What's the wrongest thing a teacher ever told you?

You won't always have a calculator with you.
- They used to deliver this line with so much sass
- I was told this while wearing a calculator watch.
- i wonder if this ever keeps any math teachers up at night. how wrong they were about this
- I'm in first year of university and we use calculator for everything except math, but math we do is actually easy that you don't need calculator.
- Yeah, this line survived a lot longer than it should have.
- My class was repeatedly threatened for using more than one finger on a calculator to solve chemistry equations. “If I see those Nintendo thumbs…”
- I was carrying not one but two programmable Casio GFX 9850 graphics calculators with me pretty much all the time. You could write some kind of Basic-ish code on these things. Neat machines, considering their age.
  
  Can play games on them to, including clones of pacman, Doom, Super Mario land and pong.
- Yes, I'm currently typing on a device that can function as a calculator
  Maths teachers should really be saying that they're teaching us how to do maths on a calculator
  I'm horrible at maths though probably because of my autism spectrum disorder
  I've only improved in areas of maths where I've self taught myself mental shortcuts to do it in my head
  School helped somewhat with the Autism accommodations here in Australia but not that much, I find making my own accommodations and self teaching myself years later is way better than the accommodations provided by my school
  They really should take student feedback in a lot more

There's checks and balances in our government
- I mean, there are, but they don't always work, if ever.
  
  There used to be. The checks and balances have basically been eroded to nothing.
- The checks are going to Musk and cronies and the balances are in the spreadsheets and databases.

You should be enjoying the school years cause they'll be the best of your life. Said by someone who very obviously peaked in high school.
- School was hell for me compared to other things.
- Best in that you don't have adult responsibilities.
- IDK being a kid was fun. Being an adult is more work.
  
  We were in late high school, it's not like we had no responsibilities. Pretty much every year after that has been better than middle/high school for me.
- To be fair, there seems to be a lot of people who think childhood was the best time of their life. I'm ~50 and I think life was best in my 30s, but it's still pretty great now also. Childhood, and highschool in particular, were the worst.
- They were kind of right and really wrong.
  Im 40 and married now... remember how nervous tou were just trying to talk to someone you had a crush on? That level of "Powerline up the ass" intensity of feelings?
  Yeah these days, firstly if I'm ever single again shit has gone seriously sideways... But I could without a sense of trepidation walk up to Charlize Theron in a coffee shop, tell her how amazing she was in Aeon flux, ask her how she got involved in executive producing Hyperdrive for netflix and then ask her if she would like to grab dinner sometime. Because these days you have to really go some lengths to get a rise out of me.

Pores in latex condoms bigger than the AIDS virus.
Fuck a science class, that motherfucker shouldn’t have been allowed near the school.
- Pores in ~~latex~~ lamb skin condoms bigger than the AIDS virus.
  That's probably what they were going for, but you'd think a teacher in that position would check their data if challenged.
- How would they work if they were going to fail at their one job?
  
  Latex condoms have been around longer than the AIDS crisis. They have another job.
  
  The virus simply respects your decision to not want to be infected and doesn't leave.
- For the kids it’s lambskin condoms that have pores larger than HIV
- We had that taight in our high school too!
  (And as a totally unrelated fact I'm sure, our biology teacher was a major figure in our local church and was pro abstinence. Completely unrelated, of course)

"Medieval armies didn't use crossbows when attacking castles."
My hand immediately shot up. "What are you talking about? Of course they did."
My elderly history teacher replied "no, they didn't."
Me "Why do you think that?"
Her "because crossbows fire in a straight line so they would just shoot over the castle."
I looked at my classmates, hoping they would see how insane this is. They were looking at me like I grew a second head.
Me "that's not true. At all."
Her, getting slightly annoyed, "how do you know?"
Me "well for one, I've fired a crossbow, I know how they work. For two, they had GRAVITY BACK THEN, the bolt comes back down!"
Her, and some of the class "ooooh!"
...
Her "well anyway...." And continues the lesson.
This was a college class.
- "I think you'll find that crossbows are a hitscan weapon 😏"
- Did she think the arrow would just... fly in space for all eternity and never come down or something?
  
  Yes, apparently.
- I'm reading this and think, "Oh man... I wish I had shot a cross bow in 4th grade."
  This was a college class.
  Ugh. Wait! Do 4th graders go to college.... No. No they don't.
  
  Well, I grew up doing medieval reenactment so my crossbow experience was from about the 4th grade, so there's that.
- Lmao I guess nobody uses guns to take a fortress either.
- LOL, show her 300.
  "We will fight in the shade!"
- They at least sound chiller than the people in the other examples.
  
  I think it was the senility and the tenure

“You need to go to college to be successful or you’ll be flipping burgers!”
So said teachers, parents, career counselors, etc. and here we are, I beat school, and no jobs. Should’ve become an electrician.
- I couldn't even get the burger flipping job starting out. Rude.
- There’s still time to become an electrician!
- Most of the most successful people never went to college. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Simon Cowell...
  
