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Dude, School was the worst f'ing psyop.
Give me a straight question and answer on the material, and I'll 100% it. No, we can't do that... Here's four answers that are all technically correct, choose the MOST correct one.
Ohh so it's pros and cons of a situation and you need to pick the one with the most upsides or least downsides? No, they're all just mostly ok, but we were REALLY thinking about answer B when we wrote the question.
School is like slavery in many aspects to be honest. Though it‘s really not a physical one, but a mental one.
You can not do much without getting permission from an authority figure first, including relieving basic biological needs such as eating or using the bathroom. You are not allowed to leave the facilities without permission. You are classified into different groups based on your performance on tests, and eventually seperated based on that (usually at high school/university level). You are trained for at least 12 years in this way to obey arbitrary rules and procedures, which are designed to get you ready for the capitalist hellscape that awaits you. Some countries even use this period of time to push another agenda on you, usually one related to religion &\ nationalism. At last, you come out of it (while probably having forgotten many of the things ”taught” to you) and you are immediately put into mandatory military service, or you come to the point of needing a service job just to survive.
Autodidacticism definitely rocks, and homeschooling would be a better idea if one was qualified for it and the child's social needs could be met elsewhere.
Kinda unrelated to your example, but I just wanted to expand on your psyop comment.
That's a solid take. The difference I’ve noticed, though everyone’s experience is different, is with homeschooling. From what I’ve seen, quite a few parents take it on despite not really being suited for it. Some seem to have their own forms of indoctrination, the kind that even public schools won’t entertain, so they choose to keep their kids out entirely.
My son has a handful of friends who are homeschooled. (We kept him home a bit longer during Covid while he did remote learning, and he kept a lot of those friends.) His friends span the full spectrum: a couple are pretty middle-of-the-road, you’d never guess they were homeschooled. One lives under really strict, almost militant control, and another seems to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.
I hate the crap that goes on when the establishment runs the game, but I also hate what happens when nutjobs run their own game. It's like we need some kind of framework to keep everyone on the same page, where kids just learn and excel. We should get nominal discipline, learn self-control, but also not be pigeonholeed with a lot of redtape used to protect schools from legal action. Some kind of common sense brigade :)
Homeschooling works best for the kids when the parents aren't working and are well educated. Most parents don't meet these requirements, the ones that do usually do and the kids to private school because it costs about the same.
They don't pay teachers enough and sometimes it shows.
Similar story of my own: Had a middle school computer teacher who told us to use "File -> Open URL" on Internet Explorer/Netscape (can't remember which) which opened a prompt window with a text field to enter in a URL. And I pointed out that you can just use the address bar and do the same thing and she angrily told me that I had to do it the proper way. While I thought she wasn't looking, I used the address bar anyway. She apparently had been trying to spy if I disobeyed, caught me, and told me that I failed the assignment (I did not even know I was being graded).
Another different computer teacher at my high school I had seemed to more or less admit she had no idea what she was doing (she originally taught a different subject, she seemed legitimately nervous/insecure about possibly losing her job) though she tried by just reading the text book to us verbatim for a few days. Eventually, she gave up and the students just taught each other computer stuff in her class, then when they ran out of things to teach each other they just played Age of Empires all class and the she let us.
Something about this reminds me of macOS's default Finder settings that doesn't let you manually type a path.
This is such a strange and irritating limitation of an other great OS.
Let that be a lesson. Truth comes from authority, not the evidence of your senses.
Similarly I got accused of plagiarism in ninth grade on a 3 page essay, because I used big words.
This was before the days of the internet. I suppose I could have used something like Encarta, but I don’t even remember if you could copy and paste into ClarisWorks from it, and it was about a fictional book we’d read anyway.
My brother got accused by the same teacher 3 years later. He had an even better vocabulary than me and went on to study theoretical physics.
