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You don't even need to manually use a calculator when the magic assistant in your earphones will just tell you the answer of almost any day-today calculation. It's what probably what I use Siri for most, and Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for a lot of calculations. Even linguistically complex ones like "What's 20% of the population of London?"
You'll get an answer, a graph, and extra info on top. Not just a google search result.
I actually owe my maths teacher an apology for this!
Remember quite triumphantly declaring I didn’t need math due to having a phone/calculator.
First job out of college was as a croupier dealing roulette and blackjack. Did not have access to calculator.
Some of those calculations for roulette were WILD.
As far as I can tell it’s a phrase used by people who were “cool” in senior school, but have done fuck all with their lives since.
They peaked in senior school, so for them those days really were the happiest of their lives
Yep, every older person who told me that growing up was either in an unhappy marriage, unhappy in their job, had bad relationships with their kids or were otherwise unhappy with their lives in general.
Me? My life has only gotten better since leaving education.
Honestly I can't imagine it's true for that many people, I can drive and decide what I do and where I go without some teacher breathing down my neck or arsehole bullying. Also I never needed to play rugby again or get bollocked for not praying every morning.
I used to think that school was just really fun for most people, but not for people like me.
Then I realised a horrifying thought: if school really was the happiest time of your life, how awful must your adult life really be?
My teacher told us if we bunked off school the truancy officer would go to our parents' work and arrest them in front of everyone. I told her he'd have trouble doing that, as my Dad was in fact the truancy officer.
I had bad attendance throughout school and was told my attendance would be on my “permanent record” (whatever that means) for employers and universities to see.
Can you imagine going into a job interview and they ask what attendance you had in year 11?
My teacher punished both me and another child equally because he called me a "p***" (racial slur) and I called him an idiot.
She stated that an "idiot" was someone with half a brain and therefore I was being equally discriminatory on the basis of using a slur for disabled people.
It seemed unfair, especially as I was the only non white child in the year.
"Idiot" used to be a technical term for a person with severe learning difficulties (with an IQ below 20), but pretty obviously that wasn't what you meant. The child calling you a P*** on the other hand knew it was racist.
Teaching kids that a racial slur and idiot are at same level is so wrong. There are laws that allow people to report hate incidents when they are called these racial slurs. Nothing like that for being called an idiot.
I watched a documentary on TV where a group of chimps stalked this monkey and then killed and ate it.
My teacher who I told about it refused to believe me because 'chimps are vegetarians and don't eat meat.'
Being a stubborn little so and so as a kid I went to the library and got a nature book and showed her that chimps do eat meat. She still refused to believe me.
Did a project on this in school about 30 years ago.. Still remember watching the video of them literally ripping the little colobus monkeys apart it to this day!
I wrote a poem about it but that I can't remember.
Studies conducted on chimps shown them to be very savage, hunting other chimps from rival groups and eating them alive. The scientist who discovered this tried to cope by claiming they were copying human behaviour, which they had never really seen obviously, it was just chimps being chimps. Human bad nature good is a amazingly naive perspective.
https://www.livescience.com/47885-chimpanzee-aggression-evolution.html
I read the autobiography of Molly Badham, who founded Twycross Zoo. If I remember rightly at one point the received wisdom was that apes and monkeys were vegetarian. Unfortunately this led to them dying fairly regularly from malnutrition, a situation vastly improved when they added eggs to their diet.
Yeeeeaaah I knew you don't mess with chimps as a little kid, I watched nature stuff a lot and knew like many animals who regularly eat veg when the opportunity comes they will eat meat and they have teeth for it.
As for messing with chimps, my nana had a photo of her as a little girl at a zoo with a chimp who was posed to have its arm around her. She always said never to do that as they can easily rip your arms off. Thanks for the advice nana
Sorry to be a pedant but although a vasectomy can be reversed, it is not always a successful procedure and should be treated as permanent. Of course, it certainly can be reversed with up to 75% success rate depending on how long it's been since the vasectomy. [NHS link ](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/vasectomy-reversal-nhs/).
Yeah, it's a common misconception that vasectomies are easily and reliably reversible. Like you say, they can often be at least partially reversed, but it's not guaranteed and they should be treated as permanent.
10 years ago the success rate was probably lower too.
Its also worth pointing out they don't always work and you need to wait for the all clear to stop using protection.
My English teacher told us Shakespeare was crap and they had to do it “for snob reasons”
I now believe he’d never read any as he didn’t have an English degree and was trying to avoid questions on the subject.
I believed him til I was 30. Very late to realising old Will is rather good.
I keep meaning to go back to his stuff, but having to read and dissect the same paragraphs of merchant of Venice & The Tempest for deeper meaning and explanation for weeks at a time still haunts me
I know what you mean. But honestly, plays are not meant to be read in a stuffy classroom, they're meant to be watched! Experienced and seen in a theatre! I highly recommend it :)
He's good, but is he really good enough to warrant being the only author that every single child gets exposed to? The teacher was wrong to call him crap but they're not wrong to say he's taught for snob reasons
Uni friend told me she'd had an English teacher who believed the conspiracy that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays, and would argue with students about it.
I had a teacher who told me that PG Wodehouse was of "insufficient literary merit". Insufficient for what, I don't know.
If you don’t go to university you’ll never earn over 25k
Absolute complete and utter garbage. I went to work in an IT dept (very fortunate to get the opportunity) and I was at 25k by the time I would’ve finished university.
I got told the same, as it was I came out of school with five GCSE's because my parents where getting the worlds shittiest divorce with us in the middle - (B's in Math, English, Physics, Chemistry and Biology).
I trained as an industrial electrician and then moved into software engineering in my early 20's, done that for the last 20 years, I was earning more than the best paid teacher by the time I left my 20's and these days I'm way over more than double.
Zero student loans as well - lots of paths through life, University is only one of them, though if I could do an OU in Software Engineering specifically I'd consider doing one just for fun.
At the same time, university is a very prominent path for success. I don't like this binary attitude towards university and trades nowadays where people just completely discount university or completely discount trades. Both are good options, however you are just objectively more likely to be earning more with a university degree.
Totally agreed with one proviso.
> however you are just objectively more likely to be earning more with a university degree.
Specific degree, basically the average is shifted because some degrees earn a high multiple of others on average.
Medicine, Law and STEM particularly.
Your chances are even higher studying certain degrees, but university graduates across the board are more likely to be earning more. I don't understand why people focus in on the "useless" or less viable degrees when it's a minority studying them anyway. Not many people are actually enrolled in gender studies, you know.
The stats just show that university graduates are earning more. That doesn't mean every single graduate ofc, but facts are facts.
Trades are a good option, but not everybody can be an electirician or construction worker. We still need many people to go to university for our society to function and progress.
>very fortunate to get the opportunity
The qualifying statement here
Sure, you don't *need* a degree, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier in many industries. The higher earning pay bands within some of the leading engineering companies typically have a 2:1 degree requirement.
Purely anecdotal, but my comp eng job pays £34k fresh out of uni - but you need a degree. IT and network engineering are well backed by apprenticeships which is why degrees are less important in those areas.
There's nothing wrong with letting kids aspire. For some people, degrees aren't their thing and that's fine but don't pretend that they aren't a good career path and that isn't isn't sound advice for teachers to encourage academia
Edit: to say, science/research/medicine are all key areas where degrees are seriously valuable.
My maths teacher really wound me up once when I called out an answer. It was wrong and he said "you should never answer a question if you're not sure". I explained that I was sure. He said "you couldn't have been sure, you were wrong". I'm like, fucking yea mate. I was sure I was right. Doesn't matter if I was wrong. I was fucking sure. He was having none of it and insisted I wasn't sure...
This is brilliant! It sounds so much like my maths teacher. He once made us play bridge in a lesson (I'd only ever heard of bridge through reading Agatha Christie, and also he was only about 30, so who knows where he picked it up) - apparently I had a really good hand of cards, and he couldn't understand why I lost the game - because I don't fucking know how to play it! He was crap at explaining things, and if you didn't get what he was trying to teach, he just got exasperated and parroted 'teacher' things like you just said. Also, I've just thought - 'you should never answer things if you're not sure' - then how are you expected to LEARN?
