For people who are really good with words, middle school is when you either get the passion beaten out of you like this, or you encounter a teacher who is a Difficult Person, but they like you and you gain their powers
Their powers of being a difficult person?
I once got a C- on an essay, but for extra credit we could submit that paper to a state essay contest. I was a state finalist in that contest, with my only revision from the class-submitted version being spell checking Britan->Britain.
Fuck you, Mrs Wickham.
Ah essays. The most bullshit part of school because they just cannot be graded objectively and never are.
I mean, few things in life can be graded objectively so that’s not really the best standard to hold education to. There’s a lot of value in learning and practicing the skill of taking in information and then rearranging it into your own words, creating and supporting arguments from the knowledge you’ve gained.
But the subjectivity of it DOES mean that occasionally teachers will need to set aside their egos. Those who legitimately want to educate the next generation usually can do that, but some just enjoy having power over children and absolutely will not units forced to do so (and doing so will just create a new grudge against that student).
Well of course nothing can be graded 100% objectively but maths for example. Your answer is either correct or not. With essays the teacher can just decide they don’t like your argument and you get fucked. I my 4 years of secondary school none of the 8 guys in my class ever got the best possible grade on an essay. Even after we got a less demanding teacher the grades barely improved.
Wow that is bullshit. Reminds me of the teacher who failed a student for drawing a digital clock in a square that prompted ‘Draw a clock showing 4:30 pm.’
Kid wasn’t wrong at all. Poorly worded question.
Further, please enjoy my own bitching about bad teachers all the way up into college:
I had a college professor for Political Science give me a shit grade for only one of the multiple papers required of the class.
Why?
I referenced US Army soldiers out right stating, on video, and with legit newspapers covering this, that they were being instructed to guard opium/poppie farms in Afghanistan, back when even liberals were pretending that was not happening. It was a paper on conflict goods, such as blood diamonds, and she pretended I was a conspiracy theorist.
Next year I had an Econ professor give my group and I got a crap grade (got nearly 100% on every thing else) on a report and presentation about Iceland’s response to the Financial Crisis of 08.
Why’d he do that?
Because Iceland’s actions and the subsequent effects on their economy did not fit into any of the possible policy choices (send all the corrupt bankers to fucking prison) and outcomes that his macroeconomic paradigm allowed to be possible, and functionally disproved it, as according to the model he was teaching us, this should have resulted in basically a total collapse of their economy. (There were some short lived negative effects, but faaar from what we should have expected)
I got a BS in Econ and a BA in PoliSci, double majored in 4 years, and what I learned was the only way to excel in either of these fields is to pick some kind of ideology to pledge your allegiance too, suck up and kiss ass and you’ll go far.
Your last point is pretty much the most likely way to excel in life too, unfortunately.
You’re lucky if you do actually like the person you have to suck up to.
Too bad I am autistic and can’t even pull that off the few times I’ve tried.
Oh well.
That is an unfortunate reality. People don’t want innovation, unless it affirms their existing beliefs. Hollywood has done the world such a disservice in portraying this ideal that if you’re right, and persistent, that you can overcome this type of bullshit. That’s romantic, sure. Everyone would love to prevail the impossible. But life doesn’t work that way.
Actually, it’s not Hollywood that’s at fault. It’s parents’ fault. Parents teach little kids that if they tell the truth, work hard, dream big, and all of this other fluffy stuff, then they will be successful. That they can be anything they want, if they want it enough. That, and, Santa, Tooth-fairy, Easter Bunny, “I don’t have a favorite child” are all lies we tell our kids; in the guise of protecting them from the harsh realities of the world, when I. Reality we are all selfishly trying to relive some innocence we lost many years ago.
If we really wanted to protect our children, we would teach them young what to expect out of life, and how to traverse the fucked up societal highways to be successful. It’s not about doom and gloom, but teaching kids to recognize the power structure of whatever situation they’re in, and how to work it to their advantage (e.g., working with the grain, versus going against it) would do them well.
Anyway, I’m ranting now. My apologies. Carry on.
It goes deeper than parents being nostalgic. The veneer of meritocracy is load-bearing to neoliberal ideology, especially post-WWII. If we, as a ~society~, acknowledged that no matter how big kids dream and how much they work they’ll probably never make it more than maybe one or two steps up the social ladder, our entire social model would collapse.
At its most fundamental level, that’s what the war against “wokism” is. It’s the privileged correctly identifying and targeting the existential threat that is the mere acknowledgement that we do not live in a meritocracy.
Checks out
It is a widely known word. All greentexts are always 100% true.
I like how the definition is that it’s meaningless
May I just point out the elephant in the room?
“Gook” is a nasty slur for asian person. This word literally means ‘unintelligible like the nonsense languages of asians’
Let’s just let this word fade away like so many other bullshit slurs, thanks.
