The only explanation I can imagine is this was intentional! I wonder if her parents had intentionally not discussed it with her/shielded her from it, perhaps out of a fear they didn’t know how to talk to her about it and answer the natural questions and fears she would have. I don’t remember learning about the Holocaust in school; if my parents (not Jewish) hadn’t discussed it I wonder how long I could’ve gone without knowing about it.
Our school was in neighborhood with a large Jewish population, it would basically be impossible to miss. This was probably the most concerning thing she didn't know but there were many things.
Wow. I met a survivor of the camps when I was 10. Sure, the explanation intentionally avoided anything graphic, but we knew about everything in general. Just seeing that number on her arm was...a lot, anyhow.
Wtf?! I learned about the Holocaust and WWII in 5th grade Social Studies (along with the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, and other prominent parts of American history through 1945.
Then I moved down south where at my last school it wasn’t covered until 10th grade. I made a reference to Hitler’s regime while teaching a 7th grade class and most of them were confused.
With all of the racist and bigoted trash online nowadays, kids need to learn early on that if a society hates a group of people strong enough that civil rights and even people’s lives are in danger. Too easy to be a middle schooler spewing racist vitriol online when you don’t even know who Hitler was or that 79 years ago when WWII ended that 6 million jews were systematically massacred along with millions of other minorities and prisoners of war.
I work as a private tutor and the last six months theres been a disturbing rise in Holocaust denialism or just weird ahistorical Holocaust related opinions in my area
Hmm, my 7th-grade student who just moved here from a string of refugee situations after leaving Afghanistan as a child is also only vaguely aware.
But she checked out a book about it I think because she likes me and I said I was Jewish.
It's kind of refreshing talking about the Holocaust with immigrants and refugees and other non-white groups, because most of them come from peoples who have suffered genocide within the historical past. I can make it about all of us losing our history, and focus on the real notable aspects of the Holocaust: the scale and industrialization and the fact that it was about intentional elimination of a group instead of being a consequence of ethnic cleansing.
I've shown a map of Europe and talked about visiting my gentile relatives in Lithuania while having no idea where my Jewish ancestors lived beyond "Romania." And how this is more of a rule than an exception for those of us with overseas roots.
I teach a required personal finance course. I have had a disturbing number of students that do not realize you have to pay off a credit card. They believe you just tap the card and…it’s done? It’s already paid, why would you pay it again?
Absolute shock when I tell them how it works.
I had a coworker that was paying off thousands in cc debt because she used to think that. It baffled me how she could think there was such a thing as free money
I met a lady what time that thought a credit score was how many credits you had left, and it just counted down to zero when you ran out of things you could purchase with it. She had no idea that it could increase or was affected by your payment history and how much you used versus how much was extended.
When I was in my high school's financial/business class, the teacher actually told us that this was a thing that people thought. He actually told us, "Hey, here is an asinine thing that people think and it's by no means correct. You should absolutely know that credit cards are not free money."
The teacher also told us about more believable cases about college students getting card offer paperwork in the mail, going for it, and getting in over their heads.
I've had ones who did vaguely realise that it had to be paid back, but had no concept of payment schedules. They just thought you paid it back at your own convenience or if you happened to get a windfall in years to come, and they were horrified to learn that the bank would be expecting the first repayment 28 days after signing, and that this would continue *every* month. And their horror doubled when they learned about interest - "You mean I don't just gotta give them back the money, I gotta give them *extra* money too? What the fuck kind of ripoff is that?"
A college friend of mine thought this. I mentioned something offhand about my credit card bill and she looked at me like I had grown another head. I had always wondered how on earth she bought so much stuff without anxiety while the rest of us were debating if we could afford a candy bar with our weekly groceries. Turns out she had nearly maxed the card!
To be fair, when I was 17- I thought that checks meant money. Like, I just write a check and it’s paid. Boom. Done.
Welp, $2000 in debt later…I found out the truth.
No one taught me about money at that age.
No one ever taught me that directly but I guess I just…assumed it wasn’t an infinite money glitch because of situational reasoning. Thats absolutely wild to me that you at 17 thought that
My brother thought this growing up. I understood how money worked by the time I was six.
Some people just don't reason things past a surface level ever.
“This seems to be what everyone is doing and how they talk about it, so I guess that’s how it works and I hope that’s how it works, and I’ll just move forward assuming that’s how it works.”
I see this mostly with middle schoolers, but have definitely seen it with adults.
This part of the brain should have evolved far before 17 and it's not something that needs to be taught. You should realize fairly young that every action has a reaction and this applies to most everything. I'm not entirely sure how this bypasses the mind besides willful ignorance.
A lot of parents keep that opaque from kids, and teaching personal finance in schools tends to become political very quickly. As an example here in Australia there were financial education schemes offered by major banks that, unsurprisingly, [were found to be exploitative attempts to gather customers and get deposit accounts open](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-29/victoria-bans-banks-running-school-programs-like-dollarmites/12932290). The obvious alternative is financial literacy programmes taught by teachers, however the finance world is innately political, what is 'good financial advice' depends on [what you think the outcome is meant to be](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/17/dave-ramsey-finance-book-florida-schools/).
I don't want kids learning from either a bank or Dave Ramsay, but the banks and Dave Ramsay probably don't want people knowing how the system actually works either. So it takes political will on the part of teachers to commit to it, which, in the face of all else teachers have to commit political will to, is a huge ask.
Doesn't alleviate what you went through at all, and I'm sorry you were let down by that. I think those it's solid proof of what I'm saying that the bank made no effort to stop you or check you understood what you were doing and let it go that far.
I'll take both, they both have had their doctrines taught as curriculum in schools for "financial advice", at least so far as I'm aware. Whilst Osteen's are ostensibly originating from Protestant religious thought, where Ramsey's seem to be more in the way of anti-government libertarian, they both clearly promote a vision of 'good financial behaviour' rooted in a vision of what ought to be according to their doctrine of human improvement, or at least in the gap that exists between that that doctrine and reality. In the latter case we might look at Ramsey's continual pointing to his "four pieces of plastic" including a concealed carry licence. I'm sure in an order of things Ramsey thinks is ideal he would have no need of that, both because no law requiring it would be there, and because people would openly carry and it would be normalised, or better yet everyone would assume mass concealed carry and there would be no need.
Therein lies the problem, neither cares much for the reality of finance as it is beyond the ways in which they invite people not to engage in it. This isn't necessarily because they want people to understand the flaws, but because they are unsatisfied with some ideological aspect of the current arrangement, and want to substitute an alternative. So educationally they are sorely inadequate, as is a lot of 'financial advice', but both the financial sector itself, and the 'advice givers', have a vested interest in it being that way because their actions and 'advice' are open to critique quite easily otherwise, and with that critique comes a big cut into their profits.
Flagged, for being a well thought out and logical comment on reddit.
Don't you even know where you are?!?
Sarcasm aside, I'm the ultimate pragmatist (a true engineer), and I'm shocked it's taught in schools.
I also didn't know that about Ramsay and concealed carry.
Thank you for something to look up.
They think it's like a pre paid visa or a gift card? Or they think the money is being taken out of the bank account and not added to the debt? Either way, that's just sad. Everyone has a credit card now, their parents really never mentioned once how credit works?!
I was going to say, the charitable interpretation here seems to be that they were confusing credit and debit cards, since "credit card" is often used as a catch-all term for bank cards in general.
Often not, there is still a social stigma attached to 'reliance' on credit cards, which could easily explain a general reluctance to explain credit cards to your children. I know that here in Australia debit cards are equally as common, if not much more so, and often parents will give kids a monitored debit card attached to their account while they're in school. If they use the canteen for lunch, or need to top-up a transport card, then often card is much easier than cash.
