes faster than the printed word, my lectures often contradict the textbook, but NONE of the students seem to notice at all.
I’m also thinking about giving bonuses to my online students for every spelling or grammatical error they find in my course notes. I seriously doubt I’d have to give away a single point since they don’t seem to have a clue what proper grammar and spelling are.
Our kids attend public schools. Our 13yo daughter is much more intelligent than any teacher she has had so far, so we’ve had to remind her that her focus needs to be on the skills she is learning (including putting up with idiotic authority figures), rather than the knowledge her teachers impart to her. The few times she has actually tried to point out errors in content, she’s pretty much been fluffed off one way or another. It also doesn’t seem to be worth trying to correct the teacher, since she is normally so convinced she is right that we can’t convince her otherwise. (The only male teacher our daughter has had was such an idiot that she pretty much discounted him the first day of class. I met him a couple of times, and have exactly the same opinion.)
Even with the emphasis on skills rather than knowledge, she still runs into problems. Until this year, her classes have focused on ClarisWorks/AppleWorks to teach basic computer applications (which is fine), but this year, they switched to Microsoft Office. Her computer teacher had never used any MS Office applications before this year, so for the first couple of months of this year, her computer teacher would ask my daughter questions about Word, Excel, and PowerPoint while the rest of the class was working on assignments, so that the teacher could prepare for the next set of lectures. Our daughter uses WordPerfect much more often than Word, but since she has played around with word processors a lot more than any of her teachers have, she discovered that she really knows how to use Word, too.
Every few years I get a student or two like this. I just get out of their way and try not to impede their education too much. I usually try to get them to research things** I** would like to learn, and then have them teach their classmates (and me!)
In my sophomore year in high school, my history teacher was talking about the old “squaw” urban legend and how somebody tried to sue someone else over the use of the word. I politely raised my hand and said “Uhhh…I don’t think that’s true, I think I remember reading something that said it was just an urban myth or something” and she basically said “Well, I don’t know for sure that it’s true, but these people sure did, and they believed it enough to file a lawsuit…”
In my freshman year history class, we were having some kind of class discussion that drifted way off-topic from whatever we were supposed to be talking about, and someone in the class told a story about how a friend of a friend of her uncle’s sister etc. had dreadlocks that he never washed or maintained, and a nest of spiders grew inside his hair. By pure coincidence, the next day I discovered Snopes.com and was browsing through all the different sections when I came across this page, which I promptly printed off and brought with me to the next history class. I showed it to the teacher, and she actually read it to the whole class! This time, the system worked!
I love it when my students correct me. It demonstrates that they’ve done the work required to do the learning, and the knowledge or skill is going to remain with them for a much longer period of time.
In fact, I build deliberate mistakes into my samples and reward students for noticing them when I do make a mistake. Anybody who’s read many of my posts knows that I have an atrocious problem with careless spelling mistakes, which my students often catch and correct.
Of the teachers my kids have had, the small handful that resemble the one in the OP were the ones who were overdue for retirement. If anything, the overall state of the education systme is getting much better as those authoritarians finally *do *retire.
Sadly, IME, jerkwads that inspired the OP are the rule, rather than the exception. This includes not only educators, but also people who work in every industry I’ve been involved with. They’re more intersted in maintaining power and control, than anything else. You come up with a better mousetrap and their only impulse is to crush you, as quickly and maliciously as possible.
One of the reasons I bug Una so much, is that she’s one of the few engineers I’ve dealt with who actually knew more about engineering than I do. Frankly, I’d trust Una’s engineering decisions in an area outside of her expertise with my simply because I know that she’s smart enough that her WAGs are more likely to be better reasoned and thought out than those of most “experts” within a field.
Hmmm…reading my original sentence as quoted by Twoflower made me realize that it was rather unclear (hey, I said science education, not English! ). In case there was any confusion, I agree with Twoflower – I don’t think that this is “a new thing” at all.
I had a professor tell us the urban legend about Dan Quayle saying he wished he had studied Latin in high school so he could converse with the people of Latin America. I think I printed up the Snopes article and showed it to him.
