I struggled at math as a young kid because I hated doing everything the long way and showing every step. I got a mental math book that taught how to do longer form multiplication in your head. I could multiply 2-3 digit numbers in my head and just tell you the answer.
My teacher made me do it on the board in front of everyone and swore I was cheating somehow because if she couldn’t do it, a kid couldn’t either.
I was also reading Michael Chriton books in the 4th grade, and teachers thought that I wasn’t because kids don’t read books like that.
School was kinda annoying with how it would punish you for being anywhere outside of normal. Even if it was positive.
Maybe they meant that the student rushes/half asses tasks. Doing them quickly doesn’t imply them being correct.
I got this, too. It was because I didn’t show my work. So I started writing out my process, and it wasn’t “how we were taught”, and got a 0 once again for it.
After that I just quit doing the work at all, and I’m sure they felt justified calling me lazy. I’m a lot of things but I’m not lazy.
My worst version of this was in third grade where we learned our multiplication tables. Our teacher had us all make multiplication flashcards. 1x1 up through 12x12. She then assigned us to spend a certain amount of hours practicing the flashcards, including some log and parental sign-off IIRC. A card might have “3x8” written on one side, “24” on the other. Practice and drill until you memorize them all.
Well, the problem I had was that I memorized my times tables in a fraction of the time we were required to practice. I ended up getting in trouble for not having enough practice hours - even though I was acing the quizzes we were getting. This wasn’t even about showing your work, as this was a rote exercise in memorization!
But the teacher thought that it took X number of hours of practice to learn your times tables. That’s what she assigned, and nothing was going to change her mind. So I sat at home pointlessly practicing the times tables I had already memorized, instead of doing something fun or even moving ahead to more advanced math concepts.
I had teachers like this. Let’s just say I keep coming back to less than nice things to say about that kind of behavior.
The flash-card thing is kind of cursed anyway because multiplication is commutative, and you really don’t need the cards for zero, one, and ten. If you can add anything to itself in your head, throw out the twos while we’re at it. So you really only need 40-ish cards to do the job, not 144+.
or even moving ahead to more advanced math concepts.
Yeah, can’t break the class up into multiple lesson plans. Gotta move with the herd.
In a just world, you’d have been bumped up a grade, moved into an advanced track, or given time in advanced sessions with other gifted students. That said, your teacher would have been responsible for making those recommendations. FWIW, I did get into those advanced sessions but only after contact with a teacher that wasn’t projecting, envious, or an authoritarian blowhard about this kind of thing.
In a just world, you’d have been bumped up a grade, moved into an advanced track, or given time in advanced sessions with other gifted students. That said, your teacher would have been responsible for making those recommendations.
Oh that did end up happening eventually. I did go down that track. Ended up taking calculus freshman year of high school.
There’s alot of us out there that don’t work like the system expects. You either know the answer or you don’t, taking more time doesn’t do anything for our brains.
There’s alot of us out there that don’t work like the system expects.
But the role of the teacher is to analyze the student’s behavior and provide useful coaching/advice. If your response to every critique is “Well, I’m just not constructed to operate that way” then you’ve squandered any value in the perspective of your mentor.
You’re implying some kind of native and intractable component of your psychology. As though neither you, nor any of your classmates, should ever be expected to adapt or expand your abilities. A bleak perspective to apply in adulthood. An absolutely nihilistic perspective to have when you’re still a very plastic formative child.
You either know the answer or you don’t
On multiple choice questions, maybe. Not on essays or proofs or other depth-of-knowledge questions.
If you were asked the question “How do bird’s fly?” you can provide a very wide latitude of answers. Some of them are short and pithy “They flap their wings”. While others are far more involved or focused on a particular area of expertise “<explanation of the physics of flight>” versus “<explanation of the biology of flying animals>” versus “<explanation of the learning process of animal intelligence>”.
But if you’re in a biology class and you keep giving physics answers to the question, then turning your nose up at your teacher when they say you are missing something critical, why did you sign up for the class to begin with?