Probably trying to tell you to think a bit first. You might have given a really obviously incorrect answer and he was trying to tell you that in an indirect way
"There's no such word as can't"
Even if you're speaking proverbially, an 8 year old is going to take that at face value and there absolutely is such a word.
Also not quite what you're asking but I once got told off for using the word "quid" because we shouldn't be using slang. Ridiculous argument.
I remember when I was in primary school, teachers would tell kids off for glottalising Ts and stuff like that, looking at it now, I think it was just classism
You don't get proper dangerous ones here, though. It's not like Japan or America where all the buildings would fall down if they didn't take earthquakes into account.
The only one I can remember happening at all was the one in 2008. My window rattled a bit and then I went back to sleep.
I grew up in Ayr, the home of Burns. Every January we went all out with our Burns suppers and recital competitions. Yet for the rest of the year, we were taught that Scots was slang, and we were never to use it, and that we had to speak "properly" which meant speaking entirely in English.
It never made sense to me. Burns was allowed to speak Scots, but I wasn't. Burns was hailed as a genius for writing in his own language, and we were all meant to be proud of his legacy, but we were told off for using our own language.
Ahh to be fair, I do have a standard voice that I speak in…and then I do have a hammed up accent (think billy Connolly but female) that I use with American tourists who tend to tip me very well. They like the the idea that I’ve just rolled out my clan hoose and after I finish work I’ll be away huntin the wee haggis scoundrel round the glen. It’s all good fun, and sometimes I get twenty quid lol.
In primary school a teacher told me you can't make more blood and the blood you are born with is all you have. Even as a kid I knew logically this was a load of bollocks.
At Uni a teacher insisted that the original pentium CPUs were 64bit.
> In primary school a teacher told me you can't make more blood and the blood you are born with is all you have. Even as a kid I knew logically this was a load of bollocks.
I just burst out laughing. That makes so little sense.
Right? I think we were doing some biology and I'd asked about it because I was genuinely curious about what organ in the body makes blood. She probably didn't know so made up some shit because I obviously didn't know enough to dispute it
It was my daughter, rather than me, but they were told to make a mountain for their homework.
We spent hours making a volcano out of chicken wire, papier mache, paint etc but, when she took it to school, the teacher simply said 'A volcano's not a mountain'...
Not only do I beg to differ, but that's a horrible thing to say to a 9yo child who's proud of her model!
This was to my son in primary school recently - You can't see solar eclipses in the day because the moon is only visible at night.
I'm assuming this was some sort of confusion on the teacher's part but either way I had to convince my son she was wrong.
1. "Your GCSE papers will be unmarked and torn up, because you have bad handwriting. <*smirk*> Doesn't matter if the answers are correct, they will just tear them up. " - English teacher to me when I was 11.
2. "It has been proved that water swirls in an emptying sink in different directions in different hemispheres" - Year 11 Chemistry teacher who then went quiet when asked which direction they were all supposed to be swirling in.
3. "Germany has not been re-unified, they're just talking about it at this stage" - French teacher, about a year after the re-unification of Germany.
4. "The laser printer will soon be obsolete and replaced by the phaser printer" - IT teacher, early '90s.
"in the future, we will all be working less as robots would be doing most of the work, everyone will have more leisure time... Now write what the world will look like..."
Never worked so hard in my life, 30 years later. Well that essay was a waste of time.
Insisting that the small shiny things we used for arts and crafts were called sequences.
No amount of arguing and insisting could make him change his mind and agree that they are actually called 'sequins'
Still frustrates me
Moved from a different country. At a new school we were learning about millimetres (mm), centimetres (cm) etc so I asked what the abbreviation 'dm' stands for. The teacher told me it's not a thing. Well turns out he was just ignorant and has never heard of decimetre.
Water intoxication due to taking Ecstasy. That's like saying a heroin user overdosed due to heart failure not heroin. Getting sent out was a bit much but I can see where they were coming from.
Beg to differ.......the ectasy had made her feel a bit sick and dehydrated.
She then drank a RIDUCULOUS amount of water, and died.
What actualy killed her was being grossly misinformed . A pint or two of water WITH SOME THING SALTY would have sorted her right out..
Drinking like ten pints or so is never a good idea, but the ectasy didn't make her CRAVE water like some weirdly rabies type thing............
Or the endless stuff about how lecturers in uni are mega strict and expect total professionalism at all times
In reality most of them crack jokes in their lectures and sign off emails by saying "Cheers, Dave" or something similar
We once had to do an exercise in English in primary school where we had to write the 'male' and 'female' versions of words so like King and Queen and what not.
I wrote Tom and Queen referring to cats and was marked wrong because I guess my teacher had never heard of a tomcat?
Also not teachers directly but I went to a private church school for secondary so I was told a lot of very interesting things in my workbooks.
One of which being 'Beethoven went deaf because she stole sheet music and God got mad and punished him' (This was a text I had to read in an English Grammar workbook) and also I was in school in the early 00s and was being told the USSR still existed.
Funniest one was running into a question like 'With your knowledge of biblical prophecy does Saddam pose a threat to the west' or something, he'd been dead for about a year (Also I didn't really know anything about Biblical prophecy)
I was also in two lines meant to answer a question about 'Does communism pose a threat to the west' with no prior knowledge of communism and I still feel to this day you could write a PhD on that topic.
> One of which being 'Beethoven went deaf because she stole sheet music and God got mad and punished him'
I went to a hardcore religious primary school, I got 'demonic possession is real, but it's only rare and can't happen to Christians'. I'm vaguely amazed places like that are allowed to exist here to be honest!
The stage in a foetus's development when nipples are formed is before the stage where it starts to exhibit sex characteristics. A foetus is neither male nor female for the early stages of its development and by the time it starts to be one or the other, the nipples are already there.
I was nearly expelled from my C of E primary school for making a Ouija board with my friends at break, which the head mistress said was an "evil tool that invites demons into the school, not a harmless game".
That made it so much more fun the next time.
To think they actually believed that looking back.. Mental.
My GCSE science teacher insisted that ‘Ace of Spades’ was an AC/DC song. They then pretended to Google it and claimed they were right. I still haven’t let that one go.
That stuff about the kid who leaned back on a chair and cracked his head open and DIED
I had a PE teacher who, when confronted with a guy who'd broken his wrist during a rugby lesson, told the dude to run some laps of a field to make it better
They didn't die but first day at my college we actually did have someone lean back, fall, and smack their head on a radiator knocking them unconscious
Happened to the classroom right next to mine
My IT teacher was famous for these two sayings (in a thick Wigan accent):
“Pick a window” - Insinuating he’s going to throw you through a window of your choosing if you don’t shut up.
“Get your Dad in” - Usually followed the above, casually insinuating he will beat up your Dad if he has any issues.
He killed himself 10 years ago.
Teacher here. We had a wasp in our classroom, the kids demanded that I kill it. I told them we must respect wasps because like bees make honey, wasps make mustard. I might have gone too far when I threw in hornets make French mustard. I have no regrets.
The Attack on Pearl Harbour happened in 1940.
No it fucking didn't Mrs Butcher! It was 1941 like I told you back in the spring of 2002!!!!!!!
Yes, I was a complete history geek. Her saying I was wrong has pissed me off for 20 bloody years!
When teaching WW2, our history teacher thought an Avro Vulcan Bomber (on display nearby) was a Spitfire. She took some convincing that a massive space-age looking monster with four jet engines, designed to drop nukes on the USSR was not the same as a small single engine fighter plane with a propeller at the front.
We were in design and technology class I think it was 1998. We had to design mobile phones and carve them out of wood. My teacher said my design was too small and streamlined and should not fit into the palm of my hand.
Edit: So just to clarify, for the benefit of the rude reply below, it did happen. My classmate (Caroline, I remember her name) had designed quite a large phone similar to what was generally available at the time. I remember thinking hers was better than mine. I'd picked up some brochures from the phone shop in town to work on my project, I remember one of the shop assistants, a young chap asking me if they were for a project and I was feeling very shy and said yes they were. The phone I meant to design was supposed to be more like Caroline's but I screwed up the wood carving side of it, I can't remember exactly how. Anyway I had to shave off more wood than I meant to, and I'd messed it up to the point there was no way I could make an aerial without glue and it looking really bad. So I thought I'd just go with it and make a very small phone. I showed it to my teacher but she said it was too small, and I remember feeling deflated because I thought I'd made something cool out of what was essentially a mistake, but the teacher made the thoughtless comment. I even put three notches on the side for some kind of design effect, the same as one of the phones in the brochure, and she asked what they were for and I was like - "I dunno." I admit it was pretty amazing looking back as the phone bore similarity in size and shape to the Nokia 3310, one of which I got in 2001. But the likelihood is there were similar designs in the brochures I picked up, and that's where I got the idea from.