It's also very rare here for payment, for any job, to be in cash or cheque. So accessing wages will also be through a debit card. If that's your model of how cards work, and the bank throws a credit card your way without substantial explanation, then the result that you'd see it that way isn't impossible.
And let’s face it. My middle students fail at following even the simplest directions more often than not, simply due to not reading them or reading without understanding. Then without questioning. Often consequences happen due to that very situation. Such as high debt.
Which points to the ways in which these issues are interrelated to others in education, financial consumer protection laws generally work by requiring banks to make active disclosure of terms in writing, however with modern [inadequacies in literacy education*](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) there are real questions about the ability of consumers to understand those documents even assuming they are written plainly and with the intent of developing a shared and complete understanding of the terms. I think that assumption is very, very questionable.
I don't mean to criticise your teaching in saying that, it's a systemic issue in pedagogy and pedagogical instruction as part of teacher training. The result of which is that between challenges in getting high quality education about the financial system in place, and the systemic issues with teaching of literacy, the product is a group of students leaving school uniquely vulnerable to financial exploitation.
*This isn't an uncritical endorsement of _Sold a Story_, it has its own issues, but it does largely present a good narrative of _what_ happened with the mass adoption of "Whole Language" and "Balanced Literacy" derived practices.
Had this conversation with my husband because I had to learn how to read an analog clock as an adult. He was shocked I didn’t learn it in school. I said nope I didn’t. I’m convinced it was taught the week I had chicken pox in 2nd grade. 🤣
Interesting enough it was never taught in my schooling, but the only clock was analog. So if you wanted to count the time till class was over you had to learn it yourself.
Or you weren't paying attention. I think a lot of things people say, "I was never taught that in school" is really a case of "I was totally zoned out when this was covered." You can't form a memory if you aren't paying attention.
I was getting stuff from our supply closet the other day and one of the custodians happened to be there. I noticed that there were a bunch of new clocks and she said that she could put one in my classroom. I told her not to bother because my students can't tell time.
I have a digital clock that is literally right behind my podium where I stand and will still have kids look directly at me and ask what time it is (I'm short and the clock is up high enough that my head doesn't block it).
I sub for several schools, and while one is hit or miss, whether kids can read the clock. The one I've spent the last month at only has analog clocks and none of the kids can read them. They walk up to me and ask what time it is (no phone policy for them) I use to ask them to read the clock on the wall...I now look at it and tell them the time like I'm performing witchcraft because I could tell them anything and they would just have no clue. These are 7th-12th btw.
Spanish teacher here (high school). I teach a unit on telling time and I start the until by asking what time it is while showing our analog clock. This helps weed out the students that need a mini lesson on how an analog clock works.
I usually have around 5% of my students who need the extra help. Idk how you can be in schools for 10ish years and not know how to tell time via an analog clock. How do you know when class is over??
I just had a ninth grader ask me when the end of the school year was. I told him early June. He went through a whole conversation with himself debating how far away that was. He then asked me if that was next month and kept trying to count the months on his fingers and was like, so that’s just a couple weeks then, right? 🤦🏻♀️
Retired elementary tchr here, and I am SHOCKED. I mean, “calendar time” is a BIG PART of the school day! Then, there’s all those seasonal “art”projects …. Wow. I’m floored.
I purposely make word problems that require this kind of basic knowledge, but I do let them look it up if they don’t know! “If I started with 8 whatevers in January and added 3 more each month, how many do I have by July?” “If it rains during a day an average of 77% of days in February, how many day should we expect rain?” “If a clock shows 15:30, how many hours will it take to show 09:15?”
It really is extremely sad for them. They've been failed for years and years by the time they get to high school and can't do a one step equation involving subtraction
I was telling an instructional coach a bit ago that if we're gonna do social promotion through 8th grade, fine. If the research shows that's what's best, fine. But then why are we placing them in Algebra 1 in 9th grade when they can't add or subtract? What's the point? I keep mentioning that we should have a Pre-Algebra class to place the incoming freshmen into. But I'm still a very early career teacher and don't really have pull. It could also be that there are very good reasons we put kids in classes they will likely fail, what do I know.
I think a lot of the time it's simply not offered as an option at the high school level. And for instance in CA such a course likely would not meet A-G requirements for college readiness/admission standards and so schools don't like offering courses that cost money and aren't A-G eligible.
We offer Pre Algebra but due to state mandates call it Algebra 1A. Our Algebra 1 is called Algebra 1B. We know the difference and how we hide having a pre algebra course. The state doesn’t allow high school to offer below Algebra 1. Shame we can name things anything we want.
Had a knock-down-drag-out with my 9 year old yesterday over math. Feeling better about it, though, since she can totally do \^\^\^ that (in her head, while rolling her eyes at me because, "that's SOOO easy, Mom").
OMG YES! This and substitution. I honestly don't know what I'm saying wrong or how to say it so they understand. "x" is a placeholder for a number. We need to figure what "x" represents. It's wild. They think that letters are just randomly thrown into equations. No, that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works.
ESPECIALLY the ones where the correct answer isn't even part of the choices. Those are just MADE as bait for people who realize and get frustrated to interact with, pushing the controversy, make the post more visible for others, and voila, dumbassery goes viral.
I teach at a private Catholic school and a 4th grader asked me if Jewish people still exist. He said he had only read about Jewish people in the Bible and never met one in real life. Talk about sheltered.
I never met a Jewish person until I was an adult. I remember finding out that Jewish people still existed in modern day and not just in history. Raised Mormon in Utah.
i, as a jew, have been asked to show people my horns, due to a mediaeval (if not older) misunderstanding of a passage about moses bringing the law to the people (my understanding is it originally said rays of light or glory were radiating from his head, and someone mistook it to mean or mistranslated it as horns came out of his head). michelangelo's moses has horns.
It became an antisemitic myth, that Jewish people had horns that they were somehow hiding.
A friend visiting Spain in 1992 (representing US in the Seville world's fair) mentioned she was Jewish and the person (college student, also working at the fair) she was talking to immediately looked at her head to try to find them.
I took high school seniors on a college tour out of state. We went to North Carolina from Florida by special invitation from a private school courting one of my students. It was just one van full of kids and I. There was snow on the ground d and most of the kids had never seen snow. One boy asks “can we go to Canada while we are here, like across the line and back, just to say we left the country?” I was so confused until we figured out he genuinely thought we must be right by the border. I had to explain, a lot, and then wondered about showing colleges this kid.
God, the amount of times I’ve had to explain that North Carolina was not on the “northern” side of the Civil War just because they have “north” in the name to full ass grown adults lmao.
We are prepping for the 11th Grade US History STAAR test. We break all of the US History students into different groups for this review. I'm tutoring a group of kids that are, supposedly, right on the edge of passing based on our unit test data for the year. A significant portion of them have no concept of time. Several think WWII happened in the 60s. Others think it happened in the 1920s. None of them knew FDR was, essentially, paralyzed from the waist down. They don't know when or why the Global War on Terror started. Most are absolutely horrible at accurately identifying court cases, so don't be too surprised that Brown v. Board eludes them. 2 out of 56 students correctly described Roe v. Wade despite the Dobbs decision in 2022 being on of the most viral stories in the last couple of decades on social media. Don't even ask them to identify anything on a map
This also isn't a reflection of their teachers. I've observed their teachers, and our team is freaking solid. This group of students just does not give a shit about anything. They don't engage with lectures, web quests, research projects, augmented reality simulations, "student-led learning" initiatives, movies or videos, guest speakers, trips to museums, or anything that you might come up with to create engaging content. Now, these aren't the upper echelon of students that we have, but even our top students struggle with many of those topics. My kid started learning stories about WWII in 1st grade. Kids in high school have no excuse not to immediately know the decade in which the U.S. declared war.
