Of course the Quebec government still believes that this is true, 78 years after the border was established. Maps produced by the provincial government show part of Labrador as Quebec territory, and the rest of the Quebec-Labrador border as “Trace de 1927 - non-definitif” (1927 line - not-definitive").
Ah-oh! Teachers have been revealed for what we really are – power-mad sadists hell-bent on quickly crushing any creative urges in our charges. It’s what we dream about all through those education courses. It’s what we talk about at faculty meetings. Power! POWER! POWER! POWER! I’ll teach 9th grade civics! I’M THE KING OF THE WORLD!
Teachers certainly aren’t in the field for the money and they have very little power – despite how it might look to the students. Sorry if your experiences with teachers have been so awful. I had some rough spots myself, but the good ones made up for it.
I had experience teaching all grades and all levels of English in high school. I even turned down an academic magnet to remain in an urban school. It is a commonly held myth that the best teachers are assigned to honors courses. That was not true in our district.
I’ve never understood teachers who could not use their own mistakes as a teaching tool.
I did. In fact, I once left school at 4pm to walk home through falling snow. It had begun to snow some time that afternoon (there was previously no snow on the ground). Once it started snowing, it continued to do so at uniform rate, and the snow stayed where it landed. I walked at a speed inversely proportional to the depth of the snow, and I walked twice as far between 4pm and 5pm as I did between 5pm and 6pm. What time did it start snowing? 
Problem with some teachers is that even if they’re knowledgeable in their field, they still might not know what it means to have something be proven, be correct, have proper citation, etc.
And even if they do know that a “fact” has to have a certain standard of proof, they might be rather inadequate at determining whether their “fact” has achieved such a standard.
You all know 'em. I know 'em. I have an high-school English teacher friend who can probably teach a good class on grammar, and writing, and lead good discussions about books, but she is seriously non-critical about what comes out of her mouth. Complete inability to distinguish fact from innuendo. She makes massive generalizations based on personal observation.
I really don’t expect our teachers to be otherwise, and I don’t suspect they ever were.
ParentalAdvisory. . .always interesting to see one piece of glurge replaced with another piece of gluge.
When I told a co worker about this thread he related his tale of woe regarding wind chill factor. Apparently, a high school teacher was explaining wind chill using a chart that had wind speed on the left and air temperature along the bottom. Find the wind speed, find the air temp, find the intersection on the chart and there was the wind chill.
The teacher presents this information and my friend (who is right here in the room with me now) asks her how the wind chill was determined. Maybe not a clear way to ask the question, but that’s another issue. She answers that one finds the wind speed on the left and the air temp along the bottom, then find the intersection on the chart. He asks again, how is the number on the chart determined? She replies… wait for it… find the wind speed along the left then find the air temperature on the bottom then find the intersection on the chart… He tries once more, Is there an equation used to find the wind chill? She replies, it’s not an equation, you simply find the wind speed on the left and the air temperature along the bottom and then find the interesction on the chart and that is the wind chill. He proceeds to beat his head on his desk.
I had almost exactly the same interaction with a grade school teacher. Between the two of us we still don’t know what equation is used to determine wind chill. Charts we know! (FWIW, I use similar charts almost everyday and some guy on TV tells me the wind chill, but I bet the TV guy makes more money.)
Back inm grammar school (back in the Paleolithic Age) one of my teachers told me that a robin had a red breast because you could see its blood through its skin.
Another told me that you got malaria from mosquitos laying eggs in your blood
Another told me that airplanes fly by “floating on a pillow of air”.
I learned from this not to completely trust my teachers. Especially about science. Teacher ignorance (and resistance in the face of correction) is nothing new. It’ll be around as long as teachers are human and fallible.
I also tried to pull the "plural of ‘goose’ is ‘gooses’ thing that I found in Ripley’s Believe it or Not on one teacher. She wouldn’t buy it, even when I showed it to her in a dictionary. Teachers have low tolerance for smart-ass kids.
A story from another perspective: a friend of mine teaches remedial math to teachers: those referred by their system have to come to his summer courses.
He came home from work one day furious about a teacher he’d dealt with, who firmly believed that 1/2 + 1/2 = 2/4. In other words, to add fractions, you add the numerators and then you add the denominators. This is how she’d always taught it, she defiantly proclaimed, and it’s how she’d continue to teach it. She admitted that half a pizza plus half a pizza gets you a whole pizza, but said that was different.
Daniel
Wow. How deliciously ignorant. Everyone knows planes fly because we believe they will.
What shocks me most abou this thread is that teachers are now teaching the etymology of words like “fuck” and “shit.” Back in my day we weren’t allowed to use words like that.
I’ve had my share of bad teachers, but at least my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Hill would allow me to correct her on matters of astronomy. She knew an expert when she saw one!
