I'm pretty sure a currently 4yo nephew of mine will suffer some sort of bullshit like that in the coming years. Little bud is already able to read big numbers like 368 (also in english no less!) and full words despite the preschool not teaching either.

Had a similar experience around age 10. Learned that cucumbers generally have a higher water percentage than seawater, 97% to 96.5%. Tell that to a friend of the same age, he says that can't be true because all the oceans have more water than all the cucumbers in the world, we begin debating and then start fighting about it and a teacher comes by to stop us and asks what's going on. I explain and the teacher immediately looks at me like I've lost my mind, pulls my friend to the side and asks him to leave, takes me to a room and sits down to try to explain how I'm wrong and that I can't start fights over things that anyone can prove is untrue. A week after I'm sent to a kind of mental health meeting, she immediately understands and looks it up, sees that I'm right, tells me to keep away from talking about "stuff like that" with friends and others my age and also teachers and parents of other kids because it doesn't matter if I'm right or not, just that I have to think about how others perceive me...

I'm not still mad about it, but can't deny that it feels wrong and weird.

"Impossible" would be a more mathematically accurate answer than "zero".

Oof, i can feel anon. Actually true probably, similar stuff happened to me. Also getting this writte in as bad behaviour as well. I started so many arguments with teachers because they were bullshitting. Maths is one thing, i was really into it as a child(still am) but i understand why a teacher has to teach things in order. Of course this could be solved with more resources, and more importantly, distrobuting resources better by having a bit more personalized education. But what i was on about is that its very common(in eastern europe at least) for teachers to spread actual complete fucking bullshit. The amount of times they took disciplinary action against me because i corrected their batshit insane claims is just sad. This mainly happened until 5th and 6th grade where i got to the conclusion that just discussing what we covered during the class, after the class, was a good way of clearing up the mess. Of course i knew way too much for a 10 year old(had an autistic sister who loved to infodump me, we still engage in it time to time ^_^) but the point is that if a 10 year old is constantly correcting his teachers theres a problem in the system. I hoped that more western systems would be better but actually i dont see (sweden in my case) being much better for children even with everyone hyping it up. Well sorry for the rant, idk what could actually solve these problems exactly as im not an expert but i really hope we adress it one day...

Ah I recall my "science" teacher when I was 13 explaining to us that all materials expand when heated and shrink when cooled.

So I ask how ice floats, or how ice cubes swell above the tray.

My experiences were to answer correctly, and then they go 'well, yes', and then don't ask me questions in the future.

God that teachers dumb.. Why even as the question? Why not just do 20 - 20 if you are going to be upset when a kid knows the answer. Simple! Don't ask questions you don't want the correct answers to. Teaching kids the wrong answers only messes them up the next year when they have to unlearn the bullshit you taught them.

Man... This sucks. I can't believe how many lemmings have had similar experiences. I'm just remembering one now where I was excited about math, went ahead in the curriculum to fractions, and answered everything in ratios. Instead of the teacher seeing the simple mistake, I just remember them being "wrong". How deflating.

Kids need connection before correction. I'm sort of glad my kid is glued to a screen doing adaptive math. It sucks in its own way, but better than unfeeling correction. Though, at least in my district, there's a big emphasis on empathy development so I think the teachers try to model that.

My English-as-second-language teacher hated me because I kept correcting her spelling and vocabulary. But it was okay because I hated her right back and took every opportunity to annoy her (for the sake of rigorous accuracy, of course). Fortunately she couldn't actually harm or sabotage me because I aced almost all of my tests and had good scores in national ESL competitions, and a sudden drop in grades would likely have been too obvious.

The point where I'd had enough was a test about the anatomy of vehicles. She had crossed out my answer to "left side of a ship" because I'd written port or larboard (not that I expected someone with a master's diploma to know the etymology of nautical terms*, or not to confuse larboard with starboard because they looked similar), but what made my blood fucking boil was when she crossed out my answers of hood and trunk because I'd used the American words instead of the British bonnet and boot, and when I pointed out that she'd marked those same answers as correct in others' tests, she went back and fucking changed the scores on the other tests. I told her it was "deplorable conduct for a teacher" (approximate translation, and as polite as I was going to get that day) and she dragged me to the principal for disrupting the class.

That was the third year of high school (I think "junior" is the American equivalent). I took an option to graduate one year early from ESL, in part out of spite. I'm sure she was glad to be rid of me.

* I knew "larboard" and "starboard" and the names of individual sails from Assassin's Creed 4. Much of my vocabulary comes from games (including some Russian from STALKER, Metro, and MGSV).

edit: A resurfaced memory! Still regarding sailing -- she thought "in distress" meant that things were calm and safe because "di-stress" was the opposite of "stress". I swear I'm not making this shit up!

Why are you going to be learning negative numbers while you are 8? Edit: Reading the comments I see that your schools are pretty shit compared to my public school was way better (even when the building was on the verge of collapsing for like the whole time I was there)

I had a kindergarten teacher try teaching syllables by clapping them out while saying the word: 👏 ALL 👏 I 👏 GATOR! Alligator! 👏 ALL 👏 I 👏 GATOR! Three syllables.

Tried correcting her, she just clapped and said gator again.

Wisdom is knowing when to say "fuck it" to save yourself the pain.

Absolutely not fake, nor gay

I would understand "unsolvable" or something but 0 just hurts. Later you learn to specify "within natural numbers" and it's totally reasonable to stay within the number range you have learned so far and it would be fine to tell the kid "you're not wrong but let's keep it simple". Just don't teach things they have to unlearn later.

My brother was in a similar situation where he said the square root of -1 is i and the teacher was impressed and it was discussed as a positive thing at home