  I mean you're looking at a few edge cases here. Most of us will tend to land in the average and never see that level of wild success. Yes, with the right skills you can get a well paying job without a degree but on the whole, people who get a higher education end up doing better financially.
  https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/education-pays.htm
  
  They either had rich parents with rich connections, or had incredibly loyal, highly skilled friends, like Jobs had Wozniak.
  
  Oprah Winfrey attended Tennessee State University and has a degree in communications

There is no such thing as negative numbers. "How do you take 5 apples from 3 when there are only 3 apples?" This was in elementary school in Wisconsin. The temperature regularly goes below zero. Pointing this out got me time in the corner. I'm still kinda salty about that.
- Maths unfortunately is hard to teach all at once, 1 year there's no negative numbers next year there is. Then they make it harder by adding letters. Get high enough, and you start doing stuff with infinite numbers, which I was also told can't be done.
  
  As far as I'm concerned there are always letters. We just hide them or when they are young use a question mark.
  2 + 5 = ?
  Is super basic algebra if you just change the question mark to an X.
  
  Science is the same way, but you can teach in a way that alludes to more complex subjects without denying those subjects. I actually called out my HS physics teacher when he kept having to correct grade school science lessons. He couldn't disagree with me that it's probably better not to teach incorrect lessons just because the correct lessons were more complex.
- He was so scared of negative numbers he would stop at nothing to avoid them.
- When you say "in the corner", I'm guessing this was one of those really, really old small schools you'd see in Little House on the Prairie.

I remember a bunch of things in science class in middle school, because I was really into science and it bothered me that they oversimplified everything to the point of being straight up false. Like a definition of "animals" being "something with eyes and a mouth". I mentioned several examples of animals without eyes, like corals, but the teacher just exasperatedly said that they did have small mouths. Ok, but your definition said eyes and a mouth, not or.
I also remember a question in a test about astronomy being "what is the biggest object". I thought about it for a moment and then wrote "the universe"; which I'll maintain to this day, was right. But it was marked wrong. The expected answer was the sun. I talked about it to the teacher, because it wasn't like I pulled the existence of objects bigger than the sun from my personal knowledge only, we'd explicitly talked about bigger stars and galaxies. But the teacher said "It was implied 'biggest object in the solar system' ". Implied how? It definitely wasn't written. I still want my point back.
- Who was your teacher? Aristotle?
  
  The Greeks thought the sun was the same size as the Peloponnese peninsula.
- The sun? The sun!? I guess your teacher didn't know about Aldebaran, the size of galaxies... Supermassive black holes... Galactic filaments... And yes, the universe itself.
  
  Nah, she'd mentioned some of these things. The logic was just that since the other questions in that test had been about objects in the solar system, I should've known it was implied "biggest in the solar system" although it wasn't written.

I got a question right on an electronics quiz about finding the resistance in a curcuit (I have verified I was right).
My science teacher who didn't know how to do it in the first place and was just looking at the (incorrect) answer schedule said I was wrong. I just said "I don't think so but ok" even though I knew I was right as I did not want to argue. As she was walking away I explained to my friend why I was right, my teacher overheard me and came storming to the table saying:
"WHEN I SAY IM RIGHT I AM RIGHT! AND WHEN I SAY YOUR WRONG YOU ARE WRONG!"
At the top of her lungs.
I was just a kid so it put me off science for a bit tbh.
- I was just a kid so it put me off science for a bit tbh.
  And isn't that a fucking shame? I mean, science can be such an interesting thing that can improve and enrich your life and can even become a career, but or just takes one bad teacher to let all that go to waste.
  I had a guy teach biology and chemistry, and he was... well just not a good teacher (but a very decent human outside of class, to be fair). Made me really hate his classes and subjects. It took quite a long time for me to get more interested again.
  On the other hand, I had a teacher in computer science teach is the basics of relational databases and object oriented programming in Borland Delphi (yes!), and now that I'm almost 40, I STILL feed on that knowledge, have become a sysadmin, have helped a dozen of co-eds in uni pass their programming test by tutoring them... He's just a huge part of what I've become as a person. One teacher really can make a difference, one direction or the other. Thank you Mr. Barchmann, wherever you are.
  