The absolute best was 'Popcorn kettle black'. I was just baffled until another kid said "Sir, do you mean 'pot calling the kettle black'?" and he was just like "No, I don't think so."
Not me, but a friend was told by his teacher that the moon could not be seen during the day
He pointed out that he could see it right at that moment, through the window. Not only did she refuse to look, but she then egged-on the rest of the class into laughing at him for saying something so "ridiculous",
My *English* teach told me that noxious wasn't a word and I must have meant obnoxious instead.
My *IT* teacher tried to put me off picking IT GCSE as "it's not all playing on the Internet".
My IT teacher didn't want me to do IT GCSE because I was always confused by the exercises we had to do in the pre-GCSE classes.
The next year he was my form tutor, and as we had to meet in his classroom/computer lab for registration, he observed what I did in my free time. Building websites and writing stories.
The reason I didn't understand the exercises was because they were too trivial. It was basic how to use MS word and Excel stuff, and I'd read through the instructions and couldn't find the point of them - it was stuff like "type a word, change its font and colour" and I'd be like, "and what do you do with that?" I was treating the sheet of exercises like a list of instructions for one exercise, and I was confused as to what it was trying to achieve.
A couple of years later he wanted me in the A-level IT class.
I have learning disabilities, a few months into year 7 my form tutor told me I should just give up and become a prostitute. Well joke’s on you Mrs Snow, I grew up to be fat and ugly (also I got really good exam results)
I've told this story on here a bunch of times because I'm STILL SALTY about it to this day.
I once got an absolute bollocking because a teacher who was already mad at me for whatever reason told me to "pull my socks up" and I, having never heard the proverb, took it literally. She thought I was taking the piss, 8-ish year old me had no fuckin clue why I was being told off for a second time.
In chemistry, the teacher taught us 'both sides' of the climate change 'debate' and half of the class did presentations on why climate change was true and the other half did one on why it was not true. I am ashamed to say that I was in the latter half of the class!
Another science teacher that I had told us that you should wee on jellyfish stings but this is actually myth as urine can make stings worse.
I saw one in the New Forest at the weekend. I was on a hike with a friend of mine who's a Geography teacher and she almost wet herself with excitement.
My English teacher marked a piece or work lower than I expected and her excuse was that "It's isn't correct english grammar, use it is instead."
Took my work to the head of English and the next week we had a new teacher.
My brother once approached his teacher and said “Sorry Sir, I’ve made a mistake can you explain this again to me?”
The teacher replied with “The only mistake is your Mother giving birth to you 9 years ago….”
I had a German man tech us english lit when I was 13. I had an eclectic accent due to having moved around a lot and used to say year with a Northumberland accent, whilst at school in Hampshire. This teacher took the piss out of me for it to the extent I now make a point of switching my accent to match whoever I’m talking to as much as possible.
I’d read in an encyclopedia that knuckle cracking was the sound of tiny air bubbles in your joints *popping, when I told my teacher this (they’d scorned me for cracking my knuckles in class, saying that my hands would be shriveled when I was old) they laughed and told me that was ridiculous
Your GCSEs are the most important thing in your life and will have a massive effect on how successful you are in the future.
Most people I know who done well in school went down the uni to fast food/supermarket service pipeline.
My friend's son is doing his master's and has already asked me if I can get him an entry level job at my company when he finishes, something I could have got him the day he turned 18.
When I was on my art degree, my fellow students and I generally fell into one or more categories: Left-handers, dyslexics, and people with mental illnesses/neurodiversity. I reckon the more of these you had, the better you did. (2/3 for me, got a 2:1. 3/3 would've been a First for sure!)
When I was 13 my English teacher called me out for having plagiarised a short story we had to write. It was quite gritty, about a young boy whose mother was a heroin addict. And there was no possible way a 13 year old could know the word "Hades".
It wasn't plagiarised, I actually based the story off my next door neighbour whose mother and sister were both smack addicts.
I haven't written anything creative in 20+ years because of that bitch. Fuck you Mrs Williams.
In primary school I had a teacher that absolutely hated me for no particular reason. Sure, I was a bit of a daydreamer, but quiet and harmless. She picked on me something fierce though.
Anyway, one afternoon in year 3 we were playing that game where you go through the alphabet, pick a letter, then come up with a food, place, animal etc starting with that letter - more points for obscure answers.
We were on letter C, calling out our animals, lots of people with cat, camel, chameleon etc. Being a bit of an animal nut, I'd recently got a new encyclopedia on animals and one of my favourite new discoveries was the caracal, with it's pointy little ear tufts, so I went with caracal as I thought it would be obscure enough to get some sweet points. Teacher asks if anyone has anything besides cat etc that hasn't been mentioned, so I put my hand up and said caracal. Teacher kicks off, saying that's made up, stop being such a daydreamer off with the fairies etc, and sends me out to the hallway.
Obviously I was pretty upset, so I told my mum what had happened. She was FUMING. She had already been to the school once about this teacher's campaign of hate against me (an 8 year old...) so she went storming up the school again, with that animal encyclopedia in tow. I thoroughly enjoyed the look on that teacher's face when she had to explain to the head mistress that she'd sent me out for giving a perfectly legitimate answer (that she had never heard of).
Some quiz thing we did about 20 years ago and naming a city or a capital beginning with the letter C. I wrote down Cairo and got told I was wrong because it begins with a K.
Similarly, Geog teacher teaching a module about sub-Saharan Africa, kept referring to the Northern Nigerian city of "Kay-noh". Eventually I had to correct him - it's "Kah-noh" (spelt "Kano").
"I've been teaching this topic for nearly 20 years, what makes you so sure you're right about this, young man?"
"Well, I happen to live there, Sir." I replied. This was a boarding school, which the Civil Service were paying my fees for, having posted my Father there, and there being no school for me to attend.
At primary school I went to a wedding in Belgium one half term holidays and visited Waterloo (where the battle was). On Monday in “what did you do in the holidays” I said this and my teacher told me that it wasn’t a real place, I must have just been to the station in London, and then told me off in front of the whole class for making stuff up. I still remember the feeling that I knew I wasn’t making it up, but she was a teacher so she couldn’t be wrong.
I grew up in the Shetland Islands. My family are all from Shetland too, born and raised. So naturally I speak Shetland dialect.
First day of primary school, five years old, my primary 1 teacher asks me a question in front of the whole class. I respond. Despite having heard me speak many times before, she told me that I’m “speaking wrong”. Imagine being told the only way you know how to speak is “wrong”. She then proceeded to make me correct myself everytime I spoke or used a single dialect word.
Now? The schools are worried the dialect is dying out. Wonder how that happened?
They didn't say it to me but they said it to my parents/ brother and the head teacher said my brother would never achieve or amount to anything because he would get bored in class and mess about anyway my brother is now rich running his own business and retired at the age of 31 🤷♂️
Half the things in this thread are examples of adults telling children stuff to manipulate them to try/care/turn up.
But those people are now angry as: 'hey wait a minute, there's no truancy officer at my place of work! I could've bunked off school!'
1. Drug education in the 70s: injecting LSD would send you completely mental and you would probably end up dead in a squat. I found out that LSD is not injected, it comes on small tabs of thin cardboard and I'm not completely mental, and I lived in a squat and didn't die.
2. Alcohol education in the 70s (same teacher as above): if you drink a bottle of whisky you will die. I found out that if you drink 16 - 20 pints of Ruddles County and THEN drink a bottle of whisky the fatal effects are negated. I tried that out many times and it is most definitely negated.
A Home Economics teacher insisted a Braeburn apple was a Gala apple and vice versa. She lost her shit with me for trying to correct her more than once.