“How do bird’s fly?”
Mostly horizontally, a bit vertically. 😂
You made a lot of assumptions about that person based off of a very short comment. Why not just take someone at their word?
Yeah! Once a teacher was mad at me for being too quick and when she checked to scold me, everything was correct…
I know I ain’t doin’ much.
Doing nothing means a lot to me.~ AC/DC Downpayment Blues
But was she right though?
I suppose it could be a criticism of the quality of the work: i.e. you finish it quickly but it’s half-arsed because you were too lazy to take the time to do it properly.
I remember being told I needed to do homework at home and my assigned work at school. I was fast enough that I got through the assignment and started on my homework. Teacher told me to stop. I kept at it as I figured it was better than sitting around bored out of my skull. Teacher lost her shit and I got sent to the principal’s office.
As a kid, this confused me. However, I kept doing it.
Part of the purpose of homework is to encourage the student to revisit the assignment later in the day. Repetition of exercise develops muscles and your brain is a muscle.
That said
Teacher lost her shit
Generally best when teachers manage their own tempers, as hot heads do a poor job of gaining the trust and maintaining the attention of their students.
While teaching is an underpaid profession, and good teachers deserve A LOT of respect for what they do, it has to be said that many many horrible people become teachers.
I’ve had my fair share of these people. Would throw them off a cliff if I could lol
It’s probably one of the biggest reasons why almost nobody wants to become a teacher. Like a few bad teachers will sour a kid’s ambition to become a teacher.
I loved to read, so if I got my work or test done quickly, I had time to read while everybody else was still.workung.
I was especially good with reading tests, because I was always the best reader in my classes in elementary school. I was always the first done.
I got the same insult as a child. I just thought “ah she’s stupid” and moved on and never thought about it until I saw this post
A task is always only so big that the weakest child can do it. That’s often not enough to learn something thoroughly.
I used to sleep in my accounting class. Another student got offended and was like why doesn’t he just skip? My teacher said he comes in, gets straight As, he can take a nap if he likes.
See I use to do the same in history but I got an F. Loser
Me in chemistry. I would sleep in class then get called on and answer correctly just to fall back asleep.
She was an awful teacher though.
This was me in highschool, I was so bored of the pace we were going at, so I skipped a lot of classes, came in and aced tests, not with the correct answers they were looking for, but still correct. 🤣
This was me including the AP classes. Then I got accepted to a really good engineering school and got my ass handed to me because I never developed proper study skills.
This was me in engineering school as well. First 2 years were brutal because I’d never really had to study and things suddenly got hard and needed to put in some effort. I got through it but it was a much different learning experience than I expected.
I got through it too but I can’t say I ever developed the level of study skills that some of my classmates had. In the end I guess I developed my own study style which I guess I still use now almost 40 years later in my work career.
It’s weird to think there might be people who had a different experience with engineering school.
This was me in world history and chemistry. I napped and got woken up if no one else had the answer in the former, woke up after the lab was explained (that was just regurgitating what was in the lab sheets) then did the lab in the latter
Based
This used to be my mentality in regards to work for the majority of my early twenties. Turns out pretty much every job out there will give you more work to do if you are too efficient. Eventually it reaches a point where you have too much on your plate and start getting burned out fairly quickly yet you’ve set the bar so high that anything less than maximum efficiency is considered lazy.
My new method is to work at 50%-70% efficiency while at work and I take my time on everything I’m asked to do. I’ve worked my ass off for about a decade at various jobs and was only rewarded with more work. I’ll save my efficiency for the things I actually care about in my life.
I have a coworker that is currently in the situation I was in five years ago. He’s working late every single day and barely has any time for personal business because he worked too hard at the beginning to “climb the ladder” that he’s now overworked and miserable as more things keep getting piled on top. I was talking to him the other day and he was saying that he started working on the weekends because he has so much shit he has to do.
