Most incorrect thing you were taught?

upandcumming

Jeff_Lebowski wrote: »

We had a young enough teacher teaching us about the evils of drugs in the 90's. She told us that "heroin is so expensive that only rich people can afford to buy it." :rolleyes:

Makes you wonder how easy it is to get a degree sometimes.

I was told that if you took ecstasy you have a 90% chance of dying!

endabob1

dalta5billion wrote: »

Fair enough.



Ok, so her version is foreign to euro = bank buys rate - this is correct.

However, iffff dear Holly walked into her bank with the resulting 75 and five-ninths of a euro, she wouldn't get out 68£ to buy the wonderful contraption.

So I say it's an equation.

x = euros holly needs to get £68 from bank

So it's actually euros to foreign - where we know the exchange rate and the result.

0.85x = 68

x = 68 ÷ 0.85

x = 80


And they say students need to think outside of the box more...

You're right

The bank is selling the Currency to Holly ergo for every Euro she gives them they will give her 85 of the Queens pennies.
However if she goes back to the bank, wanting to buy back her Euro the bank would charge her 90 Queens pennies, thus making themselves a wee profit, if they didn't do this they would be out of business in a heartbeat........ Maybe Seanie Fitz went to your school :eek:

deman

fishy fishy wrote: »

the irish flag used to have a gold harp on it. when it was taken off it was known as green, white and gold. the "orange" instead of "gold" is only fairly recent teaching - it was always thought as green white and gold.

Give me strength!

This is wrong on so many levels. :rolleyes:

Capt'n Midnight

TrixIrl wrote: »

Even when that made no sense e.g. shoes and the law of diminishing marginal utility! When we questioned it we were told we wouldnt understand til we were 27... why 27? noone knows!

Are you 27 or older ?

Capt'n Midnight

upandcumming wrote: »

I was told that if you took ecstasy you have a 90% chance of dying!

If you don't take it there is 100% chance of dying

quickbeam

Deleted User wrote: »

Having been an English teacher for a year now, I can sympathise with alot of these mistakes.. Once you're put on the spotlight and have a student question you, your mind sometimes pulls a complete blank and you end up blindly defending your point so that the students don't lose confidence in you.. At least I can blame grammar / pronunciation on casual use and accents. Must be alot tougher when you're a regular teacher.

If this thread has taught us anything, it's that kids aren't stupid. They'll lose a lot more confidence in a teacher stubbornly sticking to something that's clearly incorrect than if they admit they had made a mistake in the first place.

There's also nothing wrong with a teacher saying that they do not know the answer to something than making up a panicked answer under pressure. "I don't know but I'll research it and come back to you with that" sounds perfectly reasonable.

Monty Burnz

nice_very wrote: »

the "potato famine"

That was a bad time to be a potato.

Miguel_Sanchez

upandcumming wrote: »

I was told that if you took ecstasy you have a 90% chance of dying!

You can't argue with made up statistics so you can't.

seamus

"That's why I love elementary school, Edna. The children believe anything you tell them."

Primary school teachers actually occupy a rather scarily powerful position, and I'm not sure if this is ever properly communicated when they're being trained.

A primary school teacher, to the children, is effectively a fountain of all knowledge. Children aren't encouraged to think critically, but to just absorb information. Thus, anything the teacher says becomes fact unless the child is later corrected. Which often doesn't happen. Secondary school is different, because if I ask a business teacher about biology, I wouldn't expect them to have the answer.

I can recall this position being abused (though with good intentions), when primary teachers would talk to the children about their latest pet activism, whether that's protests against some building work in an historical area or whatever.

Primary teachers in particular should be encouraged to say, "I don't know", and realise that it's better to get the child to research the answer themselves, then give an answer which you're not entirely sure of.

We had a problem in work about four years ago. Someone was issuing an invoice for $40k, but as it's a euro-based system, there's always a euro amount behind an invoice. But the system was calculating it wrong by 1c. For example, it was coming to €25,000.23 rather than €25,000.24.

3 people had looked at the problem and checked the calculation before it ended up with me. Checked it again manually. Yep, it's wrong. Debugged the system, nothing odd going on, using standard rounding functions. So I logged it with the overseas vendor as a program error. They came back pretty much straight away and said that it's rounding fine, the system is correct and we're wrong.

So I googled it. And googled it. And asked on boards. And it turns out that I was wrong, and so were all the other Irish people I spoke to about it.

At some point, someone in the Ireland decided that in order to round up a number, you "rolled" it up. That is, if you wanted to round up 1.344532 to two places, you round each number in turn, i.e.

1.34453, then
1.3445, then
1.345, then
1.35

I talked to lots of Irish people about it. About three-quarters of them agreed that it was the right way to do it.

After getting straight in my head, I realised that this was wrong. Just plain old, completely wrong. Mind. Blown. I can distinctly recall having been taught this, using this method on a regular basis for pretty much 20 years, never having been corrected once (i.e. the teachers were using this method too), and then I find out that it's just plain incorrect.