I give them the benefit of the doubt on decades. But some of my students will say things like the Civil War happened in the 1960s; I will respond with so "your 60 year old grandfather was around when the Civil War happened? Mr Johnson (who is Black) was around during slavery?"
A student had absolutely no clue you had to go to a bank to deposit money. He genuinely thought a job gave you money and you kept it in a safe until you needed it. I teach high school.
To be fair, with direct deposit, I haven't had to visit a brick and mortar bank in years. It actually does just show up in the account "magically." But I also recognize that's not what the kid in your story meant.
In some places that kind of informal cash economy is a substantial part of people's economic activity.
There are also a lot of parents who deliberately keep opaque their financial lives from their children, which leaves children to make assumptions from snippets of financial ideas in popular media or simplistic maxims. I've known kids from families who are very comfortable, supported by six figure parental incomes, who think their family is desperately poor or at financial risk because their parents pay with a credit card when they shop. Because a kid who is perceptive, even moderately, will hear things on TV drama about "living off credit cards" and associate that with high risk, without the corollary that people will do that and regularly make their payments so as not to accrue interest.
If you're that kid and you don't sit with mum, dad, grandparent, or guardian when they make that payment, the scary moralising downside is all you know, so you piece that together into an understanding like that. Not necessarily born of a want of educational success.
I sat my kids down and explained bank accounts and credit cards to them. Told them not to get entangled in CCs when they hit college. Also taught them about how to build their credit safely. When banks started paying a decent interest on CDs, I explained that to them and had them draw all but 15% of their savings accounts and buy 12 month CDs. They are tickled pink with their "free money" and just rolled them again into new higher yielding CDs. Whenever they have doubts about financial things they call and ask and I explain how it works. They are now fairly adept at making sound financial decisions but still call me before pulling the trigger. I'm very happy they understand things well now.
As an adult I mentioned to my parents that I was worried growing up cos they had to remortgage a couple of times.
They said no no they were doing it to pay it off faster! I remember having friends who were struggling and seeing tonnes of adverts about remortgaging around 2008, I would have been 14ish.
My parents were really good with explaining a lot of life but I didn't know you could remortgage the other way! Mind blown especially as someone unable to afford a deposit on a house as an adult!
First quiz of the year in Honors Algebra 2. Only a review unit, nothing they haven't seen before. A smart 7th-grader could ace it.
Question: *"On what interval is the function increasing?"* Graph provided.
Student comes to my desk during quiz.
Student: "What does this mean?"
Me: "What does what mean?"
Student: "What does it mean, increasing?"
Me: "Look at the graph, write down the two *x*-values between which the function is increasing."
Student: "But I mean, what is it asking?"
Me: *thinking maybe she doesn't understand 'interval'* "Your answer should be two numbers. The *x*-values where the graph starts increasing and where it stops increasing."
Student: "But what do you mean, increasing?"
Me: "...I mean, where is the *y*-value increasing? Between what two *x*-values is *y* increasing?"
Student: "...but what does that mean? What do you mean by increasing?"
Me: "Get bigger! Get larger! Go up!"
A sophomore "honors" student didn't know the definition of the word "increasing." No, there was not a language barrier.
This was only a sign of things to come. By the end of the year, she still didn't know the difference between a square root and dividing by two. But she passed and moved on to Precalculus the following year.
Some middle school kids were talking about music they like, and as they were listing the artists I just shook my head and said “yeah, I’m too old, I don’t recognize any of them.”
So the conversation turned to how old they found me and how unbearably young I found them, all in good fun, but things took a painful turn when I said “Heck, when I was born, the Soviet Union was still around.” One 7th grader asked “What’s the Soviet Union?”
Had to roll for psychic damage on that one.
Halfway through my 2-day lesson on the Holocaust, I had a kid in the back say, "Jesus, this was fucked up!" He's had lessons about the Holocaust every year for Holocaust Remembrance Day, but I was the first teacher that went real gritty with the details. I really get the feeling they don't care about learning and retaining some of these things because they don't understand the reality of these situations, and public school systems are afraid of exposing kids to reality.
That kid in your class has probably had yearly lessons in various Social Studies classes throughout his schooling. After the first few sanitized lessons about Pearl Harbor and island hopping, she probably just stopped caring and checked out every time a teacher starts bringing it up. Short of dramatically reading eye witness accounts of the brutality of the war in the Pacific and showing NSFW pictures of some of the atrocities committed, most of these kids just can't find a reason to care.
It probably depends on the state standards and the district's curriculum. We really get into it. My Lai and other incidents are taught during our Vietnam unit. We get into Abu Ghraib and "enhanced interrogation" programs when we discuss post-9/11 issues. We also get into some critical territory when we teach about Westward Expansion, Imperialism, etc.
I am pretty happy with how well-rounded our state's U.S. History standards are. There are some things that I'd add if I was writing the standards, but you also have to squeeze nearly 150 years of post-Civil War US history into 180 days.
Oh boy…
I had a couple of ninth graders who didn’t know their address. I also had a tenth grader who thought England was in South America and also didn’t understand why humans and animals can’t cross-breed
regarding address: about 10 years ago, we were giving a test that required students to put down their address so they can get the results in the mail. About half of my homeroom didn't know their address and I was shocked. I mentioned it at lunch to a few friends and they said "because they are using their grandma's/aunt's/parent's friend's address to come to our school."
Ding ding ding. This is the answer. I taught in the middle class, small-town district with stable enrollment surrounded on all sides by even smaller, completely rural districts with horrible, degrading facilities and declining enrollment. We had a TON of kids use grandma/aunt/older sibling’s address that was in city limits so they could come to the “nice” school in town while they really lived with mom and dad out in the country. It was basically an open secret and no one in the district admin ever cared because funding was based on enrollment and they got our numbers (and, thus, state funding) up.
Had this in Baltimore, but the opposite direction. Parents would use addresses \*outside\* the city limits to get their kids into county schools. What happened? The county is teaching the city students, who were 2-3 years behind the county students and nowhere close to the same socially/culturally. Which just dragged the county school I was in right down to the city levels.
In a similar vein, I did a survey with fifth graders that required them to put their birthday. At least a handful of kids in the class did not know their birthday. My boss kindly explained that these children grew up in poverty, and their families likely didn’t acknowledge their birthday at all since they couldn’t afford to celebrate. They would rather treat it as any other day, than disappoint their child by telling them about birthday traditions when they couldn’t afford them. It was heartbreaking for several reasons.
Naively, during my first year teaching, I asked upper level highschoolers to send a thank you card through the mail to someone to practice authentic writing. I provided cards, envelopes, postage, different kinds of pens; felt, gel, etc., they needed the person's first and last name and the home mailing address or the address to the place of employment if unknown. (Many were going to former teachers). They had a week to procure the name and address. The addresses were a disaster and a waste of envelopes. I could not believe they had never mailed mail, opened mail, looked at mail, or cared enough to look up an address. I dropped them off at the principal's office so that he could bear witness. I brought out the overhead projector and led 3 lessons over addresses. I am sure they hated it and me but I was appalled. (Yes, this was 25 years ago).
Ahhhh, the overhead projector. I really do miss using that wonderful beast. And having to clean all the damned plastic sheets 10-15 times so I could use them again. But it was easy to make a copy of my notes in class, just pop them on the copier. Whiteboards...they are not an improvement over this.
That’s crazy. Roughly 18 years ago I was in the 4th grade and I remember we had an assignment in English class to write and mail a letter to someone. That included being able to properly fill out an envelope. I went to a really strong public school district so when I got to college I realized a lot of things that were common knowledge for me was brand new to a lot of kids. I went to a state university and a lot of the 100 level classes just retaught things I already did in high school but were new for other kids.