  I also have to thank some of my later science teachers for re-sparking my fascination in the scientific world, three of them were excellent teachers and made the class so entertaining you couldn't not be fascinated.
- Oh boy, this reminds me of one test in college where there was a question that had a logical circuit diagram, I don't remember what it asked exactly but my answer was marked wrong, I went to the teacher the next day and told him I thought that was the right answer and he said "well, it's not, I'll demonstrate" and he wrote the question on the board called attention for everyone saying he would show the right answer to the test question, and started answering it. I saw him start to answer and immediately he made a mistake, I raised my hand to point that out and he told me to let him finish. He got to the end of the thing, showed a different result, and said "see, this was the correct result" to which I said "You missed the NOT at the beginning of the circuit", he looks at it, rewrites some stuff, and gets to my answer to which I said "and that's what you marked as the wrong result on my test". He still tried to claim that was wrong because he got the question from book X, and a colleague (who I suspect had also given the right answer) produced the book, looked up the answer and said loudly "the second answer is the one on the book". Defeated he had to give me (and whoever else had the right answer) at the point for that question. Completely unrelated story, that guy was also the coordinator of the course I was coursing and after months of waiting for recognition of some classes that I had taken at a different college coincidentally the very next week they got denied which meant I would have to take 14 extra classes (so at least a year and a half extra) to graduate, and that some of the classes I was taking that semester would have to be dropped and retaken after coursing the prerequisites (which I was trying to get recognized), one such class was the one where I got the question right... What a coincidence, right?
  I should thank that guy, because of him I dropped out of college, moved to another city, and started at another college where I met my wife.
- She sounds like she had a short circuit.

I used the word poesy in a written assignment, as in the art of poetry. The teacher didn't recognize it as a real word and deducted points from my grade. She had a policy that we could correct and resubmit for half points, so I did that but didn't change the word, I just helpfully gave her the definition in a footnote.
Shocked, naive, innocent little me didn't not know what to think when she took that as an insult. I was only trying to help her, didn't she get that?!?
This was one of a handful of events when my sister started implying I might have a neurospicy brain. IDK, maybe, but I was just being accurate so I didn't really see that as anything I needes to address. I thought the overly-sensitive and factually incorrect teacher was the one who needed to self-reflect.
- Had the same with an english teacher (in germany), that probably had a smaller vocabulary than me. Whenever I used words she didn't know I had to argue with her and pull out a dictionary
- My English teacher (in Germany) did not know the word "evil". She concluded I meant to say "devil", but then the whole sentence didn't make sense anymore, so she deducted even more points for that.
- neurospicy brain
  Hey I have one of these. Maybe not in the typical way, but still. So don't worry.
  For reasons like you describe where neurotypicals aren't always exactly known for being critical, sometimes I think of how accurate it might be under some definitions to say neurotypicals are the faultily-minded ones.

I had a Mormon science teacher who told us that there was a giant planet in the middle of the universe that astronomers could see and that was where god lived I never believed anything he said after that
- Were they Mormon? Scientologist?

It doesn't matter if I'm a good person, if I don't believe in god, I'm going to hellll.
- In my tradition at least, character matters a lot more than adherence, which isn't even a strict requirement.

That Wikipedia was unreliable
- Wikipedia is not a source. It's fine to take information from Wikipedia. But if you are doing actual research. You need to cross reference that with the source cited to make sure it's accurate.
  Most Wikipedia pages have their sources listed so you can easily look them up and verify their validity.
  If there are no sources cited. You should be cautious.
- I mean when writing an essay you should really be sourcing from the original source not Wikipedia, good thing Wikipedia lists the original source the info came from so you can just use that. (Unlike some websites the teacher said were better then Wikipedia which were just full of unchecked bullshit)
  But for everything else Wikipedia is great
  
  They should have always been teaching to use Wikipedia as a beginning of research. Go to wiki, follow the cited sources and follow those cited searches if anything was referenced.
  There was always a double standard though compared to something like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Pre-internet, for practicality, you couldn't really check the cited sources on Britannica, so you took it as word of god. They're a major publication! Huge money and people who wear suits and monocles wrote it! Posh British sounding name! How could they be wrong?
  Except that when researchers compared Britannica to Wikipedia for inaccuracies, they found Britannica to contain a much higher rate. So why did Britannica keep being held in higher regard? Pure appeal to authority.
  
  Some wikipedia articles have been edited by science/history deniers/fascists/liars and it is difficult to determine if whats written at any point is true or edited. Thats where the statement comes from.
- It is unreliable to an extent. If you have expertise in anything at all go look at the wiki for it and you likely will take issues with parts of it or more. That being said it’s good enough for a generalized overlook of something so I wouldnt 100% trust the minutae in a wiki but the general concepts are typically ok
  
  The cool thing about Wikipedia is that if you have expertise in a topic and find something incorrect on it, you can edit the page to be more accurate. The trickiest part is finding and adding relevant sources. There’s a learning curve to it, but at least anyone who’s used to writing research papers should have experience with that already.

‘Skateboarding is unethical, immoral, and should be illegal…’
I wrote my next essay in highlighter after that, to make her suffer. She was the worst.
- I wrote my next essay in highlighter
  When I went to school that would have been an automatic fail. We had clear rules about what we can and cannot write with (fountain pen was the standard, but some teachers were fine with ballpoint pens too).

When I was 11, an entire class of students and the biology professor were adamant that snakes do not have skeletons. I knew for a fact this was false because I had seen one at the museum.
- Did they think snakes were like giant fucking worms or something?
  Sidenote, I had only ever seen a snake head and out of curiousity just searched up a snake skeleton just now and i am pretty scarred.