Do I know the same “experts” you do? I find it very satisfying to have finally reached a point where my reputation and “personal power” allow me to flatly tell them “You’re a moron. Shut up and stay out of my business” (and to get away with it).
The teachers I respected the least were the ones who wouldn’t admit they were wrong under any circumstances. My world history teacher in ninth grade was the worst; she snapped at people regularly for daring to challenge what she said and would get upset and defensive when someone asked a question she didn’t know the answer to.
My physics teacher, on the other hand, gave us extra credit for pointing out his mistakes. This made us pay more attention, and it was also nice to know that he didn’t think he was infallible or should be.
I’ll never forget my frustration with a teacher I had in the fourth grade who gave us an archaic poem about meadows, flowers sun and bees (with lots of references to honey) making glad the hearts of men who looked at me as if I were completely out of my mind when I said that the poem was actually about mead. She didn’t know what mead was and had no interest in finding out.
Then there was the very strange English teacher in 7th grade who got very pale and flustered when I used the word “snatch” once. I truly believe she thought I was talking about the female generative organ.
Not as egregious as the above, surely, but not too impressive.
Yeah, there seem to a lot of uncurious teachers out there. I specifically remember the substitute teacher I had in an ENglish class in 7th grade. One of the words on our spelling test was “ennui” (I’m too lazy to look it up so that’s possibly not spelled correctly). He had no idea how to pronounce it and remarked that it was a weird word and no one knew what it meant. Ok, this was in an English classroom, there were dictionaries all over the place. I grabbed one, looked up the word, and told him what it meant and how to pronounce it. Didn’t seem particularly interested. I just couldn’t believe that this guy would have spent the entire school day telling kids he was a moron.
I did notice that the quality of teaching depended on the classes you took. I was always in all the honors/gifted classes and I had some great teachers. The couple of ties I was accidentally stuck in a regular class, I was appalled. I heard the remedial classes were even worse. I always thought it almost sad that the kids who neede good teachers the most, got the crappy one while the motivated kids who would probably learn no matter who taught them got all the good teachers…
I think I had mostly good teachers in middle and high school. I moved around too much as an elementary school kid to make a good assessment. Plus, many schools didn’t have gifted and talented programs, so my parents supplemented my education a lot. It’s hard to tell what I learned at home as opposed to school since my memories of childhood aren’t the most detailed.
One of my History teachers in middle school gave extra-credit if people researched questions that came up in class that were outside the scope of what we were studying in the course. Things like, “What was the supposed scandal about how Catherine the Great of Russia died?” That was a fun student report. There was only one shithead I can particularly remember; one of my English teachers in high school. He was one of those nasty subjective graders where if you said what he wanted you to say in a paper, you’d get a good grade. If you had your own interpretation, you’d probably fail.
One of the teachers I liked and respected the most was my high school Physics teacher, Mr. Warburton. He challenged the hell out of us. A “C” was an average grade in his class. You had to earn an “A.” I prized my “B.” (I made simple errors in arithmatic a lot. Not a detail person sometimes.)
He’d challenge us to think and reason about things. Right after he finished explaining Newton’s laws of motion, he said, “But I don’t believe in that inertia crap.” Gasps of horror followed his sacreligous pronouncement. “You’ve got to have something to push against to move in outer space.” He challenged us to find another explanation besides the textbook case, to think in a different way about the problem. I probably remember this incident because I was the one who came up with an answer he accepted as well-reasoned: you can “push” against your own exhaust.
Of course, then he went back and showed evidence that inertia does really work the way the book said it did, and that the presence or absence of exhaust particles is negligible, but we all got the point that just because the book says something is so doesn’t make it so. We also got practice in arguing with and possibly changing the mind of someone who believes complete bullshit.
That’s why I remember Mr. Warburton’s name although I’ve forgotten Mr. Fuckwit’s.
For those who say that education has always been bad, I’ve got a bit of semi-objective evidence that it has gone downhill since I was in school. Three years after I took the SAT, that test was no longer accepted as being a valid assement for admission to Mensa. I think that indicates something with the system is a bit off.
). In case there was any confusion, I agree with Twoflower – I don’t think that this is “a new thing” at all.