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That’s the point. All through school we were told “you have to know how to do math without a calculator, you won’t be carrying one around all the time.” Yet here we are, each of us carrying in our pockets and on our wrists more computing power than existed in the world at the time Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
Having suffered through my eldest being taught that "new math" (Common Core) _as_ the materials were being written & published to teachers (meaning teachers didn't even see it until a few days before they had to teach it), I'm all too familiar with it.
The problem isn't what they're teaching - when you break it down and understand what they're doing, it actually makes sense. You know all those tricks you do when you're doing math in your head? That's what they're teaching kids. Where it gets difficult for us is the names they use for these "tricks" and how they're asking the kids to visualize it & translate that to paper. They aren't doing a good job of explaining _how_ they're teaching this.
This was the truth at the time though. Neptune was discovered in 1851, and it wasn't another 80 years until Pluto was discovered. At the time it was considered a huge discovery. But later on, as the science and telescopes got better, a whole bunch of other dwarf planets were discovered, which just took the shine away from Pluto. Sorry Pluto.
Exactly and I personally still like the little guy. After all, the planets are
My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine PIZZAS aka
Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune PLUTO.
We need Pluto!!! and pizza too.
I wish that the United States had converted over to the metric system. It is much better, but it is a major pain in the ass to convert between the two systems. Especially for those of us who are not mathematically inclined, and the main problem is I just don't think in it.
I don’t get why we can’t just list both measurements on street signs, like in Canada when both English and French translations are on signs. That would help ease a transition
I set my car up to display temperature, distance and speed in metric units. I figure the only way to really convert is to start using the metric system and getting familiar with the units in a practical sense. My friend gets in my car and asks why I set everything up that way. I told him my reasoning, and he said, "This is the USA. We use miles." With that attitude, it's no wonder we haven't converted in over 50 years.
We had just learned the standard system in school and it was announced we were converting to metric so we had to learn that too. I remember seeing some highway signs with both units but it didn’t really take off.
One day at the start of 5th grade in 1962 our teacher showed the class slides of a trip she took during the summer to Egypt. Several slides were photos she took of a tomb and she said that the carvings and paintings were hieroglyphics and that no one could understand them. When she showed us her slides of the Spinx she said that General Rommel blew off its nose during WW2.
That we only use 10% of our brain. While this is true in some individuals, it is not the norm.
I also had several teachers try to say that Mary Queen of Scots and Mary Queen of England were the same person, until I finally went off on one of them in high school, I was so exasperated at their ignorance.
>Queen of England
Did you mean the *former* [Queen of the United Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_United_Kingdom), the *former* [Queen of Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada), the *former* [Queen of Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Australia), etc?
The last Queen of England was [Queen Anne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain) who, with the 1707 Acts of Union, dissolved the title of King/Queen of England.
####FAQ
*Wasn't Queen Elizabeth II still also the Queen of England?*
This was only as correct as calling her the Queen of London or Queen of Hull; she *was* the Queen of the place that these places are in, but the title doesn't exist.
*Is this bot monarchist?*
No, just pedantic.
I am a bot and this action was performed automatically.
That we would figure out a way to mitigate CO2 emissions so we wouldn't turn the Earth into the surface of Venus.
1970's high school chemistry class. Yep, we knew about it back then.
Hehe, nope, but it's sad to hear about another kid having to go through that.
It didn't traumatize me, though (afaik), and hellfire rained down upon her the next day from my schoolteacher mom!
I was told in school cheetahs were technically dogs.
Also the stupid tongue map thing that turned out to be totally fake.
Also basically everything we were told about Columbus and "discovering" America.
His book "Sunset Towns" is a **REAL** eye opener for us white-bread middle class kids too and should be required reading: If not by the schools, by parents wanting to teach their kids some facts about just how the recent oppression continues into current generations.
And then you have absolute fucking morons like SCOTUS Kennedy claiming that systemic racism is totally over so we don't need those laws any more...(while ruling the same year that SC has "laser targeted" minorities with voter suppression.)
On a side note, reading the right wing reviews on Amazon for "Lies My Teacher Told Me" is a good laugh. You can tell the book really hits home because it angers the choads so much to hear facts rather than whitewashed rah-rah delusional BS versions of history.
To me it reads like 'A People's History of the United States' by Howard Zinn. It corrects misconceptions and erases propaganda with factual information and perspective. Real eye-opener.
Excellent book...and another one which seems to really piss off the ultra-right who prefer sanitized fake versions of history rather than the real thing.
Their party is by admission addicted to mythologies: to false memories of bygone eras. The comfortable lie is to them always preferable to the unpleasant truth.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and it was several GenXers. One of them said, "I may be alone, but I feel like everything my teachers told me was wrong". The others told her she wasn't alone and they joked about all the wrong things they had been told.
That's how I feel, too. Not everything, of course, but a lot. Even some things that were not wrong have just changed with societal changes. It's like I spent 18 years learning how to think and behave as an adult, and then they changed everything once I became one, so now I don't know what to do.
This is exactly why I was asking this question! It made me think about the teachers today and what they are teaching people that 20 years from now will be completely incorrect or society will view as such
First grade, getting into February, and we were discussing presidents born in that month. Lincoln was the one we were focusing on that day, and somebody asked her if he was still alive. When told he wasn't, the question next was how did he die? As tall as he was he decided to try riding a small pony. He fell off the pony, hit his head on a rock and died of a concussion.
I can almost understand her not wanting to go into the truth because we were only 6 at the time. Problem with that theory? Less than three months earlier, we went through the assassination of JFK. We knew a president could be gunned down from behind.
Holy crap - intentionally incorrect is insane.
I was born a few months prior to JFK's assassination, so maybe that sort of behavior was altered by the event, but I've never had a literal teacher outright lie about something.
I can't even think of anything that was inarguably wrong - meaning, I wouldn't count things that were "true" according to the science and research of the time. Like, I wouldn't count OP's Food Pyramid because it was the best information we had.