In 8th grade my family had to leave my home state of wisconsin to be in Mt.Ida, Arkansas for 9 months or so. During that time I had to attend the local public school and I remember the science teacher saying "matter cannot be created nor destroyed." I've always loved science and was a huge nerd during that awkward time in my life and I knew well it was ENERGY and figured she just said it by accident. Easy mistake. I said that it was energy, not matter, that can't be created nor destroyed and she argued with me and was dead serious when she insisted it was indeed matter.
I said something along the lines of hydrogen turning to helium inside the sun, and wouldn't ya know it, she didn't believe the universe was old enough for that to be true and only god can create matter... Yup, she was a 7-day creationist who wholely belived the universe was 5000 years old teaching science in a public school in bumfuck Arkansas. I gave up and a lot of things she said before finally started making sense but in all the wrong ways.
This bumb bitch was a fundamentalist Christian. The rest of the brief time I was there, and for the first time in my life, I didn't give two shits about a class that was usually one of my favorites.
- We're so doomed.
  
  Yeah. The sad part is that this was back in 1997. Their public education system is in far worse shape than it was back then. Wisconsin had an excellent and well funded public education system so I went from getting a really good education to about the worst possible you can find in the US. So glad I wasn't there long. Some of those kids are still there as adults, still holding out for a successful rap career and sending their little shit apples to the same school, repeating the cycle.
- I'm guessing she didn't believe in black holes either, since they destroy matter.
  
  Why do you think black holes destroy matter? There's an (unproven) argument that they destroy information, but I've never heard an argument that they destroy matter.

That the civil war was fought over states rights.
- State's rights to slavery.
  
  No, its not technically correct! I know the whole "state's rights to what" meme is fun, but seriously, the south was trying to compel the Federal government to infringe on the rights of other states with regards to fugitive slaves. If they were the true bastions of states' rights that lost causers argue they were, then they wouldn't have had a problem with that.
- States rights as in civilian rights? Maybe my teachers just glossed over the history, but I thought it was fought because states with large slave owning populations were afraid of subtracting slavery from their economic equation.
  
  So that’s the thing, it’s a lie of omission. The full line is ‘The civil war was fought over the states rights… to own slaves”. We were taught that north were not freeing slaves out of a moral standpoint, but to ensure monetary dominion over the south. Anyway, it’s carefully curated propaganda and white washing of history that is apparently still happening to this day.

Karl Marx was russian(by a history teacher)
Adults with autism dont exist, but kids with autism exist; the moon is an artificial satellite made by aliens; scientists are saying that 2+2=5 (by a logic teacher)
There is a conspiracy(organized by the jewish world leader) in romanian schools to trick children into starting HRT by saying to take some pills so they wont look pale right before going to act in front of an audience so they would become infertile and stop overpopulation(by a biology teacher)
- Where did they think the autism went when kids grew up?
  
  They probably insisted that kids with autism exist because i have autism and they knew that
- What do they think happens to autistic kids when they grow up? Just snap out of existence?
  
  Yeah, that's almost what the research articles I read suggested a few years back. Like, it's allegedly difficult to diagnose an adult who has modified their behavior over the years. So most people would need to have at least some indication of having had ADHD when they were younger to confirm their diagnosis as adults.
  That's not to say that adults with ADHD don't exist, but the rate does significantly decrease to about half.
  (Please let me know if I'm wrong, it's been a while since my days of genotyping.)

"Respect your elders, because they are always right"

I had a teacher confidently tell the class that Mt. Everest didn’t border China (well Tibet really, but that’s a battle for another day). I will say she was able to concede she was mistaken. I had another teacher hit on me when I was in high school while I was alone with her in the copy room. I had always heard some salacious rumors about her, but I always assumed they were just idle gossip until that day. That was a different kind of wrong. And no, I didn’t take her up on the advance.
I’m assuming English isn’t your first language, so just as an FYI, wrongest isn’t a word. “Most false” is probably the best fit in this instance. Just one of those weird quirks of this bastard language.
- You're right, it's my second language. My first/native language actually doesn't have official spelling rules, so yeah, it's a handful.
  
  Hey, OP, they're wrong. Not the wrongest they could have been, but it is indeed a word. A quick check with any online dictionary will confirm that.
  It might be considered poor style to use it in educated language, where "most wrong", "most incorrect" or "most false" might be better choices, which is probably the context they were thinking of, but it's definitely a word and people do use it.
  
  so, French? :D

By the same civics teacher: All unions but teacher unions are obsolete. Welfare queens are having more kids just to collect more. Realestate only goes up. He also said that the Waltons(of Walmart) were second to fifth riches people in the world. I did fact check him with a Forbes printout on that one. I think there's more neo-con bs that I'm forgetting at the moment.
Computer teacher: Your muscles contain memory cells and that's now typists can type so fast. This was a very creative interpretation of "Muscle Memory".
Media teacher: AM radio travels in beams and can go farther then FM radio that travels in waves.
School therapist: If you get into that harder class, you may fail and feel sad. Guess what? Now having succeed at someone else's expectation, I feel sad all the time. That may have been the moment were I could have fixed the direction my life was taking if I pushed back. Chances are they would have come up with other reasons to deny me though.
- what is it with history teachers always being so conservative?

