Ask Lemmy

What did the council of seven end up being?

“Irreducible Complexity” is a (the?) cornerstone of the pseudo scientific creationist rebuttal of evolution. Or at least it was when I was young and impressionable enough to believe it.

Never heard a science teacher explain a scientific process in business terms before.

You'd think the expectation would be that gases are hotter than liquids.

I mean when writing an essay you should really be sourcing from the original source not Wikipedia, good thing Wikipedia lists the original source the info came from so you can just use that. (Unlike some websites the teacher said were better then Wikipedia which were just full of unchecked bullshit)

But for everything else Wikipedia is great

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.

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.

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

I was told General Lee was an honorable person.

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.

I was carrying not one but two programmable Casio GFX 9850 graphics calculators with me pretty much all the time. You could write some kind of Basic-ish code on these things. Neat machines, considering their age.

My class was repeatedly threatened for using more than one finger on a calculator to solve chemistry equations. “If I see those Nintendo thumbs…”

i wonder if this ever keeps any math teachers up at night. how wrong they were about this

I was just a kid so it put me off science for a bit tbh.

And isn't that a fucking shame? I mean, science can be such an interesting thing that can improve and enrich your life and can even become a career, but or just takes one bad teacher to let all that go to waste.

I had a guy teach biology and chemistry, and he was... well just not a good teacher (but a very decent human outside of class, to be fair). Made me really hate his classes and subjects. It took quite a long time for me to get more interested again.

On the other hand, I had a teacher in computer science teach is the basics of relational databases and object oriented programming in Borland Delphi (yes!), and now that I'm almost 40, I STILL feed on that knowledge, have become a sysadmin, have helped a dozen of co-eds in uni pass their programming test by tutoring them... He's just a huge part of what I've become as a person. One teacher really can make a difference, one direction or the other. Thank you Mr. Barchmann, wherever you are.

Oh boy, this reminds me of one test in college where there was a question that had a logical circuit diagram, I don't remember what it asked exactly but my answer was marked wrong, I went to the teacher the next day and told him I thought that was the right answer and he said "well, it's not, I'll demonstrate" and he wrote the question on the board called attention for everyone saying he would show the right answer to the test question, and started answering it. I saw him start to answer and immediately he made a mistake, I raised my hand to point that out and he told me to let him finish. He got to the end of the thing, showed a different result, and said "see, this was the correct result" to which I said "You missed the NOT at the beginning of the circuit", he looks at it, rewrites some stuff, and gets to my answer to which I said "and that's what you marked as the wrong result on my test". He still tried to claim that was wrong because he got the question from book X, and a colleague (who I suspect had also given the right answer) produced the book, looked up the answer and said loudly "the second answer is the one on the book". Defeated he had to give me (and whoever else had the right answer) at the point for that question. Completely unrelated story, that guy was also the coordinator of the course I was coursing and after months of waiting for recognition of some classes that I had taken at a different college coincidentally the very next week they got denied which meant I would have to take 14 extra classes (so at least a year and a half extra) to graduate, and that some of the classes I was taking that semester would have to be dropped and retaken after coursing the prerequisites (which I was trying to get recognized), one such class was the one where I got the question right... What a coincidence, right?

I should thank that guy, because of him I dropped out of college, moved to another city, and started at another college where I met my wife.

Best in that you don't have adult responsibilities.

They were kind of right and really wrong.

Im 40 and married now... remember how nervous tou were just trying to talk to someone you had a crush on? That level of "Powerline up the ass" intensity of feelings?

Yeah these days, firstly if I'm ever single again shit has gone seriously sideways... But I could without a sense of trepidation walk up to Charlize Theron in a coffee shop, tell her how amazing she was in Aeon flux, ask her how she got involved in executive producing Hyperdrive for netflix and then ask her if she would like to grab dinner sometime. Because these days you have to really go some lengths to get a rise out of me.