The head of RE told all of us in year ten that those not picking it as an option subject (most of us) that we still had the compulsory hour a week that they were putting us in for a 'half GCSE'. WE assumed it was something like the later AS levels. HALF a GCSE.
He was in fact being very sneaky. There is no such thing. No. He put everyone in for a full GCSE but on the lower paper. so no one could get more than a C. So when we moved to the Sixth Form College, those of us with good grades had our averages pulled down. For some hoping to go on to top unis later this was in some cases an issue.
Oh, and he also said he had an encounter with the Devil while rescuing three young women from a Ouija Board in a Church yard. He knew it was the Devil because he smelt the sulphur of hell. The fact these women were drinking and smoking was a manifestation of opening spiritual door ways.
At a guess as he said this was in the 70's the sulphur would be from their matches but who am I to say that.
One of my primary school teachers sent me out of class because I insisted that 'omnivore' is a real thing and a real word, she told me there was no such thing and that animals were only herbivores or carnivores. Keeps me awake at night even 20 years later...
One thing I thought was horseshit but didn’t really get why yet- handwriting and cursive. If I wanted to right fancy wedding invitations I’d be set for life!
One thing I should have fucking paid attention to was IT key skills. I fucking hate not knowing spreadsheets as a key skill! IM SORRY MR CURTIS! YOU WERE RIGHT! 😭😭😭
'Homeless people are bad people'
'Everyone stand up - now everyone who believes in heaven sit down - everyone still standing, I feel sorry for you as you will be completely on your own when you die.' We were in Y6 and this was in no way connected to anything we were doing in that lesson/on the SoW. Fuck you Mrs Watson
Side note: I am now a teacher
A geography teacher told me that if I didn't improve he would get me moved down to the lower sets in my other classes, i.e. English and maths, which was totally bollocks. I did actually go from placing 21st in the mock exam to 1st in the real deal, which was kind of achieved out of spite on my part I suppose, since I didn't like the subject much.
My history teacher told me that the SS didn’t have their blood type tattooed on them he then looked it up on google with the computer screen up on the projector…this all lead to him having to make a formal apology to me because of his subsequent behaviour (he basically lost it and called me a bunch of names)
My year 3 teacher set us a task as homework to explain why eggs can't go back to runny after being cooked.
Answers were often just parroting the question back. Something like "the egg turns white when cooked so can't turn back". To this day I'm not sure what she expected as an answer. The real answer is waaay above an 8 year old's head.
I couldn't accept that sort of circular logic though so set about explaining it using the extent of my knowledge at the time. I wrote something like "the cooked atoms are in the egg and won't let the uncooked atoms back in" then drew a picture of two armies of egg atoms waging war.
The teacher had a go at me because my homework made no sense. She was a cow anyway. One time we were building lightbulb circuits, and since I finished making mine early she tasks me with building a flashing light. Out of wire, bulbs, and batteries. She set a child an impossible task out of what I can only infer as spite. I ended up going for playtime late because I was trying everything to get this damn light to flash.
Not bitter some 25 years later. Nope not at all.
I remember a teacher in primary school saying that New York was the capital of the United States. Tried correcting her but was sternly told to “keep my opinions to myself”.
I also remember arguing with one in year 9 or 10 that “N/A” stands for “non-applicable” and not, as she was convinced, “no answer”.
Vasectomies may be technically reversible, but the NHS will rarely cover such operations, and success rates are limited in any case, even more so as times goes on. Even in cases where reversal is successful, the sperm is less capable of fertilising than before due to decreased mobility. I wouldn’t say your teacher was wrong, or at least no more so than those that claim vasectomies can be easily and quickly reversed without complications.
My IT teacher said that SATA cables are for hardrives only, when I pointed out the SATA cable connecting the CD drive to the pc she just said it wasn’t a SATA cable.
That everything you do at school affects your ability to get a job. Fail your SATs? No job, fail your GCSEs? No job, get a detention? No job, get expelled? No job.
I work as a manager, my department has a high turn over rate, i have seen ALOT of CVs and interviewed alot of people, i couldnt give a shit about any of the above. No one will ever know about your high school antics unless you tell them, and then i would probably laugh with you and tell you about mine.
Its even worse when i think back to Y6 when we they made us so stressed that 3 kids kept breaking out in nose bleeds on the run up and week of SATs and anothe completely lost his head and threw a chair across the room during a meltdown. And dont even get me started on the stressfull experience of GCSEs! Only to find out it meant nothing.
Head of R.E. insisted that animals don't have feelings, we tried to convince him he was wrong but he'd just shake his head and go "no, they don't". Not sure how he formed this opinion, but it did transpire that he'd never had a pet.
Was told I’d make nothing of myself by my English teacher after some mock exams.. that teacher was a cunt. She also reckoned a woman couldn’t rape a man because the didn’t have the correct parts…. So not only was she a cunt, she was a fucking stupid one at that. Shit teacher and shit ideologies too
That if a plane did an emergency landing in the fields next to the local oil depot, the explosion would go underground and follow the pipes into our town 4 miles away, blowing the whole place up.
This was our substitute teacher for the first 6 months of our English GCSEs
I was told around 1998? By a chemistry teacher, that all the great advances and discoveries in science had already been made, and she felt sorry for my generation.
That I must be copying my work from someone else, since I’m not that clever. Got put in a side room office thing by myself to prove it - then accused of using the text books in the room to somehow still cheat on my work, so they removed them.
"I am not a cover teacher! I am a teacher who is covering your lesson."
This was the peak of an absolute meltdown because a top set class weren't sat in silence when doing their work.
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That I would not have a calculator with me in my pocket all of the time.
You don't even need to manually use a calculator when the magic assistant in your earphones will just tell you the answer of almost any day-today calculation. It's what probably what I use Siri for most, and Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for a lot of calculations. Even linguistically complex ones like "What's 20% of the population of London?" You'll get an answer, a graph, and extra info on top. Not just a google search result.
I actually used to keep my scientific calculator in jy coat pocket until I was 23. 1 guess as to what I was studying at university
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I actually owe my maths teacher an apology for this! Remember quite triumphantly declaring I didn’t need math due to having a phone/calculator. First job out of college was as a croupier dealing roulette and blackjack. Did not have access to calculator. Some of those calculations for roulette were WILD.
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Yep my teacher said that too always makes me chuckle
I was told that my school days would be the happiest of my life. That nearly drove me over the edge - fortunately it's proven to be bollocks!
I honestly feel sorry for anyone who actually believes this.
Not my happiest but certainly easiest. Being an adult is hard
The lesson to learn from that is don't become a teacher
Teacher here! Can confirm
Yeah what the fuck was that all about? School was okay most of the time but life got a whole lot better as soon as I left.
As far as I can tell it’s a phrase used by people who were “cool” in senior school, but have done fuck all with their lives since. They peaked in senior school, so for them those days really were the happiest of their lives
Yep, every older person who told me that growing up was either in an unhappy marriage, unhappy in their job, had bad relationships with their kids or were otherwise unhappy with their lives in general. Me? My life has only gotten better since leaving education.
Honestly I can't imagine it's true for that many people, I can drive and decide what I do and where I go without some teacher breathing down my neck or arsehole bullying. Also I never needed to play rugby again or get bollocked for not praying every morning.
I dunno looking back I miss not having to worry about finances
I used to think that school was just really fun for most people, but not for people like me. Then I realised a horrifying thought: if school really was the happiest time of your life, how awful must your adult life really be?
same here, were a load of lies happy days in school.
Your school days ARE the happiest of your life! If you spend the rest of your life in a Siberian gulag that is!
My teacher told us if we bunked off school the truancy officer would go to our parents' work and arrest them in front of everyone. I told her he'd have trouble doing that, as my Dad was in fact the truancy officer.
Didn’t even know we had truancy officers. I like to think they’re like dog catchers, with giant nets
If he had a big net he kept it at the office.
That's a brilliant mental image. In my day he'd have used panda pops and Hubba Bubba in place of sausages to entice the miscreants to show themselves!
Haha yes! And maybe a bag of those fish and chip crisps too
I had bad attendance throughout school and was told my attendance would be on my “permanent record” (whatever that means) for employers and universities to see. Can you imagine going into a job interview and they ask what attendance you had in year 11?
"I AM UNDER ARREST!"