We'd all end up drugged with needles up our arms laying in front of the unemployment centers of we don't get better at chemistry. Like, all of us.
Joke's on him, I'm in IT now, so I'm of WAY worse.

She very matter-of-factly stated that steam wasn’t as hot as boiling water. This was a chemistry teacher.
Given, it was elementary school, so the “chemistry” was mostly super basic stuff like mixing dish soap and yeast with hydrogen peroxide. But still, I’m salty about that one because I had been burned pretty badly by active steam before she said that. I still have the scar and everything.
- She should have worded and explained her reasoning there.
  Depending on the context, and parameters, she wasnt wrong. because as water boils, and turns into gas, it rapidly cools down again as it looses its heat energy to the (relatively) cold air until a certain point in which it cools to a certain point and turns into rain ( or sticks to the surface it hit that cooled it down ).
  That means that the gas above the boiling water is colder than the boiling water itself.
  ... Its just only a few degrees off and can still burn you very god damn badly.
  
  There's also the part where steam--under pressure--can be much hotter than boiling water.
  
  That means that the gas above the boiling water is colder than the boiling water itself.
  But if it's colder then it's not steam. It's air mixed with water vapor. Steam is by definition hotter than boiling water.
- You'd think the expectation would be that gases are hotter than liquids.

I spent first 8 years in a Christian school, took me to adulthood to learn that evolution theory is not just a "unproven hypothesis"
- it's funny how much the scientifically illiterate rag on something because it's 'merely' a theory. they decline to acknowledge it's the ONLY working theory that explains the fossil record, genetics, heredity etc., and has been proven to accurately predict things over and over again.
  I challenge these folks to show me something that works better than evolution to explain all those things, and then it's a matter of faith or the only reason evolution makes sense is because of the woke agenda educational industrial complex.
  fucking chuds.
- I've seen it go both ways. My best friend and her best friend went to a Catholic school, and they hinted that they did learn about evolution but with no added knowledge external to the few Bible verses that were usable to support evolution because they remotely seemed to point to it (and even then it wasn't referred to as evolution, just the mutation lineage or something).
  
  That's strange, because the Catholic Church officially endorses evolution.

"Life sciences" teacher in middle school at a Christian school told us evolution was impossible because genetic mutations only cause a loss of information. Sneaky assholes
- “Irreducible Complexity” is a (the?) cornerstone of the pseudo scientific creationist rebuttal of evolution. Or at least it was when I was young and impressionable enough to believe it.
- I remember back in my Twitter days some creationist was arguing along those lines and suddenly asks, "but how does evolution create new genes??"
  I briefly explained gene duplication and mutational drift and I think their entire worldview shattered when they stopped responding. Because honestly, understanding that is key. Lol
  
  I love this. Thank you for fighting back by educating <3

I don't remember the specifics because it was damn near 40 years ago, but I had a teacher tell the class that everyone has a sort of 6th-sense sight through an invisible 3rd eye in the middle of your forehead. And her example was that blind people will pick out clothes by colors or tell someone they were wearing an ugly tie. Which I've never seen, at least not outside of some sort of Hallmark Romance Drama quality religious schlock.
I never had any problem correcting a teacher if they made some calculation error or misquoted something out of the book (I wasn't an asshole who corrected every single thing, just the ones that might be material to everyone else's understanding of the lesson).
But when confronted with a teacher spewing utter bullshit, I was at a total loss for a response. I can't imagine anyone else believed it, either, but what a fucking loon. My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.
I don't even know if that was the worst/only one, but that's the one that has always stood out for me.
I guess you could add that American Exceptionalism was taught as a legitimate point of view rather than nationalist bullshit.
- Your teacher was full of shit, but we do have more than 5 senses. You know the taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight. There are two more everyone has:
  Vestibular - sense of balance and movement in space (like falling).
  Proprioception - you can sense where your arms and legs are relative to your body without looking or touch.
  My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.
  There's blind and there blind. Besides actual damage to the eye itself, most definitions of blind are loss of connection of the optic nerve to the visual cortex (the part of your brain which takes nerve pulses and translates them into vision). However recent science has found that even if there is a break/damage to the visual cortex, there are certain visual things that blind person can "see". The optic nerve makes a couple of stops along the way from the eye to the visual cortex, specifically the Amygdala in the brain. Many that are "visual cortex" blind can still know where someone's face is and even determine what mood they are in from their facial expression. They can also sometimes dodge object thrown at them. Both of these are Amygdala actions. Its not like they actually SEE the face or SEE the object being thrown, but they "know" if someone is upset or happy without that person even saying anything if their facial expression tells the story. Here's the science if you're interested in more.
  Since reading these studies I've always been curious to talk to a blind person to have them describe their experience with this.
  