I actually started getting more recognition when I started producing 60-70 % or less instead of 120 %. It was like management thought that, if my tasks took longer, it was probably because I was very thorough and the task was very difficult, even though the end result would be the same. If I solved a task in 1 day, instead of 5 days, they regarded the task as easy instead of me being good. The slower i worked, the more applause I got from my manager… But, he was also an idiot… But, i wouldn’t be surprised if this was a pattern in other companies as well.
It’s a pattern everywhere. I purposely tell people the modeling takes me weeks. it might take me an hour, maybe.
If i come back too soon with results they expect to get it for nearly free. Nah you’re paying for 20+ years of practice.
I used to try to smash through everything as quick as I could. I would’ve told you I was just quick and efficient but I think the reality was I was usually tired or hungover or daydreaming about whatever thing and just didn’t have the attention span to do a good job.
I’ve been self employed for the last 10 years or so, which means extra efficiency on my part doesn’t reward anyone else.
However, during that time I’ve become a lot more methodical and diligent. I am consistently accurate. Basically because I need to own any oversights, which can be very costly, I make far fewer.
My mental model is somewhat orthogonal to this, 100% efficiency by definition is the most I can sustainably do indefinitely. I can probably do 150% if I really need to, but not for very long at all, and I’m usually between 85-105%.
If I’m doing ~30 hours a week of work I’ve been asked to do, or needs to get done, and doing 8-10 hours a week of whatever I think is important to prioritize, I’m probably in a pretty good place. I don’t tend to get overly rewarded with more work, and I’m still recognized as doing valuable and important stuff by my teammates.
If someone is doing way more than 40 hours in a week on more than a very rare occasion, some layer of management has failed, and if it’s the norm, the whole system has failed. I’m well aware that may be working as designed, but I would contend it was simply designed to fail.
I learned that lesson in high school. Always more tasks if you finish any
Do just enough work to avoid getting fired.
Act your wage is the rule I usually go with
Exactly! Employers and managers typically won’t know either, unless they are micromanagers who track your every move. If this was a start up and doing more will have a big impact, then putting in more effort is justified. Med/large company? Nahhh
The problem is psychopaths are driven to leadership and they’re not actually good at anything.
Basically their ego tells them that they’re pareto people when they’re really not and society can’t tell the difference. Mostly they just steal labor. And they’re too stupid and insecure to identify and empower the most efficient people.
Yea and these people will not shut the fuck up, either.
You just described MAGA.
Wtf does that have to do with the post
Common forms of “society doesn’t understand or value the people who actually get shit done”.
That was my question but I thought I was just being high.
All teachers are psychopaths. Get with the program
Just reminded me what Pareto Principle was and now I have business school PTSD. Thanks.
It actually might be a fundamental principal of the universe like the Fibunnacci sequence. It shows up everywhere, there’s a great old vsauce episode on it.
Sure. Still doesn’t resolve the PTSD from BS management classes though lol.
I would also be completely confused and offended for the rest of my life if a teacher had said something like that to me
I was grateful that my teachers were chill with this
I’d finish my math work while the teacher was still explaining it to the class, and just start reading a book. Teacher was fine with it because I was a good student and got good grades.
Rant incoming
Although I do have one particular gripe with that teacher unrelated to any of that. Question was how far was a person in a pool from the life guard on a life guard tower. I found the hypotenuse, moved on to other questions. Got marked wrong so I brought it up to the teacher, and her explanation was that she wanted the distance from the person to the tower (the BOTTOM of the tower???) under the logic that you wouldn’t just float on up in a straight line to the life guard. First of all, the question was specifically worded as distance from person to life guard, NOT travel distance. Secondly to the BOTTOM of the life guard tower??? You wanted that value, not even the added distance of the length to the bottom of the tower and the length to climb the tower???
If you asked me how far away a plane in the sky is from me, and I answered 5 feet, I’d look like a damn idiot.