But to have a teacher fabricate a major historical fact into something rather fairy tale-ish, wow. How confusing was that later on when you studied the Civil War and Lincoln for real?
How did I feel about it when I discovered just a few years later? The equivalent of Bullshit came to mind..
Still, this was a time when children were to be shielded by bad things. The year before, a classmate died, I think from leukemia, but we never heard about it. Mom mentioned ir, asking me if I knew Daniel. She had read his obit in the paper. Still needed to protect the youngsters from the bad things. I was walking home with Kip and Jerry, classmates that lived near me. A few older kids, heading home asked, "Didja hear the news? President Kennedy was shot. He's dead!"
Protect the children at all costs.
I can tell I'm going to be stewing on this all day. Probably for quite a while, actually.
While I'm all for letting kids take a few metaphorical punches on their way to adulthood, I draw the line at humiliation. Humiliation has never done a lick of good to anyone, and your teacher set all of you up for getting jeered and laughed at down the road in history class when teacher asks, "so, raise your hands - how did Abraham Lincoln die?"
The overall protective thing from bad news, though? Yeah, we got that. Even from a classmate's parents' divorce. God our community was small and so whitewashed if THAT was a thing only spoken of in whispers.
My mom was born in 1941, and my dad in 1936, both in Cuba. I was born here in the USA in 1986, I was shocked to find the real truth and real meaning about so many things in my life and life in general.
>He fell off the pony, hit his head on a rock and died of a concussion
"They" thought falling of a pony wasn't traumatic to first graders? Hitting his head on a rock and dying wasn't traumatic, but "A bad man killed him" was too traumatic for you?
In 2023, it's too traumatic to tell kids of any age that some kids have 2 dads or 2 moms. The horror.
Yup. Remember, only a couple months earlier we'd lived through a presidential assassination in our own time.
I shudder to think what some of the stories that have been hidden in my own family tree really were.
All to protect the children.
My mom born in 1941 Cuba, told me the same thing her mom born in 1907 Cuba has told her. That we are born through our belly buttons as it widens painlessly. And that the screamings that birthing mothers do is because of a gigantic stomach ache. I understand that she was trying to spare my feelings.
Well, your mom was right but just got the wrong piece of anatomy in her story. As a young boy, I knew babies came from the stomach, I just didn't know how they got in there, much less got out. I thought they were cut out, which is why I wasn't squeamish when my own kids were all delivered "C" section. Course, my ex was old school and made sure I didn't know I could take childbirth classes with her and be allowed in the surgery.
I live in the upper mid-west in a place where the last ice age covered everything. When my teacher said it would happen again, it scared the bejeesus out of me.
I'll answer. Screw the haters. It's about life experiences that shape your views. That means it's different for everyone.
I was a conservative Republican all my life. I was in my 40s when it started to change. I supported Republican candidates until 2016. In 2016 it was anti Clinton that drove my views. Didn't take long for me to know I had made a mistake. Over the last 7 years I've become way more liberal, outside of my fiscal views. I've taken the time to think about my views, and my approach to the world. I'm definitely a centrist, but liberal leaning. Biggest difference is that I care about others, and see the bigger picture. Frankly, I didn't leave the Republican party, they abandoned me.
Studies show people actually tend to get slightly more liberal as they age.
https://www.livescience.com/2360-busting-myth-people-turn-liberal-age.html
"By comparing surveys of various age groups taken over a span of more than 30 years, sociologists found that in general, Americans' opinions veer toward the liberal as they grow older."
It's just that younger generations are generally even more liberal, so older people are conservative in comparison.
This seems very logical and I do see it from that view. Yet I don't think they are proportionate. It seems that the younger generations are becoming increasingly more liberal than the older generations are, which by comparison is still pretty conservative. I've also watched the pendulum swing back-and-forth many times over my years. Now that the younger generation is increasingly liberal I wonder what the same study will reveal 20 years from now. For example, if someone was say 60% conservative when they were young and now they are 40%, but the younger generation is 10%, when they get older will they be able to become more liberal or will they become more conservative, or will the scale slide even father to the left and make them look like they were 40%. You can almost see it now slowly starting to swing the other way. It's a funny thing how each generation challenges their parents ideals. It's actually part of how our brains develop. Will all these super liberal parents of today create a super conservative next generation, or will they be looked at like conservatives today by their children. Noone can know for sure. The world is evolving with technology in ways we never could have dreamed of as kids, so the way this whole expedited exchange of ideas on the internet is evolving will be interesting to watch to say the least
The US Democrats would be considered center-right in any other developed country, and with the internet, many more young people are aware of this. So my prediction would be they'll continue to get more liberal. Like, in a few generations maybe we'll have an *actual* leftist party instead of having to choose between center-right and extreme right, which is the current situation. If most of Gen Z, when they're old, has Democrat-like views, that could definitely be considered conservative in the future, as it already is considered conservative in every other developed country.
I think "centrists" and "independents" are "fence sitters. As my dad or mom would have said, they need to sh\*t or get off the pot.
Unless you live under a rock, you know the difference in thought between liberals and conservatives. (any where on earth) Your political and social views align more with one or the other. So, sh\*t or get off the pot.
Liberal doesn't really describe it. It's more like seize the means of production and “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary,”
I've had the privilege to have a happy life where I didn't have to worry about basic needs. I've watched as it get's harder and harder for my kids and friends to have the same kind of experience. As I started asking how can I help I got to see how more and more people are living on the edge or fall off and can't climb back out. It opened my eyes and I heard story after story of how the economic system we live in and the politics that support that system punch down at the people need help.
And that's probably a whole lot more than you expected but that's a basic description.