  Whoa, til
  
  Proprioception is a weird one. If you lay in bed very, very still (or floating in an isolation tank), you very quickly lose the sense of where your limbs are in relation to the rest of you. It's almost like a form of self-hypnosis; it's a very strange sensation. My perception is that it only functions well when you are moving.
- How did she think colorblindness worked?
- I wonder if she had heard of a (controversial) phenomenon called blindsight in which some very specific conditions of blindness some people are said to not consciously see but still have some sort of subconscious "sight".
  As in the eyes physically work and these people have damage to a very specific part of the brain, allegedly.
  Anyway she was obviously wrong but that just reminded me so I linked that.
- This is called thinking

That "electricity" was a service
Without context, it is a good.
It's like natural gas. It is a good.
It's like saying "milk" is a service because the milk man brings it to your house
She wouldn't give me my damn point back on the quiz
- Never heard a science teacher explain a scientific process in business terms before.
  
  Who said it was a science teacher?
  
  Civics and Econ teacher.
  You're supposed to assume they mean "Electrical Service" but they can't say service or they give you the answer.
- This is just semantics. Companies are often called services because they operate and maintain the network of service to your house, whether it's electric fields moving around, gas particles, laundry pick up and delivery, trash and recycling, milk, newspaper delivery, Internet service, cable subscription, whatever else. Perfectly reasonable to call home electricity a service operated by your utility.
  
  "Home electricity" sure a service. Little vague but could be a service.
  If I have solar panels on my house and store electricity in a battery. I am producing and storing a good. It would be home electricity.
- The electrons are already in the wire, the service is making them move.

This one is a little different. On the first week of some college introductory economics class, the teacher was basically just reading from the textbook we all had, some historical figure who was a member of the "Council Of Seven" or something like that, when a student raised her hand - "Ma'am, what was the Council Of Seven?" - the teacher paused, and said - "Can you bring it tomorrow, as assignment?" - and actually giggled. This was in the 90s, pre-internet, looking up something like that was not a trivial task.
The teacher might have thought she was being cute and/or deflected her own shortcomings, but the actual effect was that we immediately lost all respect and trust for her, no one ever raised a hand again in her class, we all immediately went into rote robot mode for the rest of the semester, disengaged on a gut level.
- What did the council of seven end up being?
  
  When our classmate stood at the front and read it from a piece of paper the following day, we were all already tuned out of that class for the rest of the semester, I wasn't paying attention. In fact, I might be remembering the name wrong, I can't be certain.
  
  My guess is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G7
  
  Homelander, the deep, the a-train, black noir, translucent, queen maeve, and starlight.

That Columbus was a good person.
- Columbus was exiled from the Spanish Court upon pain of death for repeatedly enslaving Christians which is forbidden under canonical laws. We knew from sources in his own time period that he was a bad guy.
- Not so fun fact, he is said to be the first European to have syphilis as it was originally a Caribbean condition, and he was said to have caused it to spread in Europe, which also means he is the reason everyone started wearing powdered wigs as it went from a way to hide syphilis baldness to a fashion statement. So now you know what to expect (a version of George Washington who looks like Brad Pitt perhaps) if you ever go back in time and burn the Santa Maria.
  
  One more reason to hate columbus!
- My school taught me that most people in Columbus' time thought that the Earth was flat and that Columbus would fall off the face of the earth during his voyage.
  
  I'm too lazy to double check now, but afaik the problem with his voyage was the exact opposite. People knew that the earth was round and its approximate radius, so they knew that going all the way around the other side to India would be much too long of a voyage. What they didn't know was that there was a whole other continent in the way.
  
  Augh I hate that myth so much
  
  I was in college when I learned Columbus thought it was pear shaped, as opposed to the globe idea that was most popular (and true). He though the northern hemisphere was smaller than the southern which is why he expected to sail to India in a relatively short distance.
- I was told General Lee was an honorable person.

- Don't think you don't amount to anything. You come off as a nice person, the best kind of person. I think of it like this; if you were a loser (and you're not), those two are cheaters. One's biggest fear should be becoming "professionals" like them.

When talking about movements of the Earth in geography, we covered the earths rotation, the orbit around the sun, the usual stuff. I mentioned precession as an additional movement - I had read about it in a book just recently. The teacher completely ruled that out and called me stupid for that. Jokes on him.

RAM is memory inside the computer, ROM is memory on the disk (5.25" floppy)
- That moment when I only know that's wrong because I've played Hyperdimension Neptunia.
- Another funny thing nowadays is that most ROM is EEPROM meaning it's not read-only.

I failed a test because I said there were only 8 planets and the "correct" answer was 9. The teacher didn't know Pluto had been demoted. Lol
- Oh I had a similar experience in elementary school. Our teacher knew and told us that Pluto wasn't a planet anymore but because the textbook was out of date, she told us that if it came up on our tests, consider Pluto a planet anyway.
  