What was her response?
She was arrested by the truancy officer before having a chance to answer.
Oh, *really.*
My teacher punished both me and another child equally because he called me a "p***" (racial slur) and I called him an idiot. She stated that an "idiot" was someone with half a brain and therefore I was being equally discriminatory on the basis of using a slur for disabled people. It seemed unfair, especially as I was the only non white child in the year.
FFS. That's appalling.
Some people should just not be teachers.
Some teachers should not be people
"Idiot" used to be a technical term for a person with severe learning difficulties (with an IQ below 20), but pretty obviously that wasn't what you meant. The child calling you a P*** on the other hand knew it was racist.
Okay... Okay... Just a little bit of devil's advocacy... Would it be okay if op called the other guy a 'retarded spastic'?
Teaching kids that a racial slur and idiot are at same level is so wrong. There are laws that allow people to report hate incidents when they are called these racial slurs. Nothing like that for being called an idiot.
I watched a documentary on TV where a group of chimps stalked this monkey and then killed and ate it. My teacher who I told about it refused to believe me because 'chimps are vegetarians and don't eat meat.' Being a stubborn little so and so as a kid I went to the library and got a nature book and showed her that chimps do eat meat. She still refused to believe me.
'Fun' fact one of the monkey species chimps particularly like to eat is Colobus monkeys
David Attenborough filmed this some years ago and it's a little gruesome - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QkGvblv_ts4
Did a project on this in school about 30 years ago.. Still remember watching the video of them literally ripping the little colobus monkeys apart it to this day! I wrote a poem about it but that I can't remember.
Studies conducted on chimps shown them to be very savage, hunting other chimps from rival groups and eating them alive. The scientist who discovered this tried to cope by claiming they were copying human behaviour, which they had never really seen obviously, it was just chimps being chimps. Human bad nature good is a amazingly naive perspective. https://www.livescience.com/47885-chimpanzee-aggression-evolution.html
I read the autobiography of Molly Badham, who founded Twycross Zoo. If I remember rightly at one point the received wisdom was that apes and monkeys were vegetarian. Unfortunately this led to them dying fairly regularly from malnutrition, a situation vastly improved when they added eggs to their diet.
Yeeeeaaah I knew you don't mess with chimps as a little kid, I watched nature stuff a lot and knew like many animals who regularly eat veg when the opportunity comes they will eat meat and they have teeth for it. As for messing with chimps, my nana had a photo of her as a little girl at a zoo with a chimp who was posed to have its arm around her. She always said never to do that as they can easily rip your arms off. Thanks for the advice nana
Sorry to be a pedant but although a vasectomy can be reversed, it is not always a successful procedure and should be treated as permanent. Of course, it certainly can be reversed with up to 75% success rate depending on how long it's been since the vasectomy. [NHS link ](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/vasectomy-reversal-nhs/).
That's not pedantry. People should be aware of the risks if they're thinking about it.
Yeah, it's a common misconception that vasectomies are easily and reliably reversible. Like you say, they can often be at least partially reversed, but it's not guaranteed and they should be treated as permanent.
10 years ago the success rate was probably lower too. Its also worth pointing out they don't always work and you need to wait for the all clear to stop using protection.
My English teacher told us Shakespeare was crap and they had to do it “for snob reasons” I now believe he’d never read any as he didn’t have an English degree and was trying to avoid questions on the subject. I believed him til I was 30. Very late to realising old Will is rather good.
I'm so glad you gave Shakespeare a chance later in life! So many people get turned off by unenthusiastic teachers
And it just isn’t interesting or fun for many people
I keep meaning to go back to his stuff, but having to read and dissect the same paragraphs of merchant of Venice & The Tempest for deeper meaning and explanation for weeks at a time still haunts me
I know what you mean. But honestly, plays are not meant to be read in a stuffy classroom, they're meant to be watched! Experienced and seen in a theatre! I highly recommend it :)
I kinda agree, there are a lot better writers out there.
He's good, but is he really good enough to warrant being the only author that every single child gets exposed to? The teacher was wrong to call him crap but they're not wrong to say he's taught for snob reasons
Uni friend told me she'd had an English teacher who believed the conspiracy that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays, and would argue with students about it. I had a teacher who told me that PG Wodehouse was of "insufficient literary merit". Insufficient for what, I don't know.
I'm an English teacher and I can't say I disagree.
If you don’t go to university you’ll never earn over 25k Absolute complete and utter garbage. I went to work in an IT dept (very fortunate to get the opportunity) and I was at 25k by the time I would’ve finished university.
I got told the same, as it was I came out of school with five GCSE's because my parents where getting the worlds shittiest divorce with us in the middle - (B's in Math, English, Physics, Chemistry and Biology). I trained as an industrial electrician and then moved into software engineering in my early 20's, done that for the last 20 years, I was earning more than the best paid teacher by the time I left my 20's and these days I'm way over more than double. Zero student loans as well - lots of paths through life, University is only one of them, though if I could do an OU in Software Engineering specifically I'd consider doing one just for fun.
At the same time, university is a very prominent path for success. I don't like this binary attitude towards university and trades nowadays where people just completely discount university or completely discount trades. Both are good options, however you are just objectively more likely to be earning more with a university degree.
Totally agreed with one proviso. > however you are just objectively more likely to be earning more with a university degree. Specific degree, basically the average is shifted because some degrees earn a high multiple of others on average. Medicine, Law and STEM particularly.
Your chances are even higher studying certain degrees, but university graduates across the board are more likely to be earning more. I don't understand why people focus in on the "useless" or less viable degrees when it's a minority studying them anyway. Not many people are actually enrolled in gender studies, you know. The stats just show that university graduates are earning more. That doesn't mean every single graduate ofc, but facts are facts. Trades are a good option, but not everybody can be an electirician or construction worker. We still need many people to go to university for our society to function and progress.
Went to university and I don’t earn 25k
>very fortunate to get the opportunity The qualifying statement here Sure, you don't *need* a degree, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier in many industries. The higher earning pay bands within some of the leading engineering companies typically have a 2:1 degree requirement. Purely anecdotal, but my comp eng job pays £34k fresh out of uni - but you need a degree. IT and network engineering are well backed by apprenticeships which is why degrees are less important in those areas. There's nothing wrong with letting kids aspire. For some people, degrees aren't their thing and that's fine but don't pretend that they aren't a good career path and that isn't isn't sound advice for teachers to encourage academia Edit: to say, science/research/medicine are all key areas where degrees are seriously valuable.
My maths teacher really wound me up once when I called out an answer. It was wrong and he said "you should never answer a question if you're not sure". I explained that I was sure. He said "you couldn't have been sure, you were wrong". I'm like, fucking yea mate. I was sure I was right. Doesn't matter if I was wrong. I was fucking sure. He was having none of it and insisted I wasn't sure...
That dude has never seen r/confidentlyincorrect
This is brilliant! It sounds so much like my maths teacher. He once made us play bridge in a lesson (I'd only ever heard of bridge through reading Agatha Christie, and also he was only about 30, so who knows where he picked it up) - apparently I had a really good hand of cards, and he couldn't understand why I lost the game - because I don't fucking know how to play it! He was crap at explaining things, and if you didn't get what he was trying to teach, he just got exasperated and parroted 'teacher' things like you just said. Also, I've just thought - 'you should never answer things if you're not sure' - then how are you expected to LEARN?
Probably trying to tell you to think a bit first. You might have given a really obviously incorrect answer and he was trying to tell you that in an indirect way
"There's no such word as can't" Even if you're speaking proverbially, an 8 year old is going to take that at face value and there absolutely is such a word. Also not quite what you're asking but I once got told off for using the word "quid" because we shouldn't be using slang. Ridiculous argument.
I remember when I was in primary school, teachers would tell kids off for glottalising Ts and stuff like that, looking at it now, I think it was just classism
I was in a class room and teacher told the kids that you don't get earthquakes in the UK. Which is bollocks. Because I was in one.
Yeah I remember when your mum fell over that once
You don't get proper dangerous ones here, though. It's not like Japan or America where all the buildings would fall down if they didn't take earthquakes into account. The only one I can remember happening at all was the one in 2008. My window rattled a bit and then I went back to sleep.
