Everything Wrong

Apreche

Every once in awhile I find a video, image or other work that symbolizes everything that is wrong with society. I have found another one. Discuss.

Starfox

If that's for real, that's sad. Props to the kid for sticking to what he knows is right.

Kiey

Yeah, that's sad. If I was his parent I'd buy that kid some ice cream... or a Wii.

Apreche

All I'm saying is that if I have kids, I'm sending them to a school where that sort of behavior is awarded.

Starfox

I'd buy that kid some ice cream... or a Wii.

Or a super nintendo!

I'm thinking it's fake. Note the slanted quotation marks. Typewriters don't know what side of the " the stuff you are quoting is on.

Kilarney

The date of the letter is certainly suspicious. 4/20... we all know that's important to a certain sub-culture.

Apreche

Oh, it's almost certainly fake or modified heavily. The point is that stuff like this does happen often. It has been reported on more heavily as of late thanks to the Intarwebs.

HMTKSteve

Dude, you got that from Digg!

Cramit

The reason I want to be a teacher in jpg form. I always had questions in school and few teachers would bother answering them if they did not know the answer off hand. I have learned over time how to answer those questions myself and hope to show my students how to answer the questions they have.

Anyway, I am sure that note is satirical, but things similar to that happen all the time.

TheWhaleShark

If I ruled the world, that teacher would be shot immediately.

belarm

I once wound up teaching my trig class in high school, and will share the story, because I love it.

My trig teacher was new to the school that semester, and a complete idiot. I hated her because of that, and she didn't much care for me, as I had a habit of reading fiction in her class. (Not only was I experienced with the math involved from programming, but due to a restructuring of the math program at our school during the previous year, this was the second time I'd taken a class covering this material.) One day, she was trying (and failing miserably) to teach the class about polar notation. She literally tried three different explanations, one of which I remember used incorrect math, to explain the concept, and no one was getting it. Finally, I raised my hand, and said, "I understand this, and I think I can explain it in a way everyone will get." (I am listening to the podcast ATM, and yes, this story is quite similar to Rym's story. Great minds think alike, I suppose ;-) She was, of course, extremely offended, responded along the lines of "yeah, ok, sure." and stormed off to sit at her desk. So I take the chalk, walk up to the board, and explain it by relating the cartesian co-ordinates to the legs of a right triangle which can also be described by θ and r. Why this never occurred to her, I cannot fathom. I ensure this has gotten through to the class, and sure enough, every single person in the class understood. I sat down and let her teach the rest of the class, which she did without comment.

My vilification did not come until later that year, when a student in that class used a different method to get the correct answer to an extra credit question on a test than she did. She had taught us neither her method nor the method employed by this kid, but she either decided her method was the only correct one, or didn't understand the method used by this kid. (As an aside: he was taking calculus at the time, but since this class had been ret-conned as a pre-req to calculus, he had to retake it simultaneously; how fucking stupid is that?) He showed this to all of us in the electronics class we had immediately following, including the teacher, who was also our physics teacher and previously employed as an algebra/trig teacher. The students all laughed at the stupidity, and the kid was going to simply leave it at that, due in large part to the fact that he still scored 100% on the test. Our teacher, on the other hand, picked up the test and stormed out of the room with not a word.

Found out a few days later what happened: He walked in to the class she was currently teaching and proceeded to lay the fuck in to her. There was apparently yelling involved (bear in mind, most of us also knew this guy personally, and he is known as the nicest, calmest quaker we know). He pressed her for nearly 20 minutes in front of her students, eventually discovering that she did not understand the method he'd employed. The marking was reversed, and we got a lecture from him on how you cannot allow this kind of shit to stand. This man remains one of my favorite teachers to this very day, in large part because of that incident.

So far as I know, that dumb bitch is still allowed to teach math for a living...

Mamath

God, stupid teachers, argh. When I see stuff like this I realise how incredibly lucky I was to get the excellent teachers I did. So excellent that I'm attending the retirement dinner of the man who taught me Math B for a year or two and ran the Math department at my school. Great guy. I still have to put together a decent present for him (aside from the one we all pitched in on...dunno what it will be ). Just as an example of his awesomeness: He loves kungfu/samurai movies and happily reads manga that involves samurai in some way. My school had some pretty mediocre (but not terrible) teachers too but the sheer number of great teachers we had more than made up for it.

As much as stuff like this upsets me, usually things get sorted out. Someone who actually knows what they're doing will come along and bite off someone else's head before long. I can't imagine that the parents of a child in a situation like that would actually comply or even do nothing.

...It does worry me when stupid people have children though. Mostly because they pass on not only their genes but their memes. Gah. Any time you see a kid with dumb parents GIVE THEM BOOKS OR SOMETHING.