  Oh public school. Always a hoot. Haha
- Sounds like they weren't updating their knowledge. We discover a new major solar system body on an average of every ten years now (the last time it was either Ceres or Sedna).
  I wonder how the teacher will react to seeing the upcoming Planet 9 (or to them, Planet X) discovery (rumored to be a minor black hole, which honestly sounds terrifying).
  
  Sedna I'd assume, Ceres has been known about for about 400 years, and is the real planet demotion superstar.
  Our solar system had 13 planets back in the 1700s.
  And yes, I am sore about this with all the Pluto-stans ignoring Ceres (and Makemake, and Eris, and Hamuhea, and Palas, and many more!).
  P.S. Also, what is your first language, as I'm intrigued by no fixed spelling rules.

- Follow the milky brick road!
- Or even that there is a god at all

Drafting on computers won't be long term.

The Russians/Soviets have guard towers on every block who monitor which rooms citizens are in at any given moment. Absolutely no true freedom of movement, unlike those of us in the free world. At the time, I figured people could trick the guards by just not turning on lights in the room when they moved about. As the years went on, two questions came to mind: isn't that prohibitively expensive? and why???
- Even North Korea never went that far.
- They just had one guard in every room. It saved a lot on guard towers.
- Did they think authoritarian governments do surveillance just for shits and giggles? Why would Stalin care about what room people are in in their homes??
- The srcret police would break into peoples homes during the day and just move things around to keep people paranoid. People in those countries do genually live in fear.

My Spanish teacher would teach us Spaniard Spanish and claim it was Mexican Spanish. One day I found out the hard way.
- One day I found out the hard way.
  someone tried to whip out the vostotros lol...
- Ay caramba!

This one is funny, I innocently listened to Motley Crue when I was about 12, Girls Girls Girls in particular. You know that lyric about the menage a trois? There was no Internet in those days, so I just thought I'd ask my French teacher. She covered a smile and told me it meant three people were living in a house together.

Shakespeare's plays were never printed in his lifetime, they were compiled from people who saw the plays live, went home, and wrote down what they remembered.
- I wouldn't think there would've been enough literate people in those times to do that.
  
  Well, consider his audiences as well...

Brazilian here - once had an english teacher call xadrez, the chess game, "checkers" (to be fair to her, "xadrez" could mean either the game or a checkered texture, but the game of checkers is what we call "damas"). She also called bolinhos (muffins) doughnuts (or "dou-go-nu-ty", as she spoke), and rosquinhas (doughnuts) muffins. I called out that she got the two mixed up, she ignored me.
She was a terrible teacher. She even forgot to put the correct text for an exam once, I asked her about the text during the exam and she just said "if you read it, you'll find (the answers)" - it took another kid bringing the same point for her to bother reading the exam she prepared and realizing she fucked up.

“With a mind like yours, you’re going to have no problem getting ahead in life”
- What was the holdup that ended up preventing you from getting ahead?
  
  Cripling anxiety and despair.
  
  Subconscious self-loathing as a result of trying to memory hole something evil I did when very young.
  Also a desperate reliance on others’ praise and approval due to emotional abuse from my mother.
  A warped model of accomplishment resulting from all the praise I got for easily mastering concepts, coupled with vicious gaslighting and moral attacks I suffered whenever I strove for something difficult.
  And many other things which I’m just starting to uncover.
  I kind of feel like a programmer sleuthing out bugs in a product, but while I spend time sleuthing out the cause of my product not working, the trade show is half over.

I shouldn't pursue further education
- A teacher told you that?
  
  Without context, it's hard to know. Higher education isn't the best choice for everyone.
  
  Yes

I had a teacher tell me women couldn't get hemophilia because it's a sex-linked gene. True enough, but it's on the X chromosome, and what do you suppose happens if a woman has that gene on both of them... I lost points on a test because of that.
This was before the internet, so I couldn't easily find answers to prove he was wrong.
- Fun fact, the second X chromosome is just a sitting duck. Once a body develops the first one, unless a Y chromosome is also in order, the body has already completed the parts of the blueprint it needs to live a long and stable life. This is where Turner Syndrome, a form of Down Syndrome or intersexuality where someone has only one X chromosome and no Y chromosome or second X chromosome, comes from, and people with Turner Syndrome can live their whole lives not knowing they have it (the opposite is actually true with the Y chromosome, where if you only have Y chromosomes and no X chromosomes, you die in stillbirth).

Had a science teacher back in middle school that claimed to have a buddy that "designed" a way to make gas engines more efficient by running the gas line over the engine to warm it up before entering the engine. Said that GM bought the "design" with no patent, and hid it away so that it wouldn't get out. Problem is, that's not how BTUs work and GM would obviously know that. Also that's a good way to destroy your engine by misfiring.
- I was told a similar thing but the claim was that the person had invented an engine that ran on water haha.
  
  My mom believes this one (she believes in a lot of crap...). Allegedly there was a dude who made a car run om water, but the evil oil company Shell bought the idea so that it would never come out!
  That is of course ignoring the fact that the supposed guy wouid still have knowledge on how to build one.
  Or... The simple fact that water can't be used as a fuel like that.
  