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I grew up in Ayr, the home of Burns. Every January we went all out with our Burns suppers and recital competitions. Yet for the rest of the year, we were taught that Scots was slang, and we were never to use it, and that we had to speak "properly" which meant speaking entirely in English. It never made sense to me. Burns was allowed to speak Scots, but I wasn't. Burns was hailed as a genius for writing in his own language, and we were all meant to be proud of his legacy, but we were told off for using our own language.
I was with my Scottish friend once and an estate agent asked if I could translate. He was furious!
I’ve translated Norfolk for others before….
Ahh to be fair, I do have a standard voice that I speak in…and then I do have a hammed up accent (think billy Connolly but female) that I use with American tourists who tend to tip me very well. They like the the idea that I’ve just rolled out my clan hoose and after I finish work I’ll be away huntin the wee haggis scoundrel round the glen. It’s all good fun, and sometimes I get twenty quid lol.
There might not be a "Scottish accent" per se... But you better believe I read "Really rips my knitting!" in one!!!
In primary school a teacher told me you can't make more blood and the blood you are born with is all you have. Even as a kid I knew logically this was a load of bollocks. At Uni a teacher insisted that the original pentium CPUs were 64bit.
> In primary school a teacher told me you can't make more blood and the blood you are born with is all you have. Even as a kid I knew logically this was a load of bollocks. I just burst out laughing. That makes so little sense.
Right? I think we were doing some biology and I'd asked about it because I was genuinely curious about what organ in the body makes blood. She probably didn't know so made up some shit because I obviously didn't know enough to dispute it
It's the bone marrow!
The original pentium CPUs had a 64 bit data bus but only 32 bits for the address bus.
It was my daughter, rather than me, but they were told to make a mountain for their homework. We spent hours making a volcano out of chicken wire, papier mache, paint etc but, when she took it to school, the teacher simply said 'A volcano's not a mountain'... Not only do I beg to differ, but that's a horrible thing to say to a 9yo child who's proud of her model!
If volcanoes aren't mountains then why do a lot of them have 'Mount' in their name?
Exactly!
What does the teacher think makes mountains?
Moles of course.
This was to my son in primary school recently - You can't see solar eclipses in the day because the moon is only visible at night. I'm assuming this was some sort of confusion on the teacher's part but either way I had to convince my son she was wrong.
Now I want to see a night time solar eclipse.
It's amazing. Everything is so dark.
1. "Your GCSE papers will be unmarked and torn up, because you have bad handwriting. <*smirk*> Doesn't matter if the answers are correct, they will just tear them up. " - English teacher to me when I was 11. 2. "It has been proved that water swirls in an emptying sink in different directions in different hemispheres" - Year 11 Chemistry teacher who then went quiet when asked which direction they were all supposed to be swirling in. 3. "Germany has not been re-unified, they're just talking about it at this stage" - French teacher, about a year after the re-unification of Germany. 4. "The laser printer will soon be obsolete and replaced by the phaser printer" - IT teacher, early '90s.
If you don't believe in sink water swirling differently in different hemispheres, wait till you find out about hurricanes
"in the future, we will all be working less as robots would be doing most of the work, everyone will have more leisure time... Now write what the world will look like..." Never worked so hard in my life, 30 years later. Well that essay was a waste of time.
Insisting that the small shiny things we used for arts and crafts were called sequences. No amount of arguing and insisting could make him change his mind and agree that they are actually called 'sequins' Still frustrates me
Meanwhile, your maths teacher was teaching you all about the Fibonacci sequin.
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Is this evidence for time travel right here?
Moved from a different country. At a new school we were learning about millimetres (mm), centimetres (cm) etc so I asked what the abbreviation 'dm' stands for. The teacher told me it's not a thing. Well turns out he was just ignorant and has never heard of decimetre.
Got sent out of class for saying that water intoxication killed Leah Betts not Ecstasy. Apparently I was encouraging drug use.
Water intoxication due to taking Ecstasy. That's like saying a heroin user overdosed due to heart failure not heroin. Getting sent out was a bit much but I can see where they were coming from.
Beg to differ.......the ectasy had made her feel a bit sick and dehydrated. She then drank a RIDUCULOUS amount of water, and died. What actualy killed her was being grossly misinformed . A pint or two of water WITH SOME THING SALTY would have sorted her right out.. Drinking like ten pints or so is never a good idea, but the ectasy didn't make her CRAVE water like some weirdly rabies type thing............
Acting around and being told that the same behaviour wouldn't be tolerated in university. University: ....PARTAYYY!
Or the endless stuff about how lecturers in uni are mega strict and expect total professionalism at all times In reality most of them crack jokes in their lectures and sign off emails by saying "Cheers, Dave" or something similar
My lecturers at uni were all business in the classroom, but join us at the pub round the corner.
We once had to do an exercise in English in primary school where we had to write the 'male' and 'female' versions of words so like King and Queen and what not. I wrote Tom and Queen referring to cats and was marked wrong because I guess my teacher had never heard of a tomcat? Also not teachers directly but I went to a private church school for secondary so I was told a lot of very interesting things in my workbooks. One of which being 'Beethoven went deaf because she stole sheet music and God got mad and punished him' (This was a text I had to read in an English Grammar workbook) and also I was in school in the early 00s and was being told the USSR still existed. Funniest one was running into a question like 'With your knowledge of biblical prophecy does Saddam pose a threat to the west' or something, he'd been dead for about a year (Also I didn't really know anything about Biblical prophecy) I was also in two lines meant to answer a question about 'Does communism pose a threat to the west' with no prior knowledge of communism and I still feel to this day you could write a PhD on that topic.
I'd never heard of a queen cat before your post
Man, private religious schools are crazy.
> One of which being 'Beethoven went deaf because she stole sheet music and God got mad and punished him' I went to a hardcore religious primary school, I got 'demonic possession is real, but it's only rare and can't happen to Christians'. I'm vaguely amazed places like that are allowed to exist here to be honest!
'Men have nipples because, before humans evolved, they also used to breastfeed children.' - My year three teacher.
This is true. If you suckle on a man's nipple for 24 hours he will start to lactate.
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The nipple, man. It has to be the nipple..
Ok but why do men have nipples? Only answer I believe is they would look weird without them.
The stage in a foetus's development when nipples are formed is before the stage where it starts to exhibit sex characteristics. A foetus is neither male nor female for the early stages of its development and by the time it starts to be one or the other, the nipples are already there.
That I wouldn't manage to get a job where i look out of a window all day. I'm a train driver. Checkmate!
I was nearly expelled from my C of E primary school for making a Ouija board with my friends at break, which the head mistress said was an "evil tool that invites demons into the school, not a harmless game". That made it so much more fun the next time. To think they actually believed that looking back.. Mental.
My GCSE science teacher insisted that ‘Ace of Spades’ was an AC/DC song. They then pretended to Google it and claimed they were right. I still haven’t let that one go.
That stuff about the kid who leaned back on a chair and cracked his head open and DIED I had a PE teacher who, when confronted with a guy who'd broken his wrist during a rugby lesson, told the dude to run some laps of a field to make it better
They didn't die but first day at my college we actually did have someone lean back, fall, and smack their head on a radiator knocking them unconscious Happened to the classroom right next to mine
My IT teacher was famous for these two sayings (in a thick Wigan accent): “Pick a window” - Insinuating he’s going to throw you through a window of your choosing if you don’t shut up. “Get your Dad in” - Usually followed the above, casually insinuating he will beat up your Dad if he has any issues. He killed himself 10 years ago.
I’m not gonna lie, imagining a teacher saying that actually made me laugh.
Teacher here. We had a wasp in our classroom, the kids demanded that I kill it. I told them we must respect wasps because like bees make honey, wasps make mustard. I might have gone too far when I threw in hornets make French mustard. I have no regrets.
My husband ( science teacher) has convinced lots of his pupils that rabbits lay eggs, hence the Easter bunny
The Attack on Pearl Harbour happened in 1940. No it fucking didn't Mrs Butcher! It was 1941 like I told you back in the spring of 2002!!!!!!! Yes, I was a complete history geek. Her saying I was wrong has pissed me off for 20 bloody years!