I had so many experiences like that. I was a voracious reader as a kid. I was reading books in English (my second language) about topics such as aeronautics and space exploration. I was reading far, far above the level of any classmates. And that lead persisted all through college.
Every time a new teacher would give us an essay assignment, I’d get called out to stay after class once they graded it. And they’d casually accuse me of plagiarism.
My usual response? Quiz me, right the fuck now, on any paragraph you want from that 20 page paper. And ask me the definition of any word you’re unfamiliar with. That shut them up right quick.
A large vocabulary is its own reward, but not so much when those who’re supposed to teach you are lacking in that department.
My reading journey mirrors yours. When I entered the professional workforce, I was consistently met with vacant stares when I'd use whatever words I thought perfectly fit whatever I was describing. I came to find that using "big" words like that (examples I can recall: superfluous, inimical, vacuous, cogent, avuncular) made people think I was trying to show I was better than them. I had to pare my verbal vocabulary back to the most basic form so I could do my actual job.
Granted, I was in a "white collar" job surrounded by blue collar folks.
I understood three of the five big words. :3
You've got some weird teachers. My teachers were all pretty keen to nurture curiosity. When we'd just learned about combustion and how fire needs oxygen, I asked my teacher after the lesson about the sun and how it could be burning without oxygen, and she just explained nuclear fusion and what the sun actually was, and that the words "burning ball of gas" is a bit of a misnomer because that's not what's happening.
Yeah, my public schools were considered some of the better ones in the country, and Im quite sure any of the teachers would just use that as a launching point, or at least give a cursory explanation and say it'll be covered later. So this a good example of the differences.
Reading these comments is bad for my health (╥﹏╥) What are the reasons for them to act this way? Seems sometimes they're just ignorant, other times definitely power tripping.
This sounds like someone following a preprepared lesson plan without the skills or experience to adapt, and panicking.
I def had some weird experiences like this in school too, though not as extreme. I had a teacher once give me a zero on an exam because I used greater than and less than symbols to describe two lines intersecting. She thought I did them all backwards. Normally I'd be too shy to push back but zero on an exam was pretty extreme so I went to discuss one on one and she basically called me dumb saying I don't know how the symbols worked (this was like 9th grade, I def did and was pretty alarmed she didn't). Finally she said fine, she'll go ask a math teacher to come explain to me in front of the class if I'm so smart. She left, was gone for like ten minutes, and came back super upset. Slams the paper on my desk in front of everyone and says something like 'fine I guess you want an A now?'. Was traumatizing. But was actually a huge teaching moment for me in that I stopped seeing teachers as things/concepts, and started seeing them as people. Same as me/my classmates/some random on the street. No one has this shit figured out. I also realized I never wanted the experience she just had, and learned to always hedge my opinions. It looks like, I think, it seems to me, etc. Has saved me from looking stupid but also encouraged those that I teach to question my dumb shit. But yeah. Teachers are just people, have you met people?
Side note my math teacher was extra nice to me that afternoon - I also learned that the teachers don't necessarily like each other either. Apparently I had helped score points for the 'not batshit insane' crew
Why are you going to be learning negative numbers while you are 8? Edit: Reading the comments I see that your schools are pretty shit compared to my public school was way better (even when the building was on the verge of collapsing for like the whole time I was there)
I switched from a French immersion to an English school in grade 3, so pretty much coasted French class until one day we were doing some exercise where we would say our names. Friends name is Green and he read it out as Verde. The teacher was ecstatic, praising him for a job well done. Of course I knew this was incorrect that you don't translate proper names and kept trying to correct them. I argued so vehemently that I got suspended for the day. Still hate French to this day.
It's a weird coincidence how ofter this happens with kids and French teachers. I know at least 3 other people who have been through similar stuff and it happened to me too and we've all been to different schools
Verde is Spanish
Haha wow, learning Spanish now so it must be taking over
Verte (feminine) or vert (masculine) in French, so pretty close. I'm assuming he chose "vert."