I kind of wish I pushed her on that question harder. I kind of just thought “good lord she’s out of her mind” and sat back down because it had little to no impact on my grade. But I have lived years being pissed about getting that question wrong, I simply cannot move on from it.
don’t worry random-internet-person, I just graded your answer and found that you were correct and that other person grading you was wrong.
so you know, you can move on now?
Could be worse. I once received a Saturday detention for “defiance” because I pointed out a mistake the teacher had made on an algebra problem.
Contempt of
copteacher
In 2nd grade I decided one day to just complete my entire 2nd grade math book because it was easy for me at the time. Their solution was to force me to go into a third grade class for math but I quit because it meant I lost one of my recesses and thought that was bullshit. Honestly, surprised no one followed up and forced me to go back at any point. I just stopped going and no one said anything.
I just found out this weekend the the algebraic (super easy) shortcut to divide an integer by a fraction that I showed my son - was referred to as ‘cheating’ by the teacher, who said the people who grade the SATs would mark him down for that.
I’m actually quite confused about that.
Ha! I worked in Test Prep and College Admissions consultation for nearly a decade at a fairly prestigious company in a major city with major private schools (major money and major lineage/legacy) and unless there have been major changes to the SAT/ACT since the pandemic that teacher is completely full of shit. There isn’t even a guessing penalty anymore on the SAT let alone any way for them to know how a student comes to the answers they choose. You don’t have to even turn in your work when you turn in the test.
Sounds like the teacher felt stupid or threatened or both and made up nonsense to combat their own failing. And honestly, I would consider giving bad advice that could impact a student’s future malpractice. That was actually the standard for teaching algebra when I was in school so a teacher telling your kid it is cheating is beyond confusing. It’s borderline abusive and at the very least completely incompetent.
There’s no guessing penalty? If they don’t offer 20 options or eliminate multiple choice in favor of exact answers, this seems dumb.
So, all colleges started accepting the ACT or the SAT without preference about 2 decades ago and what happened was the ACT never had a guessing penalty so a lot of students started shifting to the ACT in favor of the SAT to the point that the SAT had to change their test to be more like ACT to continue to compete in the marketplace with them. And “compete” might even be misleading because they were still very popular and still the standard but they made the change to avoid losing their stranglehold on the market is probably the more accurate way to describe it.
Crazy that there isn’t a consistent standard for assessment and they can compete on preference based on ease rather than rigor. That’s just another race to the bottom, wonderful.
Similar rant. In the second grade our teacher (FUCK YOU MRS MURRY) had drawn the orbit of the Earth around the sun and was telling us that because it was elliptical and that’s why we had summer; the Earth was closer to the sun and the sun was warm.
She basically drew an oval on the chalkboard and put the sun smack in the center. It didn’t make any sense to me so I kept asking why there weren’t two summers in a year if an orbit was a year and the earth passed close the sun twice…
It wasn’t until the 3rd or 4th grade when I got a hold of an illustrated astronomy book that showed our titled planet and explained the seasons.
omg it’s not just wrong it’s doubly wrong 😭. why was she allowed to teach
That was a poorly worded question, and a not so bright teacher. I’d be pissed too
This could be a nice lesson about the taxicab metric and the Euclidean metric, but that doesn’t seem like the intention.
Reminds me of one of my elementary school English teachers. We were all given a blank hardcover book and had to make a story with illustrations. Mine was called “The Loose Kitty”. Every page basically had the kitty on the loose in different areas of a city, running into other animals that had some rhyming. I spent so much time with the art, proofing it, etc. This teacher took hard red ink and strikes through loose and put “lost” ON EVERY PAGE. I tried to tell her no it is loose because EVERYTHING IN THE BOOK related to being “on the loose”. Nope. Got like a C- on that thing.
Am I still sour about it 30 years later? Yes, I still loose my shit.
to be fair she probably understood the concept of a kitten on the loose, but wanted to nudge you away from filling your book with innuendo without having to explain the concept of an un-tight and/or readily available vagina
Not all who wander are lost, bitch.
