At least you didn't have a nun telling you that if you erased, angels would tell her you did and you'd fail.

t still not over Sister Patricia - shudder

is very, very glad she did not have Sister Patricia as a teacher

!!!1!-1!!

love this.

HMOG. I had some wacky teachers, but none like THAT! Why did god put erasers right there on the ends of pencils if we're not supposed to use them??

At least you didn't have a nun telling you that if you erased, angels would tell her you did and you'd fail.

Also? I adore your tag, GC.

(for posterity)

Heaven Less Opulent Than Vatican, Reports Disappointed Pope - Onion headline

I just realized why I even care about this: I'm still mad from first grade or whenever it was we learned subtraction, and they told me that if I had written (say) 2-5, I must have written it wrong. Just tell me I'll learn how to do that later! Not that it's impossible!!!1!-1!!

Actually, how to handle this is actually a serious pedagogical question. There are a lot of things that get taught as rules in the early grades that are relevant for a certain number system but not for the ones they'll learn later. Thing is, 2-5 really is impossible in the set of natural numbers (the set is closed under addition and multiplication, but not under subtraction or division).

Even so, your teacher was pedagogically wrong, cause telling the kid they're just wrong, without any explanation or encouragement? Wrong like a wrong thing.

(But that's a thing, see, because they don't tell you there are different number systems! They just keep showing you new rules, and you go, "But last year you said I couldn't do that!" and they say, "No, you can do that" like it never happened! Anyway, there are different number systems. Just so you know. And in the natural numbers, there are no negatives.)

Actually, I think Feynman says something like this at the beginning of Six Easy Pieces, about how, to start to learn physics, you have to learn rules which are actually wrong.

Anyway, I'm agreeing with you that that was an unhelpful and bad thing for her to do.

And also -- dude, I knew about King George III and the madness, but I didn't know he had porphyria! Did you all know that Mary Queen of Scots had porphyria? Wicked!

Even so, your teacher was pedagogically wrong, cause telling the kid they're just wrong, without any explanation or encouragement? Wrong like a wrong thing.

Yes yes yes a thousand times yes.

Signed, Was told "there's no such thing as a negative number"

PS, equally bad is "be quiet - you're not allowed to know that yet".

Timelies all!

Happy Birthday to Beth and Beej!

Healthma to all who need it!

G's dad took us out to dinner for my birthday. Tomorrow is the only day his week we have to cook, as my folks are coming in to town Wed.

"be quiet - you're not allowed to know that yet".

Ha! Yes, very bad. But also funny. "Not allowed to know it yet"? What a freaking bizarre thing for a teacher to say.

I do wonder who was teaching math classes, you know? Because in theory (assuming... see footnote), they must have known that there are different systems, and different rules apply -- you'd really think they could have come up with something better than "not allowed to know it yet," which just results with kids growing up a) resentful and b) distrusting, because every couple of years they get told that the earlier teachers were lying to them.

(Footnote: assuming, you know, a background in ma... oh. Elementary school teachers don't, for the most part, have a background in math. This may be significant. Huh.)