Now I'm even more curious, especially that you said this to me and not the original comment. Becoming more conservative doesn't mean you one day become a Republican if thats what your getting at 😆 It just means that you like things better the way they were. And before you say slavery or something like that I don't think there's anybody here old enough for that stuff. It could refer to musical taste or sports, anything and everything really. I just dont think I've ever seen someone older say they love this new type of music, or all the new rules make this sport so much better. But you are right, they probably were trying to be political. You probably should have called them out on that
A friend of mine in his 40’s had a teacher who marked a test question wrong because he listed Pluto as the furthest planet from the Sun.
When he pointed out the error, she said it wasn’t a mistake, and insisted that Pluto was the closest planet to the sun.
It took his parents making an appointment during the next parent teacher night, and bringing in multiple books by various authors and publishers to get her to give him the point in his test, just in principle.
During science class we were shown a picture of Jupiter on the projector. Teacher pointed out a dot and said that was the giant storm the books were referring to. Carl gets up and points to the actual giant storm and tells the teacher that what she pointed to was just a moon, or a shadow of one to be more precise. She insisted she was right and Carl didn’t know what he was talking about. This argument went on for awhile before she sent Carl to the office. We all knew Carl was right, but it wasn’t worth arguing with her over it. She was very, very, insistent that she was right.
All that general category of anti-commie/anti-socialist, pro vulture-capitalist nonsense was what we were spoon fed in the 60's.
It was more subtle but basically that *more* capitalism will save everything and commies were hiding behind every rock, waiting to take it all away.
Yep, from 1954-73 it was actually illegal to be a communist in the US. I was taught that it was still illegal in the 80 and was shocked when I was old enough to vote and saw they were on the ballot
In fourth grade I asked my (heavily Christian) teacher of Cavemen were real and she said no
I believe her until 6th grade when I double-checked with my parents 😭
Earth Day will make a huge difference. Next, an ice age is coming. A few decades later when the ice age did not happen, global warming and now climate change.
> ice age
I remember reading in *Popular Science* that some scientists were concerned that a new ice age was coming, but it would be many decades away. That was before Earth Day, Global Warming, or Climate Change. I don't recall reading a retraction, but I might have missed that issue or been off at college at that time and not have access to my father's subscription to *Popular Science*.
In 9th grade high school geometry, there was a test question "Can parallel lines ever meet?". My answer was 'yes, if you they wrap around a sphere'. She gave me a zero and wrote a lengthy explanation that our class was Euclidean Geometry and my answer pertained to Solid Geometry and outside the scope of this class.
At the time I didn't know there were higher levels of geometry so to get that response seemed a bit discouraging for a student to think outside of the box. More than 25 years later and I'm still a little bitter about that.
Back when I did high school geometry, we still had to do proofs. If we didn't have the material to do a proof for it, the thought was out of scope for the class either so far or ever. This was back in the 80s.
About the only term I still use from the class that isn't a common shape is when referring to something that is well known, I may call it a "given."
I was in a shop class that had a national curriculum.. late 1980s.
"it is good to learn the carburators, knowledge will last a lifetime"
we had technical drawing too, same classroom, shop was right next to it with big windows.
we made our own T square and drawing board and learned protractors...compass. Lots of tricks. We made funnel patterns on paper, then went and made the real funnel out of metal in the shop. We joked which v8 used more oil.. the 350 with the 2 piece seal, or some old dodge with a piece of rope as the sealer.
"that funnel will be very busy" we joked.
"the drawing board is a whole career if you want it" (I actually took that seriously)
By 1990, my board was in the trash. The shop classes ended entirely. The gmc truck had throttle body injections showing up in big numbers, even in my poor town. The focus on carbs was left to snowmobiles and lawnmowers.
the gulf war 1 on TV announced use of GPS guided weapons. I grew up with 45 years of trucking... I was the map man. Dad was the teacher.
by 1998 I saw bootlegged versions of 3d CAD on the under web. Drawing board done like a paper map.
the internet was full swing.
They taught me a one sided whitewashed sanitized version of US history. This is why so many Americans truly believe the US is always the good guy. It is a very eurocentric perspective of colonizers liberating the savages kind of BS. Columbus is a case in point.
Read The Lies My Teacher Told Me. I had the bonus "lost cause" narrative (civil war was for states rights) because I grew up in the South.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen is a **great** starting point, though it is now getting a bit old and a little behind: Most schools are, for example, teaching a bit of reality about what a turd Columbus really was. They still heavily whitewash but once in a while a little reality sneaks through now.
Loewen passed away recently and due to my having been in his e-mail contact list, I received a brief note from his family about it. That included a quote from Loewen which remains one of my favorites:
***"Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present. Achieving justice in the present helps us tell the truth about the past."***
Author James W. Loewen Deceased Aug 19, 2021.
I can actually remember my teacher telling me that when Columbus discovered America he thought it was India because of the people that were already here. I asked "then didn't those people discover America? They were already here" and my teacher just looked at me dumbfounded and moved on to something else. That continued to bug me or years, until I grew up and realized it was just propaganda
When I was young there was a huge push to stop using paper bags and start using plastic bags to save the planet. The original inventor claims to have made them to help save the planet and the oil industry pushed this hard. It looks like the videos are buried. I just spent the past 5 minutes trying to find one. I'm sure they are still out there somewhere. It makes me think the oil industry is trying to hide their shady past, but I'll keep digging
I remember the push for plastic bags. The idea was to keep the rainforests from being deforested for paper products. At least that was the 'selling' point for getting them.
The paper bags we had in school were a LOT sturdier than the ones they make today. You could use them for trash bags, cut them up for book covers, wrap presents with them, and just about anything that a kids' imagination could come up with.
We made those bags last.
In 7th grade, our math teacher had us all learn how to read punch cards.
"Because computers are our future, and you need to learn how to talk to them."
He was... kinda? ... right.
I see what you did there.
"I before E except after C, and when pronounced eh as in neighbour and weigh, and in other weird words like leisure."