  I know of an engine that runs on water. It's a shame you have to heat it up a whole lot first for it to become steam.
  
  I knew a kid at boarding school who claimed his dad worked at BMW and was looking into this. Years later Im working at BMW in the cafeteria and I meet the kid’s dad. He did in fact look into hydrolysis for making hydrogen for cars on paper but couldn’t figure out how to not make the car explode in an accident.

“The human eye can only perceive 60 FPS”
This was in a graduate level class studying optics for virtual reality systems.
I shit you not. I believed this for far too long.
- Yes, VR, where famously anything lower than 80 FPS basically causes violent heaving, balance problems and headaches that last for up to a week in some cases.
  
  Oh I’m right there with you. I can’t believe this was actually said in a real class. If I hadn’t heard it, I would think someone was just making up a story.
- I've seen more FPS in a Wallace and Gromit movie.

Isn't a single teacher or statement. But how I was generally treated by the institution.
I am somewhere on the spectrum and/or have some kind of learning disability that makes the formal learning environment very hard for me.
I was tested as a kid back in the 80's, but they said I didn't score bad enough to be diagnosed and that I was just slow essentially.
So the school system stuck me at a desk in the back corner of the classrooms with a divider between me and the the rest of the room and more or less treated me like a leper.
Whatever the official diagnosis, I ended up getting into computers and turns out I am really good at it. So now I make a six figure income doing something I am interested in.
The experience ingrained in me a deep hatred for formalized education, especially when it comes to my son (who is officially diagnosed as autistic). I have a very hard time taking anything my kids teachers say seriously and as anything more than the rantings of a narrow minded fool. Thankfully, my wife being the wonderful person that she is keeps me in check with that. And reminds me not to think my experience at my backwater school was the norm. And I think she has been right this far thankfully.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
- I’m really sorry you went through that and really happy you’ve found success!

If you study hard in school you can do anything.
- Well, you can, you just won't be paid anything for it.
- If this were true, I'd know more languages than I do now.

We had a teacher that said phones could give you cancer due to radiation and the classic 5G causes X conspiracy theories. Certainly wasn't the worst teacher imo though.

My middle school computer teacher once said that unwanted email was called "flame". I had never heard that term before or since used in the context of email.
- My guess is they got confused with the concept of "flame wars" and "flaming" from forums. It doesn't quite match their definition of "unwanted" messages exactly, but it's not entirely far off either.
- Gives a new meaning to "flame wars".

See you next year.
Edit: Oh, you mean actually wrong.

first day of a new school year "what are you doing in this class, didn't we made you fail last year?"
I had bad grades but mathematically good enough to pass just barely. She was the Computer Science teacher and I proved her wrong more than once in front of the class. So yeah, she had a grudge.
- "Made you" fail last year? Quite the wording...
- I had a friend whose computer teacher had such a severe grudge on him that when his brother (who was her favorite student) went to jail, she gave him a passing grade despite him failing, in order to get rid of him out of lamentation.

"You'll enjoy ice skating, it's easy!" - the teacher who took our class to an ice rink... 😂
The moment I'm over the ice I become the human equivalent of a scruffed cat and people started pushing me around like I was a hockey puck and I was smiling pretending I was having fun but inside I was like
- canadian here: i had a ski part in gym class last year and literally everyone in the class was at least decent, and most were zipping around the ice.
  Not directly related, i just thought it was funny that candians are living up to their stereotypes.
- Was it an extracurricular activity, a field trip, or an actual part of class?
  Sounds like my school and the local lido. "You'll get a grasp on what to do in no time" one could expect them to have said. Still waiting for "no time" to come and go.

Not very important but I remember it strangely well.
I was 8 years old. My teacher asked "What is one hundred times one hundred?"
I raised my hand and said "Ten thousand!"
"No, it's one thousand. Ten times ten is one hundred, and one hundred times one hundred is one thousand."
"But... It's ten thousand. Can I show you on a calculator?"
"No! Sit down, it's one thousand. I'm the teacher, I should know."
I later got a calculator and showed her and she didn't apologise.
- If she was the math teacher, that should cost her the role.
- If you remember this the next time we loop around, ask her what 100 times 10 is supposed to be then.

that super size me was a reputible documentary
- Yeah the fact that Supersize Me was unironically watched in health classes Across the Nation and maybe the world, as an informational article against obesity is insane to me
  It was treated as if it's the everyday environment of what happens if you eat it daily, but it was never explained to anyone that the reason for it wasn't the fact he was eating it every meal it was because he just overall had bad habits. People have attempted to reproduce the results and have failed to do so.
  
  yep, he was abusing alcohol throughout and also went from a no meat diet to eating meat 3 times a day, obviously thats gonna shock the stomach and the alcohol abuse just completely skewed every result

That "th" sounds like the letter "f". It doesn't but I'm nearly 40 and still can't pronounce it correctly.
- Instead of touching your upper teeth with your lower lip, use the middle of your tounge to touch the upper teeth. That's all.