I think it's one of the first things I'll be trying to instill in my kids - your teachers don't know everything, question everything.

nicowa

facemelter wrote: »

Once in history class , we were watching some old movie and there was a train in one of the scenes , one boy in the class asked what was coming out of the top and I shouted out ( cause I was a little **** back in primary school) SMOKE !! ITS SMOKE ! , the teacher started giving out for me for talking ****e , then he said the words that made me lose all faith in teaching in Ireland. " its a steam engine , steam comes out t he top " , everyone believed him aswell , got called train boys for weeks !

When a locomotive is moving, a mixture of smoke and exhaust steam comes out of the stack

The steam goes have to go somewhere. A steam enging is powered by the movement of steam pushing parts of the engine. It doesn't automatically turn back into water to be reused once it's done that job so where else did you think it would go?

briany

seamus wrote: »

I think it's one of the first things I'll be trying to instill in my kids - your teachers don't know everything, question everything.

Nothing wrong with a generation of kids questioning their teachers so long as they're doing it in a considered way, maybe qualifying the teacher's stance with a differing but researched viewpoint and not just doing so to be contrary. Oh, the debates that'll be had in junior infants....

coffee_cake

seamus wrote: »

That is, if you wanted to round up 1.344532 to two places,

I'd call that 1.34? 3 places would be 1.345?

Turtwig

bluewolf wrote: »

I'd call that 1.34? 3 places would be 1.345?

That'd be how I'd do it too. But I suppose you're an engineer or physicist?:D
Interestingly, I used to do it the way Seamus said. That was how I was thought. It was quickly stamped out of me in Uni though.

coffee_cake

Jernal wrote: »

That'd be how I'd do it too. But I suppose you're an engineer or physicist?:D
Interestingly, I used to do it the way Seamus said. That was how I was thought. It was quickly stamped out of me in Uni though.

I'm pretty sure we were never taught it Seamus' way, but I couldn't say for certain

Ouchette

Deleted User wrote: »

Having been an English teacher for a year now, I can sympathise with alot of these mistakes..

You think 'alot' is a word and they let you teach English? Seriously? :eek:

Duggys Housemate

nice_very wrote: »

the "potato famine"

Yeah, it was no famine alright. Colonial genocide, is better I think.

Monty Burnz

bluewolf wrote: »

I'd call that 1.34? 3 places would be 1.345?

Yup. Seamus, you've more work to do there on your decimals.

Timistry

alproctor wrote: »

2nd biggest afaik, New York's Central Park is the biggest I think!

Nope, Kings Park in Perth is the biggest in the world

Duggys Housemate

Ouchette wrote: »

You think 'alot' is a word and they let you teach English? Seriously? :eek:

:rolleyes:
Possibly he missed the spacebar?

seamus

Monty Burnz wrote: »

bluewolf wrote: »

I'd call that 1.34? 3 places would be 1.345?

Yup. Seamus, you've more work to do there on your decimals.

Ah ye see, I know how to do it properly now. Just crazy that so many Irish people have been taught completely the wrong method. I still have to catch myself sometimes doing it the wrong way. such is the power of what you learn at an early age.

Ouchette

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

:rolleyes:
Possibly he missed the spacebar?

Deleted User wrote: »

Must be alot tougher when you're a regular teacher.

Twice?

El Weirdo

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

:rolleyes:
Possibly he missed the spacebar?

Ouchette wrote: »

Twice?

A little more than twice, actually.

Duggys Housemate

El Weirdo wrote: »

A little more than twice, actually.

really, #firstworldproblem and correcting typos is against the rules.

Shanotheslayer

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

really, #firstworldproblem and correcting typos is against the rules.

Hash tagging is for Twitter.

Mance Rayder

I was thought that because I came from a certain part of Dublin, that I had no chance of ever making a decent life for myself. Science teacher fail.

Monty Burnz

CiscoStudent wrote: »

I was thought that because I came from a certain part of Dublin, that I had no chance of ever making a decent life for myself. Science teacher fail.

Were you thought English?

LordSutch

Must be related to Matt Cooper

Solair

A technologically-confused business teacher, deducted marks from me because I mentioned in an essay that Telex was an obsolete technology, had long been replaced by fax and then email and was no longer relevant.

According to his book, clearly written in about 1982, companies were 100% reliant on their Telex machines in 2003.

So he gave me a -5 on that question!!

My brother had the same teacher quite a few years later, and in 2011 he was still waffling on about ISDN and not mentioning anything about modern technology.

He must be basing his classes on eircom propaganda publications or something.

Also, a French teacher who used to get irritated with the French guy in our class when he pointed out that any particular phrase hadn't been used since 1937!
If you followed his advice on idioms, you would sound like some french equivalent of a character out of a Dickens novel.

treborflynn

mikemac1 wrote: »

Back in the eighties my teachers told me the Japs were going to take over the world, economy wise

They were wrong, it's the Chinese

The Chinese, A GREAT BUNCH A LADS.

El Weirdo

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

really, #firstworldproblem and correcting typos is against the rules.

So is back seat modding.

Anyway, what are you going to do? Take your ball home?