This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
I'm pretty sure a currently 4yo nephew of mine will suffer some sort of bullshit like that in the coming years. Little bud is already able to read big numbers like 368 (also in english no less!) and full words despite the preschool not teaching either.
One day I'm going to frame a coloured drawing I still have from year one. The following event is also still ingrained in my mind: We had to colour in a picture with several animals, one of which was a small spotted reptile in a puddle of water. Clearly a salamander.
The teacher crossed it out in red pen and screamed that I am old enough to know lizards are green and there is no such thing as a black and yellow animal on this earth.
I know this is about reptiles and amphibians, but uh...bees, wasps, and hornets would like to meet this teacher and have a...pointed...conversation with them before the spotted salamander walks all over the afflicted areas.
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.
It's just a greentext. It's fake.
Also gay.
Mostly it's a fetishization of being the minderstood smart kid with scenarios that aren't true but feel true.
Pretty fake. Pretty gay.
I don't really like the slur I've been using here, but authenticity requires it. Oi moi.
I literally had a teacher once "correct" me for saying the area of a circle is πr² instead of πrr. I was told "you're not wrong but that's for future classes". On another class, I had a teacher correct a short story by removing repeated words, whereas I used repetition for emphasis, but used a comma instead of ellipsis. Think "I saw it, saw the thing" instead of "I saw it... saw the thing". Both was in early elementary, no higher than 3rd grade.
So, believe it or not, things happen to other people even if they didn't happen to you.
The worst thing about calling this fake is that it's not even unbelievable, it's a perfectly possible and mundane thing that most likely happened to millions of children as they grew up, yet everything in the internet is fake, right? No one just happens to record people for no reason, no one's smart enough to make funny jokes in the spur of the moment and get a reaction from strangers.
EDIT: Added context.
I got this in school, it happens. Or happened in the 90s.
it happens with bad teachers, and "good" parents will take the students side when the teacher's being an idiot.
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".
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.
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
If I didn't learn to shut the fuck up and keep my head down, it would have happened to me, too.
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.
Seeing several of the most brain-dead people I knew in high school going into teaching really made me lose a little respect for teachers. Don't get me wrong, I've had some great teachers, but this really explains all the shitty ones.
There's good out there too. I was good at maths in school and was encouraged to do more advanced stuff
We had computer classes where we had to learn about spreadsheets.
To do a number plus ten percent we had to put in A1+A1*10/100
I did A1*1.1 like a normal person.
She then went round to make sure everyone had put it in correctly. Got annoyed at me and changed A1 to something else to expose my folly.
Was visibly annoyed when it showed the right answer.
Average autism experience tbh
That, and teachers really fucking hate being called out on something for some reason.
All my teachers were fine with it honestly :3 at least after primary school.. if you corrected them they might've given you extra credit
But the general notion of saying something correct and people saying that that's wrong, and not knowing why still stands
I asked my science teacher why and how the periodic table was setup like it was, I got "that's how it's setup"
But why, there as to be a reason
That's just the way they made it
Yeah because they have to have gone by something what is that something
That's just the way they did, stop asking questions (please don't fucking learn in here)
Godamn that pissed me off.
Teachers and parents. So many tend to double down when you point out their mistakes.
Really? Seems like.a very shit teacher and school. Dont think a 7 yr old getting upset by that is unusual. Id be furious of that had happened to my kid.
Its kind of a perfect example of how mediocre has become acceptable and even celebrated. And the attidues of don't question, or don't challenge. Scale that up and you start understanding how the world is as it is, particularly in the US.
I can believe this. Not fake, not gay. The math teaching of the past was so dumb. Even now, I have 2 kids who never got a bad math teacher and still love math; two who did (one teacher who actually thought women ought not get higher education) and those two do not
And a good math teacher is a treasure beyond words. Mr. Galing, if I could have had you teach my kids through high school I would have taken them anywhere.