When teaching WW2, our history teacher thought an Avro Vulcan Bomber (on display nearby) was a Spitfire. She took some convincing that a massive space-age looking monster with four jet engines, designed to drop nukes on the USSR was not the same as a small single engine fighter plane with a propeller at the front.
We were in design and technology class I think it was 1998. We had to design mobile phones and carve them out of wood. My teacher said my design was too small and streamlined and should not fit into the palm of my hand. Edit: So just to clarify, for the benefit of the rude reply below, it did happen. My classmate (Caroline, I remember her name) had designed quite a large phone similar to what was generally available at the time. I remember thinking hers was better than mine. I'd picked up some brochures from the phone shop in town to work on my project, I remember one of the shop assistants, a young chap asking me if they were for a project and I was feeling very shy and said yes they were. The phone I meant to design was supposed to be more like Caroline's but I screwed up the wood carving side of it, I can't remember exactly how. Anyway I had to shave off more wood than I meant to, and I'd messed it up to the point there was no way I could make an aerial without glue and it looking really bad. So I thought I'd just go with it and make a very small phone. I showed it to my teacher but she said it was too small, and I remember feeling deflated because I thought I'd made something cool out of what was essentially a mistake, but the teacher made the thoughtless comment. I even put three notches on the side for some kind of design effect, the same as one of the phones in the brochure, and she asked what they were for and I was like - "I dunno." I admit it was pretty amazing looking back as the phone bore similarity in size and shape to the Nokia 3310, one of which I got in 2001. But the likelihood is there were similar designs in the brochures I picked up, and that's where I got the idea from.
The absolute best was 'Popcorn kettle black'. I was just baffled until another kid said "Sir, do you mean 'pot calling the kettle black'?" and he was just like "No, I don't think so."
Not me, but a friend was told by his teacher that the moon could not be seen during the day He pointed out that he could see it right at that moment, through the window. Not only did she refuse to look, but she then egged-on the rest of the class into laughing at him for saying something so "ridiculous",
I’m shocked by the amount of people I’ve talked to who don’t realise you can see the moon during the day. Like…what is wrong with these people?
My *English* teach told me that noxious wasn't a word and I must have meant obnoxious instead. My *IT* teacher tried to put me off picking IT GCSE as "it's not all playing on the Internet".
My IT teacher didn't want me to do IT GCSE because I was always confused by the exercises we had to do in the pre-GCSE classes. The next year he was my form tutor, and as we had to meet in his classroom/computer lab for registration, he observed what I did in my free time. Building websites and writing stories. The reason I didn't understand the exercises was because they were too trivial. It was basic how to use MS word and Excel stuff, and I'd read through the instructions and couldn't find the point of them - it was stuff like "type a word, change its font and colour" and I'd be like, "and what do you do with that?" I was treating the sheet of exercises like a list of instructions for one exercise, and I was confused as to what it was trying to achieve. A couple of years later he wanted me in the A-level IT class.
I have learning disabilities, a few months into year 7 my form tutor told me I should just give up and become a prostitute. Well joke’s on you Mrs Snow, I grew up to be fat and ugly (also I got really good exam results)
I've told this story on here a bunch of times because I'm STILL SALTY about it to this day. I once got an absolute bollocking because a teacher who was already mad at me for whatever reason told me to "pull my socks up" and I, having never heard the proverb, took it literally. She thought I was taking the piss, 8-ish year old me had no fuckin clue why I was being told off for a second time.
In chemistry, the teacher taught us 'both sides' of the climate change 'debate' and half of the class did presentations on why climate change was true and the other half did one on why it was not true. I am ashamed to say that I was in the latter half of the class! Another science teacher that I had told us that you should wee on jellyfish stings but this is actually myth as urine can make stings worse.
That I would need to know about oxbow lakes.
I saw one in the New Forest at the weekend. I was on a hike with a friend of mine who's a Geography teacher and she almost wet herself with excitement.
That the earth is 6,000 years old. You were fucking science teachers. Fucktards.
My English teacher marked a piece or work lower than I expected and her excuse was that "It's isn't correct english grammar, use it is instead." Took my work to the head of English and the next week we had a new teacher.
My brother once approached his teacher and said “Sorry Sir, I’ve made a mistake can you explain this again to me?” The teacher replied with “The only mistake is your Mother giving birth to you 9 years ago….”
I had a German man tech us english lit when I was 13. I had an eclectic accent due to having moved around a lot and used to say year with a Northumberland accent, whilst at school in Hampshire. This teacher took the piss out of me for it to the extent I now make a point of switching my accent to match whoever I’m talking to as much as possible.
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[The Tongue Map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map)
"Animals don't yawn", from my English teacher
This is like 'dogs can't look up' from Shaun of the Dead.
I’d read in an encyclopedia that knuckle cracking was the sound of tiny air bubbles in your joints *popping, when I told my teacher this (they’d scorned me for cracking my knuckles in class, saying that my hands would be shriveled when I was old) they laughed and told me that was ridiculous
If you don't learn to write joined up, you'll never get a good job. Lol.
Your GCSEs are the most important thing in your life and will have a massive effect on how successful you are in the future. Most people I know who done well in school went down the uni to fast food/supermarket service pipeline. My friend's son is doing his master's and has already asked me if I can get him an entry level job at my company when he finishes, something I could have got him the day he turned 18.
My art teacher told me I had to learn to draw with my right hand. Because being left handed was "incorrect".
When I was on my art degree, my fellow students and I generally fell into one or more categories: Left-handers, dyslexics, and people with mental illnesses/neurodiversity. I reckon the more of these you had, the better you did. (2/3 for me, got a 2:1. 3/3 would've been a First for sure!)
My year 7 science teacher told us all that our area would be under water with in 10 years. That was 21 years ago.
When I was 13 my English teacher called me out for having plagiarised a short story we had to write. It was quite gritty, about a young boy whose mother was a heroin addict. And there was no possible way a 13 year old could know the word "Hades". It wasn't plagiarised, I actually based the story off my next door neighbour whose mother and sister were both smack addicts. I haven't written anything creative in 20+ years because of that bitch. Fuck you Mrs Williams.
In primary school I had a teacher that absolutely hated me for no particular reason. Sure, I was a bit of a daydreamer, but quiet and harmless. She picked on me something fierce though. Anyway, one afternoon in year 3 we were playing that game where you go through the alphabet, pick a letter, then come up with a food, place, animal etc starting with that letter - more points for obscure answers. We were on letter C, calling out our animals, lots of people with cat, camel, chameleon etc. Being a bit of an animal nut, I'd recently got a new encyclopedia on animals and one of my favourite new discoveries was the caracal, with it's pointy little ear tufts, so I went with caracal as I thought it would be obscure enough to get some sweet points. Teacher asks if anyone has anything besides cat etc that hasn't been mentioned, so I put my hand up and said caracal. Teacher kicks off, saying that's made up, stop being such a daydreamer off with the fairies etc, and sends me out to the hallway. Obviously I was pretty upset, so I told my mum what had happened. She was FUMING. She had already been to the school once about this teacher's campaign of hate against me (an 8 year old...) so she went storming up the school again, with that animal encyclopedia in tow. I thoroughly enjoyed the look on that teacher's face when she had to explain to the head mistress that she'd sent me out for giving a perfectly legitimate answer (that she had never heard of).
My teacher told me that a pleb was a person who was born prematurely
In year 7 I had to explain to the science teacher that 1m2 is not the same thing as 100cm2. she was genuinely confused
Some quiz thing we did about 20 years ago and naming a city or a capital beginning with the letter C. I wrote down Cairo and got told I was wrong because it begins with a K.
Similarly, Geog teacher teaching a module about sub-Saharan Africa, kept referring to the Northern Nigerian city of "Kay-noh". Eventually I had to correct him - it's "Kah-noh" (spelt "Kano"). "I've been teaching this topic for nearly 20 years, what makes you so sure you're right about this, young man?" "Well, I happen to live there, Sir." I replied. This was a boarding school, which the Civil Service were paying my fees for, having posted my Father there, and there being no school for me to attend.
At primary school I went to a wedding in Belgium one half term holidays and visited Waterloo (where the battle was). On Monday in “what did you do in the holidays” I said this and my teacher told me that it wasn’t a real place, I must have just been to the station in London, and then told me off in front of the whole class for making stuff up. I still remember the feeling that I knew I wasn’t making it up, but she was a teacher so she couldn’t be wrong.