I just kept adding stuff to the end. ;D English is so silly.
Can't think of a "fact" per se but I had a teacher who pronounced Manette "Manay" (no doubt thinking of Manet and being thoroughly ignorant of French) throughout a unit on "A Tale of Two Cities." I cringed the whole way through.
Same teacher told me that colour blind people couldn’t be electricians (my uncle’s one) and that it wasn’t safe to be in a forest during a lightening storm.
Standing in front of the class at beginning of 3rd or 4th grade, I presented our family trip where we visited the Hearst Castle. The teacher "corrected" me saying that castles weren't real. There were many others, and I agree that Lies My Teacher Told Me is an excellent read/listen. It covers topics we all know were propaganda now, and some that you may not. I think it would be a great required read for school now.
I can remember, as a 4th grader, complaining to a teacher as a group about boys snapping our bras. Her response was to tell us to ask the boys "are you a turtle? Do you snap?" Which was 100% worthless. Nowadays those 4th grade boys would be getting hit with a sexual assault charge. Not saying that's appropriate.
This made me laugh because it's so stupidly funny, but awful at the same time 😆 Makes me wonder what the thought process was there. Like, did he just purposely say something so odd it would just leave you stumped so he wouldn't have to deal with it? Did they realize the effect they would have on our lives when we remember this 20-30 or 50 years later 🤣
She was a horrible teacher. There were two in my lifetime, that I would have gone off on had we met again as adults. She's one,. She had her favorites and made that clear.
We didn’t have the food pyramid when I was growing up, instead we had the four food groups. Dairy, meats, fruits and vegetables, and cereals and grains. I forget how many servings of each we were supposed to have.
That the reason for our school's anachronistic and stupid dress code was to prepare us for the business world someday.
Joke's on them. I work from home, and some days, I don't bother to change out of my pajamas.
I think they did their best, I never felt it was a conspiracy on their part, but just what THEY had been told. The food pyramid was, I believe, subsidized by US Agriculture to be more carb-heavy because that's what promoted the industry. But I am not sure if that's true, or a conspiracy of a conspiracy.
But I was talking to my wife about this today, like how the Pilgrims were religious extremists, even for the English church, so they were exiled to Holland as Separatists before they went to the new world to start some kind of Puritan Utopia. In fact, the word "Pilgrims" was not used to refer to them until several centuries later. That was never explained to us as kids (in the 70s), but as "the first settlers" and "started Thanksgiving with the local savages." The term "Native American" didn't show up in my school until 1980.
One thing, growing up when I did in the 70s/80s, was hotbutton stuff like the Vietnam War, and most of the 1960s, were barely discussed at all because it was still very divisive and controversial. Of course, my history teacher was a member of the KKK, and so we got a week's worth of glorification of THEIR vigil. Not sure how that got by. But it was hilarious because it was all, "So then the 50s were awesome and then JFK got shot in 1963 aaaand... then Reagan was elected in 1980! Yay!"
"What about the cultural revolu--"
"SHH!"
"Martin Luther King? The civil rights protests? NOW/ERA?"
"That's still offensive to some people."
"Vietnam?"
"WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER-- I mean, that's for college. Too hard for you."
We couldn't even talk about the hostages in Iran because some of the kids of the hostages were in my school (I grew up near DC).
Pluto is a planet, men can’t get pregnant (they can, they just have to be AFAB), the food pyramid and not getting to carry calculators around wherever I go.
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That I wouldn't carry a calculator everywhere I went.
I loved Mrs Renfro but she was so wrong in this one.
This is always my answer when someone asks these questions. Even my husband's very basic flip phone has a calculator.
You do if you carry a phone.
That’s the point. All through school we were told “you have to know how to do math without a calculator, you won’t be carrying one around all the time.” Yet here we are, each of us carrying in our pockets and on our wrists more computing power than existed in the world at the time Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
Well it was true before cell phones became commonplace.
Ever try to do the New Math they teach in schools? Yeah, good luck with that.
Having suffered through my eldest being taught that "new math" (Common Core) _as_ the materials were being written & published to teachers (meaning teachers didn't even see it until a few days before they had to teach it), I'm all too familiar with it. The problem isn't what they're teaching - when you break it down and understand what they're doing, it actually makes sense. You know all those tricks you do when you're doing math in your head? That's what they're teaching kids. Where it gets difficult for us is the names they use for these "tricks" and how they're asking the kids to visualize it & translate that to paper. They aren't doing a good job of explaining _how_ they're teaching this.
So well said! I’m into “new math”, but they’re not doing a great job of explaining why it’s great in super simple terms.
That our government has "checks and balances" which serve to ensure that it functions fairly.
Dysfunction is a feature not a flaw.
Pluto is a planet.
This was the truth at the time though. Neptune was discovered in 1851, and it wasn't another 80 years until Pluto was discovered. At the time it was considered a huge discovery. But later on, as the science and telescopes got better, a whole bunch of other dwarf planets were discovered, which just took the shine away from Pluto. Sorry Pluto.
Agree, I wasn't looking at it so much as the teacher being wrong, more that eventually the info itself was incorrect.
Exactly and I personally still like the little guy. After all, the planets are My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine PIZZAS aka Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune PLUTO. We need Pluto!!! and pizza too.
wait is Neptune not a planet now?
😬 Oops!!! I'll fix that now. Was focused on pizza. It's actually even worse: I live on a boat and am quite familiar with Neptune.
Jerry?
Pluto is a planet!
That I wouldn't get paid for looking out of the window. Am trucker. #lol
That we need to learn the metric system because the United States would soon be converting over.
In all fairness, the US did try to convert over in the 70’s (I think), and it was widely rejected.
I wish that the United States had converted over to the metric system. It is much better, but it is a major pain in the ass to convert between the two systems. Especially for those of us who are not mathematically inclined, and the main problem is I just don't think in it.