There’s not much worse as a kid in a learning environment, or even with your parent(s), to be shut down painfully for being right about something that they don’t know or don’t think you know. Really crushes the satisfaction of nailing a win and turns it into bitterness and starts the lifelong process of keeping your mouth shut when you’re right and letting others win when wrong.
On the other hand, its a crash course in reality of just because you're right it doesn't mean anyone gives a shit
This shit happened to me, but in kindergarten. I grew up in a bilingual house. I spoke English and Spanish equally. I went to the school with my mom to get assessed. She said I could read and was bilingual. The teacher didn't believe it and made me read from one of their books.
To add insult to injury, when they had Spanish class, the fucking teacher taught us that "purple" was "porpuda" and "lizard" wad "lizardo." Shit like that... My mom put me in another school.
I'm 48 and still laugh about lizardo. How absolutely stupid.
When I was in kindergarten, my mom got a call day 1 because I didn't know how to count to 10 supposedly. Even though I did it multiple times. I just did it in Japanese cause they never requested I do it in English. Tbf, I'm white and not bilingual.
Americanized versioned, but with a match teacher it went something like this:
Teacher: Whoever can solve this will get an A.
me: I have a solution.
Teacher: come out and explain it.
Me: I do just that.
Teacher: that is correct, but you didn't use the method we just learned, no A, sit down.
The worst part is that he was grounded by the parents. When I was younger a teacher told me I was wrong for saying that Portrush was in County Antrim, not Londonderry like she told the class. My mum brought it up at the parent teacher conference.
Same teacher also marked me wrong when asked to list loughs in Northern Ireland and Iisted Lough Beg. I was right, but it wasn't on the list that SHE gave us.
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...
Reminds me of a time where I shortened the code for pointers in c++ at age 15, so quite old, and my teacher said it wouldn't work (we didn't have computers in that class, next class we would type the code and execute it in computer lab). Anyway I said it'd work, he said it would never work, I said well we can test it next class and teacher said we can't waste time in computer lab like that, and I said I will ask principal for extratime in computer lab after school to prove that my code works. I got sent to principals office anyway for rude and unruley behavior and not only did I get scolded for trying to embarrass my teacher, I wasn't granted extra time in the lab either. Next time in lab I managed to write the shorter code and get same results and I called teacher to show my code works, he just unplugged the cable and sent me to principals office again.
Luckily this time they called my parents and my mom unleashed hell on them threatening with talking to press and media and name and shame the teacher and principal for being stupider than a student is when they stopped harassing me.
And I quit paying attention in that class, I got bad marks for low class participation but hey I had already stopped giving fucks at that point.
I still remember my teacher bitching me out in front of the class when we were learning negative numbers because when he asked me how I figured out the correct answer I said that the positive numbers and negatives cancelled each other out. Like -4 and positive 5, the negative 4 cancels out 4 on the positive side and you are left with 1. Maybe that wasn't the correct verbiage but it gave me the correct answer every time. He was a dick about correcting me though.
You understood numbers intuitively and that piece of shit could not even comprehend that someone can understand it this way.
The autistic experience summarized
Ah I recall my "science" teacher when I was 13 explaining to us that all materials expand when heated and shrink when cooled.
So I ask how ice floats, or how ice cubes swell above the tray.
Still with the lame pokemon. Shit was lame then and is lame now.
I had an elementary school teacher who insisted that gravity came from the earth's rotation, and that if the earth stopped spinning there would be nothing holding us down.
Man... This sucks. I can't believe how many lemmings have had similar experiences. I'm just remembering one now where I was excited about math, went ahead in the curriculum to fractions, and answered everything in ratios. Instead of the teacher seeing the simple mistake, I just remember them being "wrong". How deflating.
Kids need connection before correction. I'm sort of glad my kid is glued to a screen doing adaptive math. It sucks in its own way, but better than unfeeling correction. Though, at least in my district, there's a big emphasis on empathy development so I think the teachers try to model that.