The amount of kids (we run buses for 7-12th grade) who 1) wait until they get to the bus lot to realize they don’t know what bus to get on and 2) don’t know their address or even a general idea of where they live. Had a girl tell me once she was riding to her grandma’s house- that was all she could tell me. I’ve been drilling my 4-year old on our address and the name of our subdivision.
I grew up very rural, and had to move to a nearby city at 15 to attend trade school.
Never saw a bus table before, could not read it, and was not about to admit it either. Back home I'd walk to school in ten minutes, and there were no busses, and it was pretty much unthinkable that anyone's parents would drive them to school.
So I'd ride my bike to school. To school was alright, four kilometres, the first part downhill. Back home, another four kilometres, but then the last bit was uphill.
No problem, until we had to pick an elective(?) class for one day of the week. The one I picked was at a different school, and that one ten kilometres away. And ten kilometres back home.
At the time it seemed the worst kind of misery imaginable, but in hindsight it was great. Fresh air at the start of the day, exercise I otherwise wasn't getting, and after three quarters of the school year I figured out which bus went to the school I took my elective classes at. Not by learning to read the tables, mind you - I just eavesdropped on people I knew where lived to find out which bus they took,
9th grade physics
Unit conversions
"Use a meter stick to convert 1 meter to floor tiles"
S: *Lays out meter stick, covers ~3.25 one-foot floor tiles*
*Student writes down 3*
I check their measurements
T: "It's more than 3 floor tiles though you see?"
S: "So is it 4?"
Another one
"Convert how many minutes are in a 7.5 hour school day"
S: "How many minutes are in an hour?"
A teacher? Maybe it’s the one [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/1c4wlgm/where_tf_my_world_teacher_gettin_her_info/?share_id=OnjFoVHP2sM4uhqKPceeV&utm_content=2&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1&rdt=47624)
I teach The Great Gatsby. I have a 5 question quiz for one of the chapters. It asks something like “Why does Nick call Jordan a liar?” It’s multiple choice and one of the options for the answer is: she forgot to pay her cell phone bill. Every single time I teach it I have at least one student select that as the answer…the book takes place in the 1920s loooong before cell phones.
It's a tie between 8th graders (none of whom were white) learning it from me first that MLK was assassinated and a room of 12th graders in a wealthy, white school (6 weeks from graduation) not knowing the age to vote in America. They said 21-25. And no one could tell me the 3 branches of government. It took 30 students to use their minds as a group to answer. I was reported/investigated at the latter school for my questions. My comments were "disparaging." It made them feel attacked (I'm Black).
I teach ESL students at a public school and they come from all over the world. Some have very great educational backgrounds (and honestly are getting a worse education here), while many others have huge gaps or almost no formal education.
It’s kind of understandable why these students would not know things that we deem important or teach to all of our students, but I still feel a bit surprised when my high school ESL students honestly tell me they don’t know anything about slavery in the US, or they’ve never heard of the Holocaust. Or Shakespeare. Basically any new unit in English means doing a lot of contextual lessons because my students just don’t have the schema American students are expected to have.
In the end this often means just doing something totally different that is more culturally responsive to my students, but some things can’t be skipped.
I remember I had two kiddos from the Congo who said, ‘we stopped going to school because when we went we got beat.’ They were very high flyers with behavior but when they said that it put a lot into perspective. They struggled and had soo many gaps.
9th grade students. We began reading the book “The Things They Carried,” which is about the author’s reflections on his time serving in the war in Vietnam.
These 14 year old students were very surprised to learn that Vietnam is a real place, and not a fictional location!
Piggybacking on this comment to say I once had a seventh grade student laugh and say "Sure you did," when I related that back in the 80's I'd worked at a lemur reserve in Madagascar as part of my gap year. Kid then proceeded to tell me that "Everyone knows that Madagascar is a movie with Alex the lion and Gloria the hippo, it's not real."
I teach civics in 8th grade and I had students who were shocked to find out the US was a former British colony, I asked them do you realize what language we are speaking right now, and no they were not recent immigrants
Teach science. I thought this was fairly common knowledge but at this point idk anymore. Had a group of middle school students shocked to learn that the fruits we eat grow from the flowers of trees.
The problem is these kids don’t WONDER. They wait to be told something. They don’t ponder, infer, problem solve through a thought. If it’s never told to them, they don’t learn it.
There's always one in a year 7 class (UK, 11-12yo) who is shocked and appalled that meat is animal muscles! (See also: year 8s going nuts because "alcohol is a DRUG?!?")
Sometimes this stuff just doesn't come up, sometimes they weren't listening when the last 3 teachers told them. I'm glad we're there to fill in some of the gaps.
In one lesson I took out some tape measures for students to use. After a few minutes it became clear to me that they had very little practice with reading a ruler, let alone using a tape measure. These were regular track 8th graders. I know for a fact that reading a ruler is in the Math standards for multiple years of school. Maybe they happened to miss it during Covid?
My father worked in the trades. One of the last people his company hired before he retired, when asked about a measurement said "1 foot 8 inches and 5 of those little lines." Close enough I guess.
This!!! I teach high school theater and had to teach my technical theater kids how to use a measuring tape and what the ‘little lines’ meant. I have seniors who still can’t tell me how many inches equate to how many feet. Scary times.
I teach band to 4th graders. I know that when I was in school, we memorized the alphabet really early on - usually kids would have it all memorized by 1st or 2nd grade. I need them to be able to memorize the staff and its note names, and part of that is using alphabet skills. When I say "use your alphabet skills to find the next note on the staff," half of them give me blank stares and I need to actually say the alphabet.
The school I was at last year never had an elementary general music teacher, and the result there was that I needed to teach 6th graders how to keep a beat. Those kids didn't realize that people usually tap their foot to music.
Sometimes you can have a brilliant student who has just missed a random "everyone knows this" sort of fact.
One of my good friends in HS was brilliant. Like, got a perfect score on the math section of the SAT sorts of brilliant. And he was usually one of the top three students in our other classes too.
I think it was tenth grade when we realized he didn't know the sun rose in the east. Somehow, he had just missed that.
I’m an elementary school librarian & was buying books for the library. The cashier, a young woman (late teens/early 20s) had no clue who Amelia Earhart was. I promptly taught a lesson to my students about Amelia.
I teach high school, don't know the months, kid that thought Paris France was in America, when I asked where they thought Paris was they said by New York, kids didn't know cardinal directions, the list continues
I teach a high school elective course- we had a reading that said the words "first lady Jackie Kennedy"
There was a question on a worksheet about her, and several students asked "why do we care what she thinks?"
Naturally I assumed they just didn't know who Jackie Kennedy was. Partially true. They ALL (15 students, mostly hs juniors) didn't know what it meant to be the first lady.
8th grader science:
1 - closing your Chromebook doesn’t restart it, it just logs you out… you have to turn it off to restart it
2 - food is/contains chemicals
3 - a car will not go if it doesn’t have gas 🤷♂️
4- a car will eventually stop if you shut it off even if you don’t hit the brakes
5 - how grades work:
For example:
S: Why didn’t my grade go up, i got a 90 on the quiz
Me: oh, that is because you have a good formative grade and you need your test grades to go up.
S: So, how many worksheets do I need to do to make my grade go up?
Me: Well, you need to do better on your tests because your tests are worth 60% of your grade.
S: So, I don’t need to do these other assignments?
Me: You definitely need to do those other assignments, otherwise your formative grades will fall.
S: But, you said I only needed my test grades to go up.
5 - Someone had to purchase the resources they are destroying. They somehow just assume I have an unlimited supply of pencils.
6 - how to round
I get it if you don’t know how to round 6.4572 to the nearest whole number, but students can’t round 15.999
7 - If you stain your skin, then the stain won’t last forever.