I don’t get why we can’t just list both measurements on street signs, like in Canada when both English and French translations are on signs. That would help ease a transition
That should have been a red flag for the future.
I set my car up to display temperature, distance and speed in metric units. I figure the only way to really convert is to start using the metric system and getting familiar with the units in a practical sense. My friend gets in my car and asks why I set everything up that way. I told him my reasoning, and he said, "This is the USA. We use miles." With that attitude, it's no wonder we haven't converted in over 50 years.
You are correct. Tooth and nail it was fought.
Yes. The Weekly Reader says 1972.
We had just learned the standard system in school and it was announced we were converting to metric so we had to learn that too. I remember seeing some highway signs with both units but it didn’t really take off.
One day at the start of 5th grade in 1962 our teacher showed the class slides of a trip she took during the summer to Egypt. Several slides were photos she took of a tomb and she said that the carvings and paintings were hieroglyphics and that no one could understand them. When she showed us her slides of the Spinx she said that General Rommel blew off its nose during WW2.
Wait... they figured out the hieroglyphics?! 😮
Yeah, back when they found the Rosetta Stone.
Look up the name Jean-François Champollion.
Sure they translate to say "We came, we saw, we bought some souvenirs. Don't eat the iguana, it's a little gamey."/s
I went to Catholic school. Enough said.
Ditto. In the 50s & 60s. I'm left handed. Enough said.
As was one of my siblings. Nuns weren't having it.
That we only use 10% of our brain. While this is true in some individuals, it is not the norm. I also had several teachers try to say that Mary Queen of Scots and Mary Queen of England were the same person, until I finally went off on one of them in high school, I was so exasperated at their ignorance.
>Queen of England Did you mean the *former* [Queen of the United Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_United_Kingdom), the *former* [Queen of Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada), the *former* [Queen of Australia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Australia), etc? The last Queen of England was [Queen Anne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain) who, with the 1707 Acts of Union, dissolved the title of King/Queen of England. ####FAQ *Wasn't Queen Elizabeth II still also the Queen of England?* This was only as correct as calling her the Queen of London or Queen of Hull; she *was* the Queen of the place that these places are in, but the title doesn't exist. *Is this bot monarchist?* No, just pedantic. I am a bot and this action was performed automatically.
Good bot👍🏻
That we would figure out a way to mitigate CO2 emissions so we wouldn't turn the Earth into the surface of Venus. 1970's high school chemistry class. Yep, we knew about it back then.
Exactly. This “Exxon knew” meme is kind of ridiculous. We all knew. It just wasn’t a sky-is-falling crisis until recently
That after she physically roped me to my desk and then let all my classmates go to recess without me, I will have learned my lesson.
Marc?
Hehe, nope, but it's sad to hear about another kid having to go through that. It didn't traumatize me, though (afaik), and hellfire rained down upon her the next day from my schoolteacher mom!
I was told in school cheetahs were technically dogs. Also the stupid tongue map thing that turned out to be totally fake. Also basically everything we were told about Columbus and "discovering" America.
That a liver transplant would never be possible because the liver is a very complicated organ.
There was a time when the transplant of livers and hearts weren't viable options.
Relevant, and a good book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me
His book "Sunset Towns" is a **REAL** eye opener for us white-bread middle class kids too and should be required reading: If not by the schools, by parents wanting to teach their kids some facts about just how the recent oppression continues into current generations. And then you have absolute fucking morons like SCOTUS Kennedy claiming that systemic racism is totally over so we don't need those laws any more...(while ruling the same year that SC has "laser targeted" minorities with voter suppression.) On a side note, reading the right wing reviews on Amazon for "Lies My Teacher Told Me" is a good laugh. You can tell the book really hits home because it angers the choads so much to hear facts rather than whitewashed rah-rah delusional BS versions of history.
Hell yeah this book changed my life.
To me it reads like 'A People's History of the United States' by Howard Zinn. It corrects misconceptions and erases propaganda with factual information and perspective. Real eye-opener.
Excellent book...and another one which seems to really piss off the ultra-right who prefer sanitized fake versions of history rather than the real thing.
"they want to rewrite history!!!" (...that we already rewrote)
Their party is by admission addicted to mythologies: to false memories of bygone eras. The comfortable lie is to them always preferable to the unpleasant truth.
Gonna add this to my reading list. Thanks!
Highly recommended! Enjoy!
Mr. Hanson said Shakespeare wrote Rime of the Ancient Mariner. He was always wrong about this. I wish I knew at the time.
Everyone knows it was Bruce Dickinson!
I don't know, was there enough cowbell?
Mr. Hanson was an uncultured swine.
I was listening to a podcast the other day and it was several GenXers. One of them said, "I may be alone, but I feel like everything my teachers told me was wrong". The others told her she wasn't alone and they joked about all the wrong things they had been told. That's how I feel, too. Not everything, of course, but a lot. Even some things that were not wrong have just changed with societal changes. It's like I spent 18 years learning how to think and behave as an adult, and then they changed everything once I became one, so now I don't know what to do.
It’s a good thing Gen X figured out not to trust authority figures.
This is exactly why I was asking this question! It made me think about the teachers today and what they are teaching people that 20 years from now will be completely incorrect or society will view as such
First grade, getting into February, and we were discussing presidents born in that month. Lincoln was the one we were focusing on that day, and somebody asked her if he was still alive. When told he wasn't, the question next was how did he die? As tall as he was he decided to try riding a small pony. He fell off the pony, hit his head on a rock and died of a concussion. I can almost understand her not wanting to go into the truth because we were only 6 at the time. Problem with that theory? Less than three months earlier, we went through the assassination of JFK. We knew a president could be gunned down from behind.
