My first grade report card from 1982
My first grade report card from 1982
And second grade...
And third grade...
And fourth grade...
Sometimes I wonder what the next 40 years would have been like if I'd gotten some help instead of just getting yelled at for being lazy.
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Yup I'm also an "if only they apply themselves" person.
Every year, almost every teacher.
I am applying myself, Jane you ignorant slut (SNL reference).
I was embittered before 2nd grade because teachers wouldn't answer my questions and acted like I was being a smart ass.
No, YOU just did a shitty job explaining why something is done a certain way. "Just because" isn't a fucking answer.
College was just as bad, maybe worse.
Most teachers suck. As in about 95% of them.
Math in particular. I can't just memorize all the shortcuts, I need to know why they work and what they're doing
and for newer generations: yes teach, i will always have a calculator in my pocket, so fuck you very much.
I will never understand the insistence on making people memorize things before they know if they'll ever have a use for it, we live in an age where you can just look things up within seconds and there is a whole profession which is specifically built around copying from others (programming).
People are capable of memorizing things that come up a lot, there's no need to pre-emptively memorize when we have computers and the internet.
As a tutor I run into the consequences of this all the time. Teachers throw details at students and are either shit at explaining why things work or don't see how it is relevant to teaching the information then I end up breaking concepts apart and showing why things work because its the only way for students to actually understand things rather than just learn what buttons on the calculator to press.
Me too. I always did kind of OK in school but i could never be bothered to really try hard.
I always thought of it as more of a "give me something interesting to do and I'll apply myself person". I did great in science because we were always doing experiments and shit. Math not so much because it was just here's how to do X. Now lose an hour of your free time doing that 80 times. Fuck that.
It does not help that most teachers don't know how to make math relevant and interesting because at some level they don't think it is either. And even if you actually do find math to be interesting, school more or less beats that out of you.
I remember when we were learning about negative numbers I got it intuitively and was able to do all the problems right away. The teacher asked me to explain what I was doing and when I did he scolded me in front of everyone for not explaining it the way he did. I had said something like "the negative and positive cancel each other out" and whatever you're left with is the answer. I don't even remember what the "proper" explanation was but that's always worked for me. I had a ton of moments like that with shitty math teachers over the last 4-5 years of grade school it really made me hate the subject. My 8th grade teacher hated me so much that she recommended me for the remedial math class in high school even though I was never having problems learning anything in her class I just didn't do the obscene amount of homework she gave me. High school was better but I was a year behind everyone else because of that. The only plus to it was she also recommended like all the hot girls for that so I was in math classes with them for most of highschool.
Same both from the school system and my mum. It's led to a large chip on my shoulder and a very nuanced ego and lack thereof at the same time. I am making almost 200k a year and still a large part of me feels like a failure thanks to a childhood that didn't recognize my challenges.