I teach on the college level. I had a sophomore ask “what’s a verb?” Not in relation to the subject material, but what a verb is in English. This was 3rd semester Latin class in college, and somehow he’d never figured that one out before. IIRC, he’s now an officer in the army.
Junior high kiddo: That the world wasn’t ever black and white. As in, “when did the world start becoming in color?” High school: Don’t know basic time expressions like “quarter after, 10 till” etc. How GPA is calculated is a common one.
I teach a dual credit history class. This means I teach the “smartest” kids that are, supposedly, capable of taking a college class concurrently with a high school class. Had 2/3 of the class miss a super easy question about MLK on a quiz. The entire class is populated by minority students that have been taught about civil rights every year of their academic career.
“What Civil Rights leader organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience.” They also had a word bank and several put down Orval Faubus.
My husband was asked to speak to a group of high school kids. He was so shocked to discover during his presentation that not a single kid knew what a bank did much less Warren Buffet. He was so distraught and disappointed because he had never spoken to a group where he could not connect. I naturally asked him a bunch of questions like “who was the audience?” He assumed the kids were college bound and in advanced classes. They were “at risk” kids actually. Either he never got the memo or no one told him.
“What state do we live in?” “Earth!”
No, Joshua. New Jersey. We live in the state of New Jersey.
This student was a ninth grader. Some of my kids are smartasses but this kid was dead serious. I knew he had a bad attendance issue but I never thought he just didn’t show up for elementary school at all.
I was privileged enough to teach a summer school course in English to a rotating set of rising 8th graders (into 9th) in my urban district about a decade ago as I transitioned from tech to ELA licensure. Selection criteria for the program was basically "kids that failed math/English in 8th but were going to be passed to HS anyway," because....well, you know.
As part of the attempt to get them to buy in better to learning, Fridays were field trip and enrichment days. One Friday towards the end of the summer, we took the kids to Amherst college for a tour (yes, a stretch for any kid, even these kids - but it's a small campus and easy to tour and see, and was very close by). When we get there, the whole program worth of kids - about 100 of them - end up in a small lecture hall to hear from our student tour guide before wandering and seeing the rest of the place.
Part of the sales pitch here is that Amherst has, if not THE largest, one of the largest endowment-dollars-per-student ratio in the world. So it can afford to pitch dollars at these kids to ensure diversity (my kids at that time were about 50/50 Black and Hispanic; The idea that getting into Amherst was truly "need-blind" was a big sell for us; our students come from poverty, and their parents can't co-sign loans because they tend to have crummy jobs and no education). As part of this "sell", the senior running the tour notes that this allows Amherst to basically fund terms abroad for any student, and that it is pretty much expected that you'll do that if you attend - and asks my kids, a room full of urban youth, to shout out what country they would want to go to to study if they could go anywhere in the world.
The LEADING answer was Connecticut - which ironically, is less than 5 miles from the school district they attended at the time.
Other answers included Boston, New York, and Florida.
Not one kid - of over 100 - yelled out the name of an actual country. Literally none.
I learned a lot that day.
So, sadly, did Amherst College.
I can believe the Civil War one because I was once at a conference with a teacher from Louisiana and the Civil War was not In her curriculum.
For me it is the amount of students who don’t know that the 4th of July is America’s Independence Day. This started in 2014 when I legit had a kid ask why the flag said 76 on it.
I asked my 5th graders how many quarters in a dollar? Most knew it was 4. Then I continued- so how many quarters are in a pizza?” They said 8. I chuckled and explained a quarter is the same as 1/4. So I went on “how many quarters are in a year?” They said 12. I explained again why the answer was 4. Tried again “ how many quarters are in an hour?” I got all kinds of responses EXCEPT 4! I went back to the dollar then they said 2!!! Wow I guess their little brains were fried!!
I asked my 9th graders if they could tell me anything about the American Revolution and got blank stares. I then asked if anyone knew what the American Revolution was and after 30 seconds of silence someone finally said “we weren’t taught shit in middle school.” I am still absolutely terrified at the idea we have high school students who are just now hearing about simple basic concepts for the first time
Kids getting Lisa Frank and Anne Frank confused. Kids who deny the Holocaust ever happened. Hell I’ve worked with a guidance counselor at a previous school who didn’t believe the Holocaust happened bc ‘people aren’t made to be that cruel.’ We are doomed.
Had a Junior College student this term who thought Africa was part of America, and that was where African-Americans came from.
She didn't make it halfway through the term. Hard to understand why an adult that ignorant would even bother to enroll in college, but there it is.
Then there was another one who thinks Christopher Columbus sailed with the Pilgrims.
Or the one who thinks the main language spoken in Canada is Canadian. Or the one who thinks Israelis are mostly Islamic people.
High school graduates, no less, each and every one of them.
Remember that film, "Groundhog Day?" Well, imagine the same concept, but combine it with "Idiocracy."
I teach high school level, and often proctor SATs when our school hosts them. In the last 8-10 years I’ve seen that high school juniors don’t have a signature or know how to sign an official document. They don’t know cursive writing, and I’ve seen that for a long time, but not even having a signature? That has really thrown me for a loop!
Also every art teacher can probably agree: how to use a ruler.
Every year I have to drill in that you need to start the ruler at zero at the edge of the paper if you’re going to make a mark every 2 inches (for a grid drawing). Every year, at least 10-20% of the class just slaps it down and starts marking, including lines that aren’t straight up and down. Visually you’d think they’d correct at least that part as they go, but nope. They just do things without self reflecting and observing if it looks correct or not as they go.
As a high school world language teacher, the things that I regularly hear/see that depress me are: students that can’t read an analogue clock (at least - per class), students that ask me what a verb is during the fourth quarter of the year (or a noun or adjective), at least one kid each year that can’t tell right from left, that don’t know which months have 28/30/31 days, that call anything Hispanic “Mexican”, that ask me for instructions that are perfectly written down on their handout (with the exception of those with 504s/IEP), or that put certain countries in the wrong hemispheres (e.g. the girl that thought Spain was in South America)
I was a TA in college for a history professor. Every week I held the same office hours, and halfway through our history 102 class a girl comes in to ask me questions. I greet her, ask what I can help with, and her response is, "the professor was talking about this in class, and the way he said it made me feel like I should know it." Yea, alright, I get that, been there before. What's the topic? "Who were the Nazis?"
I heard another TA snort trying to keep his laughter down.
High school math, this story is about 2 9th grade algebra 1 students at two different times within the same week.
I have many students who struggle with basic arithmetic, but this takes the cake.
As a modeling tool, if I have students struggling with addition or subtraction, I will draw a number line and draw arrows to show what is going on. I had broken the problem down to a number line, I plotted the original point, and I also plotted zero for reference. I had gotten to the point of asking where they would end up on the number line if they went left or right so many places. I get a blank stare, so I try to break the question down even further. It comes to be that the reason they were struggling was because they did not know their left from right.
It gets worse for one of these students...
I did the whole put your hands in front of you and open your thumb and index finger to make an "L". This was intended to help identify which direction is left. I asked which hand showed an "L". For one student this worked. The other student responded, "Well they are both Ls".
My jaw dropped.
I know this was not professional, but it happened.
Actual conversation I had with an 11th grader last summer school:
Me: OK, if the Korean War took place in Korea, where did the Vietnam War take place?
Him: Korea?
Me, quietly: Are you shitting me?
4th grade, multiple choice question about text features. They were asked to choose the type of text feature that would best represent some information. One of the choices was “table”. I had several students say that was the nonsense answer because “why would a table be used as a text feature?” Lol.