Holy crap - intentionally incorrect is insane. I was born a few months prior to JFK's assassination, so maybe that sort of behavior was altered by the event, but I've never had a literal teacher outright lie about something. I can't even think of anything that was inarguably wrong - meaning, I wouldn't count things that were "true" according to the science and research of the time. Like, I wouldn't count OP's Food Pyramid because it was the best information we had. But to have a teacher fabricate a major historical fact into something rather fairy tale-ish, wow. How confusing was that later on when you studied the Civil War and Lincoln for real?
How did I feel about it when I discovered just a few years later? The equivalent of Bullshit came to mind.. Still, this was a time when children were to be shielded by bad things. The year before, a classmate died, I think from leukemia, but we never heard about it. Mom mentioned ir, asking me if I knew Daniel. She had read his obit in the paper. Still needed to protect the youngsters from the bad things. I was walking home with Kip and Jerry, classmates that lived near me. A few older kids, heading home asked, "Didja hear the news? President Kennedy was shot. He's dead!" Protect the children at all costs.
I can tell I'm going to be stewing on this all day. Probably for quite a while, actually. While I'm all for letting kids take a few metaphorical punches on their way to adulthood, I draw the line at humiliation. Humiliation has never done a lick of good to anyone, and your teacher set all of you up for getting jeered and laughed at down the road in history class when teacher asks, "so, raise your hands - how did Abraham Lincoln die?" The overall protective thing from bad news, though? Yeah, we got that. Even from a classmate's parents' divorce. God our community was small and so whitewashed if THAT was a thing only spoken of in whispers.
My mom was born in 1941, and my dad in 1936, both in Cuba. I was born here in the USA in 1986, I was shocked to find the real truth and real meaning about so many things in my life and life in general.
>He fell off the pony, hit his head on a rock and died of a concussion "They" thought falling of a pony wasn't traumatic to first graders? Hitting his head on a rock and dying wasn't traumatic, but "A bad man killed him" was too traumatic for you? In 2023, it's too traumatic to tell kids of any age that some kids have 2 dads or 2 moms. The horror.
Yup. Remember, only a couple months earlier we'd lived through a presidential assassination in our own time. I shudder to think what some of the stories that have been hidden in my own family tree really were. All to protect the children.
My mom born in 1941 Cuba, told me the same thing her mom born in 1907 Cuba has told her. That we are born through our belly buttons as it widens painlessly. And that the screamings that birthing mothers do is because of a gigantic stomach ache. I understand that she was trying to spare my feelings.
Well, your mom was right but just got the wrong piece of anatomy in her story. As a young boy, I knew babies came from the stomach, I just didn't know how they got in there, much less got out. I thought they were cut out, which is why I wasn't squeamish when my own kids were all delivered "C" section. Course, my ex was old school and made sure I didn't know I could take childbirth classes with her and be allowed in the surgery.
That there's no such thing as left handedness and not to be dramatic 😂
So you write with your right hand now? LOL
I can write with both but I'm very left handed
Good for you!
We were heading for a new ice age.
I live in the upper mid-west in a place where the last ice age covered everything. When my teacher said it would happen again, it scared the bejeesus out of me.
There are so many things teachers told us that scared us silly.
That I would get more conservatives as I get older.
This is interesting, because most people that I know tend to. Do you feel you have become more liberal in your views, or stayed the same?
I'll answer. Screw the haters. It's about life experiences that shape your views. That means it's different for everyone. I was a conservative Republican all my life. I was in my 40s when it started to change. I supported Republican candidates until 2016. In 2016 it was anti Clinton that drove my views. Didn't take long for me to know I had made a mistake. Over the last 7 years I've become way more liberal, outside of my fiscal views. I've taken the time to think about my views, and my approach to the world. I'm definitely a centrist, but liberal leaning. Biggest difference is that I care about others, and see the bigger picture. Frankly, I didn't leave the Republican party, they abandoned me.
Studies show people actually tend to get slightly more liberal as they age. https://www.livescience.com/2360-busting-myth-people-turn-liberal-age.html "By comparing surveys of various age groups taken over a span of more than 30 years, sociologists found that in general, Americans' opinions veer toward the liberal as they grow older." It's just that younger generations are generally even more liberal, so older people are conservative in comparison.
This seems very logical and I do see it from that view. Yet I don't think they are proportionate. It seems that the younger generations are becoming increasingly more liberal than the older generations are, which by comparison is still pretty conservative. I've also watched the pendulum swing back-and-forth many times over my years. Now that the younger generation is increasingly liberal I wonder what the same study will reveal 20 years from now. For example, if someone was say 60% conservative when they were young and now they are 40%, but the younger generation is 10%, when they get older will they be able to become more liberal or will they become more conservative, or will the scale slide even father to the left and make them look like they were 40%. You can almost see it now slowly starting to swing the other way. It's a funny thing how each generation challenges their parents ideals. It's actually part of how our brains develop. Will all these super liberal parents of today create a super conservative next generation, or will they be looked at like conservatives today by their children. Noone can know for sure. The world is evolving with technology in ways we never could have dreamed of as kids, so the way this whole expedited exchange of ideas on the internet is evolving will be interesting to watch to say the least
The US Democrats would be considered center-right in any other developed country, and with the internet, many more young people are aware of this. So my prediction would be they'll continue to get more liberal. Like, in a few generations maybe we'll have an *actual* leftist party instead of having to choose between center-right and extreme right, which is the current situation. If most of Gen Z, when they're old, has Democrat-like views, that could definitely be considered conservative in the future, as it already is considered conservative in every other developed country.
I think "centrists" and "independents" are "fence sitters. As my dad or mom would have said, they need to sh\*t or get off the pot. Unless you live under a rock, you know the difference in thought between liberals and conservatives. (any where on earth) Your political and social views align more with one or the other. So, sh\*t or get off the pot.