Too many teachers assume if they admit they were wrong, the students will get more insolent, as if sensing weakness. I’ve briefly been an assistant teacher in a middle school, and I found that on the contrary, students seem to appreciate an earnest admission of mistake and calmly accept the apology. Even some students that would be insolent in other situations. When it’s clear you’re wrong and the student knows it, pretending you’re right won’t do any good. Acting in a respectable manner will get you more respect.
Wins argument
“Quit being a sore loser”
Had an English teacher do kinda this to me once. We presented our research paper to the class, teacher tells me the birthday of the dude I’m presenting on, I correct her like; “bitch, dis my mf research paper! I know my dudes fuckin birthday, it the one damn slide I memorized!” (Paraphrasing, but the meaning was there, expertly and subtly disguised of course.) She then proceeds to tell me I must be wrong and failed my whole project, my magnum opus of eighth grade.
P.S. Frank Lloyd Wright was born June 8, 1867 in Wisconsin, not 1701 like some cranky, funny smellin old English teacher insists upon
…she was wrong by MORE THAN A CENTURY AND A HALF and failed YOU on that basis??
That’s the kind of self-righteous incompetence you’d expect from a Republican politician, not someone who’s enduring crap wages and constant vilification from bigoted parents out of the love of passing on knowledge!
Some people enjoy power wherever they find it
Wtf? Didn’t Wright do most of his most famous work in the 20th century? Did your teacher think he was a vampire?
Frank Lloyd Wright (1701-1959). Frank Lloyd Wright was an omniscient demimortal techno mage who took up architecture in the late 19th-century at the age of 186 after discovering the eldritch art of soul drafting. He began designing and building structures across the United States with the intention of harnessing the psycho-emotional energy of the US population. Many of his architectural plans plainly display the geometrical interplanar-harvester elements, in comparison to architects such as Ivo Shandor (cult of Gozer) who felt the need to obfuscate the intent of their structures. [1]^ Wright’s final design was commissioned from archmage Norman Lykes, who trapped Wright’s life force in a soul stone embedded in a Mission-style rocking chair. Wright’s legacy was commemorated by logistical clerics in a postage stamp in 1966 and in 1970 by Bardic duo Simon & Garfunkel.
citation needed ↩︎
Got failed for a programming test. Discovered during the practice tests that it was a vm that would run your code for a variety of test cases. Turns out it was a linux vm and said test cases and answer where in a big plain text file that was accessible by the program when being run. Wrote a universal solver that simply read the file checked which case was being checked and returned the correct answer. Got given zero for cheating.
Although it was cheating, IMO they should at least have given you credit for ingenuity.
You have the mindset of a proper hacker (the old fashioned definition of course).
As someone (I can’t remember who) said, the best way to get something done is to assign it to a lazy but genius person.
They should have said, good job, now do the actual assignment.
Because clearly you aren’t learning the relevant material that way.
I remember a 7th grade teacher making fun of my computer knowledge as I had made some fun adjustments to the qbasic gorillas game. She said “you act like you know more than anyone else does” trying to shame me in front of the class. My response? “That’s because I do.” As flatly as I could. She was silent.
I have software developer in my title now.
Something like this happened to me as well, but it didn’t directly impact my grades. In the 7th grade my teacher accidentally locked herself out of the shitty filing cabinet that was standard issue in every classroom. I had learned from my cousin a couple of really basic Lockpicking techniques, just raking and jiggling, nothing with actual pin picking.
I told her I could try to open it with a paperclip and she was like “yeah okay sure lol” totally sarcastically. I get down there, bend open a paperclip, and start trying to jiggle or rake the pins up. This process looks a bit like I’m struggling to do anything, so she immediately goes “see? You can’t actually open it”. I told her I just needed to get the mechanism to catch the pins, she became completely insufferable, and started making fun of me for being a 7th grader who knew a 10 dollar word like “mechanism”. I honestly wish I was making this part up but for the rest of that school year she joked about me… knowing the word “mechanism”. What a fuckin’ nerd amiright?
Anyway I got the cabinet open after maybe a minute of fucking around with the lock and she barely even thanks me at all, mostly just acts sheepish because she probably never believed I could do it, and suddenly realized that a student could break into her cabinet where she keeps her teaching materials (not that I ever would have)
Teacher acted like a dick but it’s fairly easy to get a 98% on the final and get a C. Anyone who has taken a class in a standard us school and given a shit about their grade will recognize that they are typically also graded on the other tests, homework, class participation, quizzes, projects, etc.
Might also explain why the teacher was kind of a dick. Maybe anon was the pain in the ass student that clearly had the intelligence to easily pass the class but rarely paid attention, never did homework, was often disrespectful, etc and then was shocked when the educator wasn’t willing to work with them.
Those kids are neurodivergent. Class isn’t set up for them.
Meds or lol C
Remember kids intelligence lead jobs don’t mean intelligent people the opposite is true also
I cannot make sense of this comment. Perhaps someone can sprinkle in some punctuation?