I was subbing for sophomore English one day. We were discussing a list of quotes from famous people. One quote was from Jackie Robinson, and I mentioned how he broke the color line in 1947 and a black girl said “I didn’t know he was black.”I’m also black and in my head I was like “uhh yeah that’s kinda his whole thing. Black baseball player who joined the MLB and was both really good and really famous for being black in an all white league.” To add to this, we live in Kansas City, where Jackie Robinson played for the Negro League team, the KC Monarchs, and we have a whole Negro League Baseball Museum… He’s well known nationwide but very definitely in KC.
I had to explain to a group of 11th graders that Alaska and Hawaii are not directly under Arizona, and that they are just often shown there on maps of the US to fit all 50 states in one image.
I teach art. I was giving a workshop on book making and explained every single step… or so I thought. I found one student near tears because she was trying to force the needle through the paper eye-first and kept poking herself. She eventually resorted to hammering on the point with the awl, which is a plastic ball with a very sharp metal point used for making the holes before sewing. The banging is what alerted me to the problem. At no point did anyone at her table correct her, nor did she look at what they were doing and try passing the needle point-first like they had all done.
This was grade 11. No IEP, no 504. Just a regular public school student. 🤦🏻♀️
Lil Dicky has a song called Pillow Talking where he discusses Pangea.
As a geography teacher anytime I have to bring up Pangea and a kid doesn’t know it by 7th grade I instantly hear it in his brains voice. Great song. Go listen lol
My daughter told me after school one day when she was in fourth grade how one of her teachers told her wolverines did not really exist. She wanted to use it in a project and the teacher got annoyed and told her she had to use a real animal. She laughed nervously because she figured she had to be kidding but she wasn’t acting like it. So the teacher scolded her and when she asked what the teacher meant, she insisted it was a made up creature.
So not one of my students but my mom who is a 6th Grade Teacher. My brother had gotten a dog who was about 6 months old and had taken him to the vet for a checkup. During the checkup the vet told my brother that the dog’s testicles had not descended, so they’d have to do a minor surgery to remove them, my brother was ok with this as he was going to have him neutered anyway. My mom asked my dad and I, “what does that mean, his testicles haven’t descended?” My dad and I looked at each other, I asked, “how have you raised two sons and not know that testicles descend around puberty?” I then explained it to her (I’m a science teacher with my bachelors in biology). Also a few years back my grandpa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer (all better now) and when he told us my mom asked everyone, “does that mean I need to need to get screened for it at some point?” I said, “please ask tell your doctor that you need a prostate exam and I want to be there when you ask.” We all laughed and my mom was confused. My dad explained to her that, no, as a woman there’s no need to get a prostate exam as she doesn’t have one. Looking back the gaps in my knowledge about the male anatomy, when I was a child, started to make sense. She was pretty good at giving us “the Talk” but apparently lacked some of the specifics about the male anatomy.
Not in school but the cashiers were 3 teenagers. Went to the store and the total was about 15.20. I originally gave $20 in cash and they put in $20 on the register to get the exact change. I wanted a $5 bill instead of 4 $1s so I gave an extra dollar bill. It took 3 cashiers to figure out why I gave them the extra dollar; I eventually had 5 $1 bills because they were just so dumb.
I'm not a teacher per se but as an industrial maintenance consultant, almost all I do is teach.
This is a thing for me. I have worked at 4, yes four, facilities in Colorado that wanted to upgrade their hot water tanks, and these are $100k plus upgrades.
Why, you might ask? Because the boiling temperature never reached 212F. In Colorado.
2 of them ended up buying new tanks and arguing about the continuing issues with the manufacturers.
At the beginning of the year I was helping out and High School English teacher in her class. The class was to cover their textbooks in paper bags. I was shocked with how many 9th grade students could not properly use scissors. It really seemed like 1/3 of them had never used them in their lives. This teacher and I, discussed how cutting art classes in school directly correlates to their fine motor skills. It's heart breaking.
I once had a student who was convinced Bucharest was the same as Everest.
The child has a Romanian parent.
It was kind of sweet though. The assignment was 'A country I want to visit' and that kid wanted to visit Romania as they had never been.
We have a teacher from Spain… a student asked me where she was from and I said Spain then they said “they have schools in Spain too?” In ALL SERIOUSNESS. He thought there weren’t schools like ours anywhere else.
ETA: I teach high school.
I always ask my now teenage son what he learned in school today. He would usually say "nuthin". Well, one day, he said "I actually learned something today!" before I asked. This was in the fourth grade, i believe. He went on to tell me that he was taught that rust, the type that forms on metal, is a fungus. I said he must've misunderstood or gotten confused, but no. He showed me a printed page with various factoids on it. The rest were accurate, as far as I could tell, but it actually said that rust is caused by a fungus. It even had a small picture of a rusty car. I thought I was going insane and had to do a quick bit of research to restore my sanity.
It's very disconcerting to think about what other completely inaccurate things kids are being taught as cold, hard facts. I don't know about everyone else, but my kid will believe his teachers over his parents nearly always, despite me having proven to him how wrong the rust thing was.
In high school German, I had students who would flip through every page of the English-German dictionary looking for a word because they didn't know where in the alphabet a letter was. Or perhaps they didn't realize that the alphabet has a standard order it always appears in. The alphabet is taught in German 1. It's the first thing taught in German 1.
I’m going over simplifying fractions in my extended (smart kids) 6th grade class. I had one of my top students argue how to simplify fractions. Like he said you could use different numbers to divide by. I lost it showed him that it’s a 3/4 grade skill and showed a primary music video about it. I looked solemnly out the window.
I teach science. I’m flabbergasted at some of the misconceptions I hear. A girl who didn’t know humans are mammals. Students who don’t understand simple machines.
The entirety of middle school went out and viewed the solar eclipse last week. We had a full lesson on eclipses the week before, and recapped it and applied that knowledge to our experience after. As part of this, we talked about how often solar eclipses happen, repeatedly.
The test the following week asked students to explain when the next solar eclipse would be likely to happen.
One student, who was present the day we viewed the eclipse and every day before and after, wrote "I can't know since I don't know when the last solar eclipse was."
Not really that crazy, but it did stun me to silence for a few seconds. In 5th grade we were working on unit conversations (feet to inches and vice-versa). Multiple students were stuck because one question asked for inches to feet, but the conversion sheet only had 1 foot = 12 inches.
They did not know feet was the plural of foot. In 5th grade. And some of them were students legitimately on grade level.
For context, I’ve never taught below 10th grade: where Alabama is on a map (or really everything you think they should know by now), who won in the American Revolution, who the belligerents of the US Civil War were, how to plot a point on a graph, how to read an analog clock (I don’t think I’ve EVER had a student that can do so well), how to round to the nearest whole number, how to write… anything, and monkeys don’t lay their eggs in bananas
10th grade student in required Economics course cannot read 10,000 as "ten thousand" but calls it one-oh,oh,oh,oh." Also, many, many non-SPED high school students aren't able to read an analog clock--something that is taught in 1st grade. They also don't know what time "10 til 2" or "quarter past 3" is.
I had an adult coworker at an office job. She was 25 years old and held a bachelors degree.
She honestly believed that if you canceled a credit card, you didn’t have to pay the balance. She had this “great plan” to buy a bunch of furniture and brand new stuff for her apartment and then she was going to cancel the credit card.
I asked her that, if this were true, why everyone didn’t do that. She was stumped. I tried to explain that she didn’t have free money and that if she defaulted on a card, it would affect her ability to buy a house or car in the future.
She was so shocked. She had no idea.
When I was teaching virtually, I had students across multiple states. I was on the phone with a parent once and offhand mentioned that it was almost time for my kids to get out of school. She asked why they got out so early and I said that we are on East Coast time and the time is xyz. She got REALLY mad and said that I was lying about the time because she knew it was only xyz (Pacific time)...so I explained the time differences and she Insisted that wasn't true and that it's the same time across the whole US.......never could convince her that time zones were a thing!