Well, yeah, because if half a pizza and another half pizza aren’t delivered within 30 minites, they’re free.
Duh.
Half a pizza is different from 1/2 . . . I think my brain just cramped.
And as to
I feel obligated to point out that in these days of standardized testing and exit testing, the tests often follow the texts. If the text is wrong, it may still be, like the hitchhiker’s guide, definitively wrong. As in, the child with the right answer may loose points on the test while the child with the wrong answer gets the points because they’re accurately remembering what they were taught.
It’s usually only a few points per test, and I still think that teachers should do their best to give accurate information. But I can see how some teachers may want to stay ‘on text’.
No. Parental Advisory was on a train leaving Boston at 4:45. His homework was on a train leaving Chicago at 6:15.
There’s also a hungry dog on the 6:15
If Parental Advisory is on an eastbound train leaving Boston at 4:45, and his homework is on a westbound train leaving Chicago at 6:15, at what time will they meet in the Marianas Trench, and for how long? 
Subjective information follows.
I have had poor teachers and excellent ones at all levels of education. My younger brother is 10 years younger than I am. We grew up in generally the same region of the country (southeast). I would say that the quality of his education has been just about comparable to my own. He’s had to put up with a lot of really stupid ones, naturally, but so did I.
Now, with that said, I make my living off of teacher’s failures. Parents (and in some cases, the students themselves) pay me to turn mathematics problems into mathematics successes, and I will say that in most cases (not all, some notable exceptions) the problem comes from a teacher who knows just enough to follow the textbook. In the realm of mathematics, I don’t teach anything that I can’t personally prove to my students (or, if the proof lies outside their current mathematical spheres, I will ask them to come back to me when they’ve taken calculus for further discussion on the idea). One should not attempt to teach high-school mathematics with only a high-school student’s knowledge of the core principles.
Now, with that out of the way, some dumb teacher stories.
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I recall in middle school correcting a teacher’s spelling (on a spelling assignment, no less). This was, I found, a large mistake on my part. I was told in no uncertain terms that if that happened again she would be on the phone with my parents immediately with a list of every small infraction I had ever committed (and it was hinted that she was not above making up a few, just to be sure).
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I recall another middle school teacher who I never got along with. Never ever ever ever. I don’t recall why we were always at odds, but we were. I left a textbook in her class once. She told me that she had thrown it away. She denied that later, of course, when my parents got involved.
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My younger sister came home one day proclaiming the truth about America’s civilization. Apparently, her teacher had been spouting Van Sertima’s theories on regular, constant African contact with the Tolmecs (discounted by lack of evidence, but it does sell books). It took a bit of research on my part and a lot of pestering of the principal before real social science was taught in that class again.
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My little brother has a computer class right now. He spends his time in there hooking up PCs to the school network, because apparently no one else knows how. I have tried to explain the concept of “billable time” to him to no avail.
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(more heavily into mathematics here) I had a student today who was taking pre-calculus mathematics. She had no idea how to find asymptotes of polynomials. I gave her a quick run-through, and she looked upon me as though I were Prometheus bringing down fire. She told me that her teacher had told them just to use their graphing utilities. I should perhaps emphasize that this is a college professor telling college students to estimate asymptotes. For those of you staring off into space now, I’ll just say that these are really, really easy to find. It’s an easy to remember process that just takes a few seconds and can be done in your head. It’s also a very important part of one of the two main subjects of pre-calculus mathematics. I understand that the graphing calculator makes it much easier to illustrate, but I’d be lost trying to teach derviatives (or even limits) to a student that couldn’t even comprehend asymptotes.
But all in all, I think that the state of education is improving. It’ll be a slow process, to be sure, but that’s good for me, because that means I have a job for years to come.
When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher (not a substitute) refused to believe that West Side Story is a modern retelling of Romeo & Juliet.
Dare I ask if the preponderance of poor teachers is because of school budget cuts that prevent the districts from attracting better talent?
Who could? What a silly notion! Claire Danes isn’t Puerto Rican.
What’s next - drawing parallels between the Matrix and, oh, the New Testament? It is to laugh.
If posters here haven’t seen it, rent “Finding Forrester”. You’ll love it. Keep your hankies handy. The F. Murray Abraham character personifies the citations above.
And I thank my parents for having had me and brought me up in a small New England town with a great school system (now long ago and far away). The (population 20,000) hometown weekly newspaper this week (until Thursday) lists the names, job titles, and salaries of all 86 town employees who made over $65k last year. Nineteen are teachers. Another 17 are curriculum directors, principals or asst. principals. I hope they are getting what they pay for.
I don’t know, but I do know it was Colonel Mustard, in the library, with a revolver.
Well your daughter has learned a very important lesson. We are all humans, and not infalliable, even though in positions of authority.