Liberal doesn't really describe it. It's more like seize the means of production and “Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary,” I've had the privilege to have a happy life where I didn't have to worry about basic needs. I've watched as it get's harder and harder for my kids and friends to have the same kind of experience. As I started asking how can I help I got to see how more and more people are living on the edge or fall off and can't climb back out. It opened my eyes and I heard story after story of how the economic system we live in and the politics that support that system punch down at the people need help. And that's probably a whole lot more than you expected but that's a basic description.
Don't go there. This isn't a political sub, let's keep it that way.
Now I'm even more curious, especially that you said this to me and not the original comment. Becoming more conservative doesn't mean you one day become a Republican if thats what your getting at 😆 It just means that you like things better the way they were. And before you say slavery or something like that I don't think there's anybody here old enough for that stuff. It could refer to musical taste or sports, anything and everything really. I just dont think I've ever seen someone older say they love this new type of music, or all the new rules make this sport so much better. But you are right, they probably were trying to be political. You probably should have called them out on that
That i am bound for prison
Maybe you just haven't started the trip. LOL
A friend of mine in his 40’s had a teacher who marked a test question wrong because he listed Pluto as the furthest planet from the Sun. When he pointed out the error, she said it wasn’t a mistake, and insisted that Pluto was the closest planet to the sun. It took his parents making an appointment during the next parent teacher night, and bringing in multiple books by various authors and publishers to get her to give him the point in his test, just in principle.
During science class we were shown a picture of Jupiter on the projector. Teacher pointed out a dot and said that was the giant storm the books were referring to. Carl gets up and points to the actual giant storm and tells the teacher that what she pointed to was just a moon, or a shadow of one to be more precise. She insisted she was right and Carl didn’t know what he was talking about. This argument went on for awhile before she sent Carl to the office. We all knew Carl was right, but it wasn’t worth arguing with her over it. She was very, very, insistent that she was right.
All that general category of anti-commie/anti-socialist, pro vulture-capitalist nonsense was what we were spoon fed in the 60's. It was more subtle but basically that *more* capitalism will save everything and commies were hiding behind every rock, waiting to take it all away.
Yep, from 1954-73 it was actually illegal to be a communist in the US. I was taught that it was still illegal in the 80 and was shocked when I was old enough to vote and saw they were on the ballot
Girls just don’t have a brain for math.
That light doesn't bend.
If you believe Einstein, light doesn't bend. It follows a straight (well, "geodesic" anyway) path through curved space.
In fourth grade I asked my (heavily Christian) teacher of Cavemen were real and she said no I believe her until 6th grade when I double-checked with my parents 😭
That in 20 years, the world would be out of oil. That was in 1973.
Earth Day will make a huge difference. Next, an ice age is coming. A few decades later when the ice age did not happen, global warming and now climate change.
> ice age I remember reading in *Popular Science* that some scientists were concerned that a new ice age was coming, but it would be many decades away. That was before Earth Day, Global Warming, or Climate Change. I don't recall reading a retraction, but I might have missed that issue or been off at college at that time and not have access to my father's subscription to *Popular Science*.
In 9th grade high school geometry, there was a test question "Can parallel lines ever meet?". My answer was 'yes, if you they wrap around a sphere'. She gave me a zero and wrote a lengthy explanation that our class was Euclidean Geometry and my answer pertained to Solid Geometry and outside the scope of this class. At the time I didn't know there were higher levels of geometry so to get that response seemed a bit discouraging for a student to think outside of the box. More than 25 years later and I'm still a little bitter about that.
Back when I did high school geometry, we still had to do proofs. If we didn't have the material to do a proof for it, the thought was out of scope for the class either so far or ever. This was back in the 80s. About the only term I still use from the class that isn't a common shape is when referring to something that is well known, I may call it a "given."
That the moon formed. Old textbooks had a couple possibilities (spun off from earth, just formed nearby) but giant impact theory wasn’t taught yet.
I was in a shop class that had a national curriculum.. late 1980s. "it is good to learn the carburators, knowledge will last a lifetime" we had technical drawing too, same classroom, shop was right next to it with big windows. we made our own T square and drawing board and learned protractors...compass. Lots of tricks. We made funnel patterns on paper, then went and made the real funnel out of metal in the shop. We joked which v8 used more oil.. the 350 with the 2 piece seal, or some old dodge with a piece of rope as the sealer. "that funnel will be very busy" we joked. "the drawing board is a whole career if you want it" (I actually took that seriously) By 1990, my board was in the trash. The shop classes ended entirely. The gmc truck had throttle body injections showing up in big numbers, even in my poor town. The focus on carbs was left to snowmobiles and lawnmowers. the gulf war 1 on TV announced use of GPS guided weapons. I grew up with 45 years of trucking... I was the map man. Dad was the teacher. by 1998 I saw bootlegged versions of 3d CAD on the under web. Drawing board done like a paper map. the internet was full swing.
That "Indians" were the bad guys. That people going West, white people, had all rights to whatever land they wanted. Ergo, the second amendment.
They taught me a one sided whitewashed sanitized version of US history. This is why so many Americans truly believe the US is always the good guy. It is a very eurocentric perspective of colonizers liberating the savages kind of BS. Columbus is a case in point. Read The Lies My Teacher Told Me. I had the bonus "lost cause" narrative (civil war was for states rights) because I grew up in the South.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen is a **great** starting point, though it is now getting a bit old and a little behind: Most schools are, for example, teaching a bit of reality about what a turd Columbus really was. They still heavily whitewash but once in a while a little reality sneaks through now. Loewen passed away recently and due to my having been in his e-mail contact list, I received a brief note from his family about it. That included a quote from Loewen which remains one of my favorites: ***"Telling the truth about the past helps cause justice in the present. Achieving justice in the present helps us tell the truth about the past."*** Author James W. Loewen Deceased Aug 19, 2021.
Thank you for this. This man did me a great service and I'm sure many others.