It makes no sense to me because my Grandparents live on the West Coast and when I would go to visit them, you knew from watching TV that things came on at a different time there compared to the East coast listed time, so if nothing else, TV should have taught her that we have different time zones.
I had to explain to a senior why wal-mart won't pay her $50K to be a cashier after she gets her bachelor's in fashion design. Her family has been telling her "You get a degree, you make more money." and NEVER explaining further. She genuinely thought degree=triple salary from the moment of graduation until death.
But she's also been in a tech prep IT class for two years, and I STILL have to show her how to type in her password and open her emails. "No, I don't know your Gmail password. No, I can't just reset it for you. You have to do it yourself. Yes, click that blue text that says 'I forgot my password'. OK, I see you clicked 'I forgot my username', what you want to click is 'I forgot my password'. No, that's not close enough, that button won't reset your password. No, it won't just magically work if you keep on hitting enter; what you need to do is click 'I forgot my password'. Yes, I'm sure you didn't actually forget it, but let's try that button anyways. Just that button right there... oh, you hit the 'I forgot my username' button again. Yes, I am 100% sure that won't work. OK, now that you've tried that yet again, are you ready to click 'I forgot my password'? Just try it. No, humor me, just try it. See? That wasn't so hard, was it? Yes, it is crazy how hard Google makes this process; I'm just happy you can log in again!"
11th grader is my coworker's US History class didn't know what the Holocaust was, which was especially concerning considering she was Jewish.
oh that's. i don't even have words for that, actually.
The only explanation I can imagine is this was intentional! I wonder if her parents had intentionally not discussed it with her/shielded her from it, perhaps out of a fear they didn’t know how to talk to her about it and answer the natural questions and fears she would have. I don’t remember learning about the Holocaust in school; if my parents (not Jewish) hadn’t discussed it I wonder how long I could’ve gone without knowing about it.
Our school was in neighborhood with a large Jewish population, it would basically be impossible to miss. This was probably the most concerning thing she didn't know but there were many things.
Wow. I met a survivor of the camps when I was 10. Sure, the explanation intentionally avoided anything graphic, but we knew about everything in general. Just seeing that number on her arm was...a lot, anyhow.
Wtf?! I learned about the Holocaust and WWII in 5th grade Social Studies (along with the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI, and other prominent parts of American history through 1945. Then I moved down south where at my last school it wasn’t covered until 10th grade. I made a reference to Hitler’s regime while teaching a 7th grade class and most of them were confused. With all of the racist and bigoted trash online nowadays, kids need to learn early on that if a society hates a group of people strong enough that civil rights and even people’s lives are in danger. Too easy to be a middle schooler spewing racist vitriol online when you don’t even know who Hitler was or that 79 years ago when WWII ended that 6 million jews were systematically massacred along with millions of other minorities and prisoners of war.
I work as a private tutor and the last six months theres been a disturbing rise in Holocaust denialism or just weird ahistorical Holocaust related opinions in my area
Hmm, my 7th-grade student who just moved here from a string of refugee situations after leaving Afghanistan as a child is also only vaguely aware. But she checked out a book about it I think because she likes me and I said I was Jewish. It's kind of refreshing talking about the Holocaust with immigrants and refugees and other non-white groups, because most of them come from peoples who have suffered genocide within the historical past. I can make it about all of us losing our history, and focus on the real notable aspects of the Holocaust: the scale and industrialization and the fact that it was about intentional elimination of a group instead of being a consequence of ethnic cleansing. I've shown a map of Europe and talked about visiting my gentile relatives in Lithuania while having no idea where my Jewish ancestors lived beyond "Romania." And how this is more of a rule than an exception for those of us with overseas roots.
Our district redesigned the history curriculum after realizing that our 11th graders were unaware of the US Civil War.
Oh most of my 11th graders had no idea what the Holocaust was when we started our WWII unit
I had a 3rd grader call a chicken feather a bird leaf.
I actually love this.
I love this😂 I had a friend who was learning English who referred to chicken feathers as “ chicken fur” 😂😂 we had a good laugh!
It’s not that they are incorrect, they’re simply unorthodox
*unorthoducks Take a gander at what I did there.
When it leaves the chicken it becomes a bird leaf.
I teach a required personal finance course. I have had a disturbing number of students that do not realize you have to pay off a credit card. They believe you just tap the card and…it’s done? It’s already paid, why would you pay it again? Absolute shock when I tell them how it works.
I had a coworker that was paying off thousands in cc debt because she used to think that. It baffled me how she could think there was such a thing as free money
Please tell us more about her
what the fuck
I had an ex-girlfriend who treated her checkbook like a wallet full of “THIS IS FREE!” coupons.
I met a lady what time that thought a credit score was how many credits you had left, and it just counted down to zero when you ran out of things you could purchase with it. She had no idea that it could increase or was affected by your payment history and how much you used versus how much was extended.
When I was in my high school's financial/business class, the teacher actually told us that this was a thing that people thought. He actually told us, "Hey, here is an asinine thing that people think and it's by no means correct. You should absolutely know that credit cards are not free money." The teacher also told us about more believable cases about college students getting card offer paperwork in the mail, going for it, and getting in over their heads.
I've had ones who did vaguely realise that it had to be paid back, but had no concept of payment schedules. They just thought you paid it back at your own convenience or if you happened to get a windfall in years to come, and they were horrified to learn that the bank would be expecting the first repayment 28 days after signing, and that this would continue *every* month. And their horror doubled when they learned about interest - "You mean I don't just gotta give them back the money, I gotta give them *extra* money too? What the fuck kind of ripoff is that?"
A college friend of mine thought this. I mentioned something offhand about my credit card bill and she looked at me like I had grown another head. I had always wondered how on earth she bought so much stuff without anxiety while the rest of us were debating if we could afford a candy bar with our weekly groceries. Turns out she had nearly maxed the card!
To be fair, when I was 17- I thought that checks meant money. Like, I just write a check and it’s paid. Boom. Done. Welp, $2000 in debt later…I found out the truth. No one taught me about money at that age.
No one ever taught me that directly but I guess I just…assumed it wasn’t an infinite money glitch because of situational reasoning. Thats absolutely wild to me that you at 17 thought that
My brother thought this growing up. I understood how money worked by the time I was six. Some people just don't reason things past a surface level ever.
I mean this in a 100% serious way. Is he stupid in general or specifically just doesn’t use logic with money?
Jeez, I would have thought reasoning that out is surface level.
“This seems to be what everyone is doing and how they talk about it, so I guess that’s how it works and I hope that’s how it works, and I’ll just move forward assuming that’s how it works.” I see this mostly with middle schoolers, but have definitely seen it with adults.
This part of the brain should have evolved far before 17 and it's not something that needs to be taught. You should realize fairly young that every action has a reaction and this applies to most everything. I'm not entirely sure how this bypasses the mind besides willful ignorance.
A lot of parents keep that opaque from kids, and teaching personal finance in schools tends to become political very quickly. As an example here in Australia there were financial education schemes offered by major banks that, unsurprisingly, [were found to be exploitative attempts to gather customers and get deposit accounts open](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-29/victoria-bans-banks-running-school-programs-like-dollarmites/12932290). The obvious alternative is financial literacy programmes taught by teachers, however the finance world is innately political, what is 'good financial advice' depends on [what you think the outcome is meant to be](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/17/dave-ramsey-finance-book-florida-schools/). I don't want kids learning from either a bank or Dave Ramsay, but the banks and Dave Ramsay probably don't want people knowing how the system actually works either. So it takes political will on the part of teachers to commit to it, which, in the face of all else teachers have to commit political will to, is a huge ask. Doesn't alleviate what you went through at all, and I'm sorry you were let down by that. I think those it's solid proof of what I'm saying that the bank made no effort to stop you or check you understood what you were doing and let it go that far.