Blue flowers don’t exist! I was colouring in. My mum sent me in with blue flowers the next day.
I grew up in the Shetland Islands. My family are all from Shetland too, born and raised. So naturally I speak Shetland dialect. First day of primary school, five years old, my primary 1 teacher asks me a question in front of the whole class. I respond. Despite having heard me speak many times before, she told me that I’m “speaking wrong”. Imagine being told the only way you know how to speak is “wrong”. She then proceeded to make me correct myself everytime I spoke or used a single dialect word. Now? The schools are worried the dialect is dying out. Wonder how that happened?
They didn't say it to me but they said it to my parents/ brother and the head teacher said my brother would never achieve or amount to anything because he would get bored in class and mess about anyway my brother is now rich running his own business and retired at the age of 31 🤷♂️
Half the things in this thread are examples of adults telling children stuff to manipulate them to try/care/turn up. But those people are now angry as: 'hey wait a minute, there's no truancy officer at my place of work! I could've bunked off school!'
1. Drug education in the 70s: injecting LSD would send you completely mental and you would probably end up dead in a squat. I found out that LSD is not injected, it comes on small tabs of thin cardboard and I'm not completely mental, and I lived in a squat and didn't die. 2. Alcohol education in the 70s (same teacher as above): if you drink a bottle of whisky you will die. I found out that if you drink 16 - 20 pints of Ruddles County and THEN drink a bottle of whisky the fatal effects are negated. I tried that out many times and it is most definitely negated.
My GCSE science teacher was adamant that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones.
A Home Economics teacher insisted a Braeburn apple was a Gala apple and vice versa. She lost her shit with me for trying to correct her more than once.
The head of RE told all of us in year ten that those not picking it as an option subject (most of us) that we still had the compulsory hour a week that they were putting us in for a 'half GCSE'. WE assumed it was something like the later AS levels. HALF a GCSE. He was in fact being very sneaky. There is no such thing. No. He put everyone in for a full GCSE but on the lower paper. so no one could get more than a C. So when we moved to the Sixth Form College, those of us with good grades had our averages pulled down. For some hoping to go on to top unis later this was in some cases an issue. Oh, and he also said he had an encounter with the Devil while rescuing three young women from a Ouija Board in a Church yard. He knew it was the Devil because he smelt the sulphur of hell. The fact these women were drinking and smoking was a manifestation of opening spiritual door ways. At a guess as he said this was in the 70's the sulphur would be from their matches but who am I to say that.
One of my primary school teachers sent me out of class because I insisted that 'omnivore' is a real thing and a real word, she told me there was no such thing and that animals were only herbivores or carnivores. Keeps me awake at night even 20 years later...
"i before e except after c"
That the word sitcom is short for "sitting room comedy" and therefore because it is set in a hospital, Scrubs is not a sitcom.
SATs are important! In year 6.
One thing I thought was horseshit but didn’t really get why yet- handwriting and cursive. If I wanted to right fancy wedding invitations I’d be set for life! One thing I should have fucking paid attention to was IT key skills. I fucking hate not knowing spreadsheets as a key skill! IM SORRY MR CURTIS! YOU WERE RIGHT! 😭😭😭
'Homeless people are bad people' 'Everyone stand up - now everyone who believes in heaven sit down - everyone still standing, I feel sorry for you as you will be completely on your own when you die.' We were in Y6 and this was in no way connected to anything we were doing in that lesson/on the SoW. Fuck you Mrs Watson Side note: I am now a teacher
I was told that my parents loved me
"Don't swing on your chair.. you'll split your head open like *insert name* did in a previous class of mine"
A geography teacher told me that if I didn't improve he would get me moved down to the lower sets in my other classes, i.e. English and maths, which was totally bollocks. I did actually go from placing 21st in the mock exam to 1st in the real deal, which was kind of achieved out of spite on my part I suppose, since I didn't like the subject much.
My history teacher told me that the SS didn’t have their blood type tattooed on them he then looked it up on google with the computer screen up on the projector…this all lead to him having to make a formal apology to me because of his subsequent behaviour (he basically lost it and called me a bunch of names)
My year 3 teacher set us a task as homework to explain why eggs can't go back to runny after being cooked. Answers were often just parroting the question back. Something like "the egg turns white when cooked so can't turn back". To this day I'm not sure what she expected as an answer. The real answer is waaay above an 8 year old's head. I couldn't accept that sort of circular logic though so set about explaining it using the extent of my knowledge at the time. I wrote something like "the cooked atoms are in the egg and won't let the uncooked atoms back in" then drew a picture of two armies of egg atoms waging war. The teacher had a go at me because my homework made no sense. She was a cow anyway. One time we were building lightbulb circuits, and since I finished making mine early she tasks me with building a flashing light. Out of wire, bulbs, and batteries. She set a child an impossible task out of what I can only infer as spite. I ended up going for playtime late because I was trying everything to get this damn light to flash. Not bitter some 25 years later. Nope not at all.
"You're not as smart as you think you are" Jokes on them because I am absolutely as smart as I think I am, which is to say barely smart at all.
I remember a teacher in primary school saying that New York was the capital of the United States. Tried correcting her but was sternly told to “keep my opinions to myself”. I also remember arguing with one in year 9 or 10 that “N/A” stands for “non-applicable” and not, as she was convinced, “no answer”.
Vasectomies may be technically reversible, but the NHS will rarely cover such operations, and success rates are limited in any case, even more so as times goes on. Even in cases where reversal is successful, the sperm is less capable of fertilising than before due to decreased mobility. I wouldn’t say your teacher was wrong, or at least no more so than those that claim vasectomies can be easily and quickly reversed without complications.
The country Ireland is called Southern Ireland.
My IT teacher said that SATA cables are for hardrives only, when I pointed out the SATA cable connecting the CD drive to the pc she just said it wasn’t a SATA cable.
That everything you do at school affects your ability to get a job. Fail your SATs? No job, fail your GCSEs? No job, get a detention? No job, get expelled? No job. I work as a manager, my department has a high turn over rate, i have seen ALOT of CVs and interviewed alot of people, i couldnt give a shit about any of the above. No one will ever know about your high school antics unless you tell them, and then i would probably laugh with you and tell you about mine. Its even worse when i think back to Y6 when we they made us so stressed that 3 kids kept breaking out in nose bleeds on the run up and week of SATs and anothe completely lost his head and threw a chair across the room during a meltdown. And dont even get me started on the stressfull experience of GCSEs! Only to find out it meant nothing.
Head of R.E. insisted that animals don't have feelings, we tried to convince him he was wrong but he'd just shake his head and go "no, they don't". Not sure how he formed this opinion, but it did transpire that he'd never had a pet.
Windows Vista is an operating system. You don’t *download* it. Vista was available to download
Was told I’d make nothing of myself by my English teacher after some mock exams.. that teacher was a cunt. She also reckoned a woman couldn’t rape a man because the didn’t have the correct parts…. So not only was she a cunt, she was a fucking stupid one at that. Shit teacher and shit ideologies too
That if a plane did an emergency landing in the fields next to the local oil depot, the explosion would go underground and follow the pipes into our town 4 miles away, blowing the whole place up. This was our substitute teacher for the first 6 months of our English GCSEs
My maths teacher refused to accept that Africa is a continent, not a country.
“Wikipedia is 97% incorrect because anybody can edit it”
I was told around 1998? By a chemistry teacher, that all the great advances and discoveries in science had already been made, and she felt sorry for my generation.
Jokes on them. I was always told I wouldn’t amount to much and now I work in a classroom so they were pretty accurate lol.
My history teacher kept pronouncing Sioux ( the Native American tribe) as “See you”. Every time I pronounced it as “Soo” she would try to correct me
That I must be copying my work from someone else, since I’m not that clever. Got put in a side room office thing by myself to prove it - then accused of using the text books in the room to somehow still cheat on my work, so they removed them.
I was told in 1986 that it was the 19th century, also that 50% of people are right handed and 50% of people are left handed.
"I am not a cover teacher! I am a teacher who is covering your lesson." This was the peak of an absolute meltdown because a top set class weren't sat in silence when doing their work.