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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.
“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.
Most of the most successful people never went to college. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Simon Cowell…
Oprah Winfrey attended Tennessee State University and has a degree in communications
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
Employment doesnt necessarily mean “most successful” but education is obviously importer regardless if its self-directes or not.
And i love me a distribution graph. Thank you.
They either had rich parents with rich connections, or had incredibly loyal, highly skilled friends, like Jobs had Wozniak.
I wondered that too, but then you have people like Whoopi Goldberg and Chris Rock on that list. And it’s not like Will Smith was that rich friend.
Your also looking at a very specific field. Some fields require a degree and others require talent and a nonstop work ethic to just get out there and do it day after day and push through those hardships.
Or they have a degree as Winfrey does have a degree
There’s still time to become an electrician!
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
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.
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.
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
The Milky Way leads to God
Follow the milky brick road!
Or even that there is a god at all
That Columbus was a good person.
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 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.
Augh I hate that myth so much
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!
I was told General Lee was an honorable 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.
See you next year.
Edit: Oh, you mean actually wrong.
“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.
They at least sound chiller than the people in the other examples.
I think it was the senility and the tenure
Lmao I guess nobody uses guns to take a fortress either.
“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.
We watched an educational movie from the 1950s by Frank Capra, which my 8th grade science teacher had liked as a kid. He admitted they were somewhat dated, but still basically accurate.
In it, the scientist explained that they still don’t understand how chloroplasts transform sunlight into energy. The cartoon chloroplast hid what she was doing and said something like, “The Russians don’t know either.”
I was pretty blown away by a scientist admitting they didn’t know something, at that age, but when I looked it up, I discovered that scientists had pretty much figured it out, but it’s very complicated.
Clip if you’re interested: https://archive.org/details/our_mr_sun around 36:09
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.
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
This is called thinking
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.
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.
It’s not how big it is, it’s how you use it.
I wonder how much experience they had before saying that.
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.
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.
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.