What a bitch! I never thought the comments in this post would raise my blood pressure
This one hurt for even me to read
Sound’s like your an pour loster.
You were writing a picture book for kids, so it’s important to communicate clearly. It should have been titled “Kitty on the Loose”, to teach kids the correct version of the phrase. The kitty isn’t loose, it’s on the loose. The former is an unconventional grammar construction that small children don’t need to learn to navigate. Save those Shakespearen grammar innovations for adult stories.
Its because teachers hate the idea that a smart student isn’t enthusiastic about the topic they’re teaching and that they’d do clearly what is their bare minimum and then mentally drop out. Its insecurity.
I had a ton of teachers like this.
My music teacher was pretty angry that I clearly only picked the subject because I didn’t want to take art or PE.
I wasn’t there due to any passion for it, did the absolute minimum, and the only way it’s affected my life is that I keep thinking about how annoyed he was.
Eh, that’s the system so I can’t fault you. But specialty electives like that usually have limited seats - your seat may have displaced someone much more enthralled with the subject.
Also I guarantee they sucked at it and made everyone else sound worse by association. Childhood visual art classes are way easier than music anyway, it doesn’t even have to look like anything. It’s extremely obvious when someone doesn’t know what they’re doing in a music class.
Well, music is kind of a team sport, I’d be pissed if one of the percussionists could never hit the damn triangle at the right time.
A teacher once said to me, for acting antisocial: “if you keep pushing people away: one day, they’ll just leave you alone”
I wasn’t doing it for attention. I’m very glad to be largely left alone now. It’s great.
“Antisocial” doesn’t mean “introverted”
Are you sure you don’t mean asocial?
Depends on how pissed off I was that day…
Yeah like I’ve never actually had enough of this solitude people kept threatening me with
Out of curiosity, how old are you now?
My first grade teacher criticized me for not cutting straight enough on some time waster paper piecing project we were doing. Sorry for not having perfect motor control, I’m 6??
Damn does your family still remind you of it 30 years later and are you me?
6? You were a year behind already! ;)
Where’s that behind? In the US 5 year olds go to kindergarten, and 6 year olds to 1st grade. Sorry if some joke is wooshing me lol
I was just yanking the other guy’s chain.
Depends on the birthday cutoff. My daughter will be a 6yo kindergartner for most of it because she’ll be five for the first few months of the school year
I had a teacher who said the same bullshit. But she also fucking sucked at her job. She taught typing and computer literacy but did not actually know how to use a computer and just hated every student that knew more than her.
I see you also had Mrs. Anz for computer class.
When I was a kid, I noticed that I was consistently finishing My work early, so I asked the teacher for the next lesson’s work. I wanted to speed through the entire year’s coursework and finish early so I could have an extended summer.
Teacher said no, but I got My wish in the end. I got to skip an entire year of school. Didn’t get any more summer, though.
When I was a child, I was told that Communism failed because it gave no incentive for people to work hard and better themselves and their society. After all, if everyone is paid the same and has a guaranteed job, why worker harder than than anyone else? As an adult, I learned the same thing applies to workers in capitalist societies. In most companies, there is little reason to do more than the bare minimum needed to keep from getting fired. Promotions never happen as companies prefer to hire externally. Real raises and bonuses don’t happen; you have to move companies to get a real raise. And of course, workers don’t get any direct reward for working more. The owners just pocket all the profits and tell you to work harder.
I turns out both American Capitalism and Soviet Communism wasted colossal amounts of human potential.
Meanwhile Australian communists created an agricultural system so efficient that their daily work only took a few hours, and they could spend most of the day sitting around and talking. Early Europeans remarked on how little the Aboriginal people worked and called their existence “miserable”, but I wish I had as much free time as a precolonial Australian.
This reminds me of that old series “And Now…The Rest of the Story”.
This is Paul Harvey…Good Day!
