Greentext

Had a similar experience around age 10. Learned that cucumbers generally have a higher water percentage than seawater, 97% to 96.5%. Tell that to a friend of the same age, he says that can't be true because all the oceans have more water than all the cucumbers in the world, we begin debating and then start fighting about it and a teacher comes by to stop us and asks what's going on. I explain and the teacher immediately looks at me like I've lost my mind, pulls my friend to the side and asks him to leave, takes me to a room and sits down to try to explain how I'm wrong and that I can't start fights over things that anyone can prove is untrue. A week after I'm sent to a kind of mental health meeting, she immediately understands and looks it up, sees that I'm right, tells me to keep away from talking about "stuff like that" with friends and others my age and also teachers and parents of other kids because it doesn't matter if I'm right or not, just that I have to think about how others perceive me...

I'm not still mad about it, but can't deny that it feels wrong and weird.

This or something similar has happened to everyone I know 🇨🇦

Did I write this fucking greentext and then forgot or something, because this exact same thing happened to me, except they took my yugioh cards, not pokemon csrds

Had a similar experience in what I think must have been my second year of primary school.

I was asked to go through a math problem that was written out, something like "4 + 7 = ?".

I said "Four plus seven equals eleven".

The teacher said that was wrong and said "Four add seven is eleven".

I'm like, what is the difference? She says, we aren't onto "plus" and "equals" yet

Six year old me spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how their was some difference between plus and add. She just could have said "they are the same, but please use these words to describe them in our lessons".

The autistic experience summarized

math fraud. top kek.

7 when the story happened, tells it 15 years later in 2020, so I'm supposed to believe this guy is 7 - 15 + 2025 - 2020 = -3 today. Something doesn't check out about this story.

Well this didn't happen.

That's just bad teaching. If you're not allowed to use negatives then the teacher shouldn't be asking questions where negatives are the answer. 20-25 is NOT equal to zero whether you've learnt negatives or not.

And now, I feel rage too. Be very afraid, unnamed teacher!

AI is coming for your job!

The bajillion stories in the comments about horrible experiences with math just reinforce the fact that I've made the right career choice.

I became an elementary teacher as a second career specifically because so many elementary teachers are absolutely terrible at teaching math. (Mostly because they don't actually understand the math that they're teaching. In my university cohort, almost 50% of my classmates failed the math entrance exam the first time. There was nothing more complex than 5th grade math on that test.)

Students should be allowed to use the strategies that work for them, and they should definitely never be punished for knowing math from higher grade levels.

If a student in my class knows something more advanced, I will challenge them to use grade-level-appropriate strategies to prove that their answers are correct. And if they demonstrate that they can do both, I'll give them more advanced work to help them grow.

So every four weeks or so, maths teacher would give us a test at upper primary level. This was at pre-computer times. One of the questions was always "how long is this line" with a pen-drawn line underneath. Except, the pen he used always left a blot at the end of the line and sometimes there was a little flick from where he lifted his pen up.

Simple I thought, the line is 10.2cm - 10-3cm! Easy! But, it was always marked wrong. EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. Correct answer: 10cm. It wasn't like to be rounded to the nearest cm or anything, just "how long is this line". The ink blot counted. It counted!

I'm still bitter.

Oof, i can feel anon. Actually true probably, similar stuff happened to me. Also getting this writte in as bad behaviour as well. I started so many arguments with teachers because they were bullshitting. Maths is one thing, i was really into it as a child(still am) but i understand why a teacher has to teach things in order. Of course this could be solved with more resources, and more importantly, distrobuting resources better by having a bit more personalized education. But what i was on about is that its very common(in eastern europe at least) for teachers to spread actual complete fucking bullshit. The amount of times they took disciplinary action against me because i corrected their batshit insane claims is just sad. This mainly happened until 5th and 6th grade where i got to the conclusion that just discussing what we covered during the class, after the class, was a good way of clearing up the mess. Of course i knew way too much for a 10 year old(had an autistic sister who loved to infodump me, we still engage in it time to time ^_^) but the point is that if a 10 year old is constantly correcting his teachers theres a problem in the system. I hoped that more western systems would be better but actually i dont see (sweden in my case) being much better for children even with everyone hyping it up. Well sorry for the rant, idk what could actually solve these problems exactly as im not an expert but i really hope we adress it one day...