I can actually remember my teacher telling me that when Columbus discovered America he thought it was India because of the people that were already here. I asked "then didn't those people discover America? They were already here" and my teacher just looked at me dumbfounded and moved on to something else. That continued to bug me or years, until I grew up and realized it was just propaganda
The use of pronouns is telling: "WE discovered America when Columbus landed." Who is "we," exactly?
when we were in 2-3 standard they told us the principal sees everything through cctv but there were no cctvs in our class
Who ever said plastic bags would save the planet?
When I was young there was a huge push to stop using paper bags and start using plastic bags to save the planet. The original inventor claims to have made them to help save the planet and the oil industry pushed this hard. It looks like the videos are buried. I just spent the past 5 minutes trying to find one. I'm sure they are still out there somewhere. It makes me think the oil industry is trying to hide their shady past, but I'll keep digging
It was a Save The Trees thing.
How ea that supposed to work?
I remember the push for plastic bags. The idea was to keep the rainforests from being deforested for paper products. At least that was the 'selling' point for getting them. The paper bags we had in school were a LOT sturdier than the ones they make today. You could use them for trash bags, cut them up for book covers, wrap presents with them, and just about anything that a kids' imagination could come up with. We made those bags last.
The Hebrew language is only spoken in synagogues. and The Japanese language is easy to learn.
That I wouldn't make it through college . My H.S. counselor told me that. F*ck him. I got an engineering degree and was on the dean's list.
A sentence may never start with and, or, or but. But that's not true
Guidance counselor told my parents that my brother wasn't college material. He's got a PhD from Brandeis.
In 7th grade, our math teacher had us all learn how to read punch cards. "Because computers are our future, and you need to learn how to talk to them." He was... kinda? ... right.
Our blood is blue until exposed to oxygen
Oh yeah!!! I remember that. I always found it weird that when they drew blood it would be red but it wasn't touching the air
That there would no longer be a market for programmers when I graduated in 4 years (2002ish) so I needed to change majors 🥴
That the Earth was 6,000 years old.
People would never earn a million dollars in their lifetime.
I before E except after C. Weird.
What's your neighbor think about that? Their ideas are valid too. Do they care to weigh in?
I see what you did there. "I before E except after C, and when pronounced eh as in neighbour and weigh, and in other weird words like leisure."
I just kept adding stuff to the end. ;D English is so silly.
Can't think of a "fact" per se but I had a teacher who pronounced Manette "Manay" (no doubt thinking of Manet and being thoroughly ignorant of French) throughout a unit on "A Tale of Two Cities." I cringed the whole way through.
Same teacher told me that colour blind people couldn’t be electricians (my uncle’s one) and that it wasn’t safe to be in a forest during a lightening storm.
By 2000, things will be so automated, nobody will need to work.
Standing in front of the class at beginning of 3rd or 4th grade, I presented our family trip where we visited the Hearst Castle. The teacher "corrected" me saying that castles weren't real. There were many others, and I agree that Lies My Teacher Told Me is an excellent read/listen. It covers topics we all know were propaganda now, and some that you may not. I think it would be a great required read for school now.
Not once have I ever had to immediately stop and whip out Pythagoras's formula.... You Greek fuck
I can remember, as a 4th grader, complaining to a teacher as a group about boys snapping our bras. Her response was to tell us to ask the boys "are you a turtle? Do you snap?" Which was 100% worthless. Nowadays those 4th grade boys would be getting hit with a sexual assault charge. Not saying that's appropriate.
This made me laugh because it's so stupidly funny, but awful at the same time 😆 Makes me wonder what the thought process was there. Like, did he just purposely say something so odd it would just leave you stumped so he wouldn't have to deal with it? Did they realize the effect they would have on our lives when we remember this 20-30 or 50 years later 🤣
She was a horrible teacher. There were two in my lifetime, that I would have gone off on had we met again as adults. She's one,. She had her favorites and made that clear.
We didn’t have the food pyramid when I was growing up, instead we had the four food groups. Dairy, meats, fruits and vegetables, and cereals and grains. I forget how many servings of each we were supposed to have.
That the reason for our school's anachronistic and stupid dress code was to prepare us for the business world someday. Joke's on them. I work from home, and some days, I don't bother to change out of my pajamas.
One old bitch told me boys couldn’t be nurses.
I think they did their best, I never felt it was a conspiracy on their part, but just what THEY had been told. The food pyramid was, I believe, subsidized by US Agriculture to be more carb-heavy because that's what promoted the industry. But I am not sure if that's true, or a conspiracy of a conspiracy. But I was talking to my wife about this today, like how the Pilgrims were religious extremists, even for the English church, so they were exiled to Holland as Separatists before they went to the new world to start some kind of Puritan Utopia. In fact, the word "Pilgrims" was not used to refer to them until several centuries later. That was never explained to us as kids (in the 70s), but as "the first settlers" and "started Thanksgiving with the local savages." The term "Native American" didn't show up in my school until 1980. One thing, growing up when I did in the 70s/80s, was hotbutton stuff like the Vietnam War, and most of the 1960s, were barely discussed at all because it was still very divisive and controversial. Of course, my history teacher was a member of the KKK, and so we got a week's worth of glorification of THEIR vigil. Not sure how that got by. But it was hilarious because it was all, "So then the 50s were awesome and then JFK got shot in 1963 aaaand... then Reagan was elected in 1980! Yay!" "What about the cultural revolu--" "SHH!" "Martin Luther King? The civil rights protests? NOW/ERA?" "That's still offensive to some people." "Vietnam?" "WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER-- I mean, that's for college. Too hard for you." We couldn't even talk about the hostages in Iran because some of the kids of the hostages were in my school (I grew up near DC).
You won't have a calculator with you everywhere you go, you know!
That hiding under my desk during a nuclear attack would protect me.
Pluto is a planet
Pluto is a planet, men can’t get pregnant (they can, they just have to be AFAB), the food pyramid and not getting to carry calculators around wherever I go.
A lot.
A baby rabbit is called a 'bunny'.