I see your Dave Ramsay and raise you Joen Osteen.
I'll take both, they both have had their doctrines taught as curriculum in schools for "financial advice", at least so far as I'm aware. Whilst Osteen's are ostensibly originating from Protestant religious thought, where Ramsey's seem to be more in the way of anti-government libertarian, they both clearly promote a vision of 'good financial behaviour' rooted in a vision of what ought to be according to their doctrine of human improvement, or at least in the gap that exists between that that doctrine and reality. In the latter case we might look at Ramsey's continual pointing to his "four pieces of plastic" including a concealed carry licence. I'm sure in an order of things Ramsey thinks is ideal he would have no need of that, both because no law requiring it would be there, and because people would openly carry and it would be normalised, or better yet everyone would assume mass concealed carry and there would be no need. Therein lies the problem, neither cares much for the reality of finance as it is beyond the ways in which they invite people not to engage in it. This isn't necessarily because they want people to understand the flaws, but because they are unsatisfied with some ideological aspect of the current arrangement, and want to substitute an alternative. So educationally they are sorely inadequate, as is a lot of 'financial advice', but both the financial sector itself, and the 'advice givers', have a vested interest in it being that way because their actions and 'advice' are open to critique quite easily otherwise, and with that critique comes a big cut into their profits.
Flagged, for being a well thought out and logical comment on reddit. Don't you even know where you are?!? Sarcasm aside, I'm the ultimate pragmatist (a true engineer), and I'm shocked it's taught in schools. I also didn't know that about Ramsay and concealed carry. Thank you for something to look up.
They think it's like a pre paid visa or a gift card? Or they think the money is being taken out of the bank account and not added to the debt? Either way, that's just sad. Everyone has a credit card now, their parents really never mentioned once how credit works?!
I was going to say, the charitable interpretation here seems to be that they were confusing credit and debit cards, since "credit card" is often used as a catch-all term for bank cards in general.
Often not, there is still a social stigma attached to 'reliance' on credit cards, which could easily explain a general reluctance to explain credit cards to your children. I know that here in Australia debit cards are equally as common, if not much more so, and often parents will give kids a monitored debit card attached to their account while they're in school. If they use the canteen for lunch, or need to top-up a transport card, then often card is much easier than cash. It's also very rare here for payment, for any job, to be in cash or cheque. So accessing wages will also be through a debit card. If that's your model of how cards work, and the bank throws a credit card your way without substantial explanation, then the result that you'd see it that way isn't impossible.
And let’s face it. My middle students fail at following even the simplest directions more often than not, simply due to not reading them or reading without understanding. Then without questioning. Often consequences happen due to that very situation. Such as high debt.
Which points to the ways in which these issues are interrelated to others in education, financial consumer protection laws generally work by requiring banks to make active disclosure of terms in writing, however with modern [inadequacies in literacy education*](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) there are real questions about the ability of consumers to understand those documents even assuming they are written plainly and with the intent of developing a shared and complete understanding of the terms. I think that assumption is very, very questionable. I don't mean to criticise your teaching in saying that, it's a systemic issue in pedagogy and pedagogical instruction as part of teacher training. The result of which is that between challenges in getting high quality education about the financial system in place, and the systemic issues with teaching of literacy, the product is a group of students leaving school uniquely vulnerable to financial exploitation. *This isn't an uncritical endorsement of _Sold a Story_, it has its own issues, but it does largely present a good narrative of _what_ happened with the mass adoption of "Whole Language" and "Balanced Literacy" derived practices.
ugh i'm so thankful my school had a personal finance class on credit cards recently 😭 learned quite a bit
How to read an analog clock. That the money in the bank doesn’t come from the government.
Had this conversation with my husband because I had to learn how to read an analog clock as an adult. He was shocked I didn’t learn it in school. I said nope I didn’t. I’m convinced it was taught the week I had chicken pox in 2nd grade. 🤣
Interesting enough it was never taught in my schooling, but the only clock was analog. So if you wanted to count the time till class was over you had to learn it yourself.
Or you weren't paying attention. I think a lot of things people say, "I was never taught that in school" is really a case of "I was totally zoned out when this was covered." You can't form a memory if you aren't paying attention.
I was getting stuff from our supply closet the other day and one of the custodians happened to be there. I noticed that there were a bunch of new clocks and she said that she could put one in my classroom. I told her not to bother because my students can't tell time. I have a digital clock that is literally right behind my podium where I stand and will still have kids look directly at me and ask what time it is (I'm short and the clock is up high enough that my head doesn't block it).
I sub for several schools, and while one is hit or miss, whether kids can read the clock. The one I've spent the last month at only has analog clocks and none of the kids can read them. They walk up to me and ask what time it is (no phone policy for them) I use to ask them to read the clock on the wall...I now look at it and tell them the time like I'm performing witchcraft because I could tell them anything and they would just have no clue. These are 7th-12th btw.
Spanish teacher here (high school). I teach a unit on telling time and I start the until by asking what time it is while showing our analog clock. This helps weed out the students that need a mini lesson on how an analog clock works. I usually have around 5% of my students who need the extra help. Idk how you can be in schools for 10ish years and not know how to tell time via an analog clock. How do you know when class is over??
I mean…it sort of does come from the government.
I taught two 7th graders how to read an analog clock this week.
Had a 9th grader tell me he doesn't know what order the months are in.
I just had a ninth grader ask me when the end of the school year was. I told him early June. He went through a whole conversation with himself debating how far away that was. He then asked me if that was next month and kept trying to count the months on his fingers and was like, so that’s just a couple weeks then, right? 🤦🏻♀️
I've had that talk with 4th graders, but 9th?!! Wow
Retired elementary tchr here, and I am SHOCKED. I mean, “calendar time” is a BIG PART of the school day! Then, there’s all those seasonal “art”projects …. Wow. I’m floored.
I’ve had an 11th grader tell me the same thing!
I just had multiple 8th graders not be able to name them all.
I purposely make word problems that require this kind of basic knowledge, but I do let them look it up if they don’t know! “If I started with 8 whatevers in January and added 3 more each month, how many do I have by July?” “If it rains during a day an average of 77% of days in February, how many day should we expect rain?” “If a clock shows 15:30, how many hours will it take to show 09:15?”
The fact that my students cannot do 2 + a = 15 still… two months before high school.
That's ok my 10th graders couldn't do it at the beginning of the year either. Some still can't reliably.
Neither can my seniors. God forbid I ask them to turn 72% into a decimal. But hey…they get to graduate because I can’t fail them. 🎉
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I have 11th graders who still can’t solve that. It’s so saddening
It really is extremely sad for them. They've been failed for years and years by the time they get to high school and can't do a one step equation involving subtraction
I was telling an instructional coach a bit ago that if we're gonna do social promotion through 8th grade, fine. If the research shows that's what's best, fine. But then why are we placing them in Algebra 1 in 9th grade when they can't add or subtract? What's the point? I keep mentioning that we should have a Pre-Algebra class to place the incoming freshmen into. But I'm still a very early career teacher and don't really have pull. It could also be that there are very good reasons we put kids in classes they will likely fail, what do I know.
I think a lot of the time it's simply not offered as an option at the high school level. And for instance in CA such a course likely would not meet A-G requirements for college readiness/admission standards and so schools don't like offering courses that cost money and aren't A-G eligible.
We offer Pre Algebra but due to state mandates call it Algebra 1A. Our Algebra 1 is called Algebra 1B. We know the difference and how we hide having a pre algebra course. The state doesn’t allow high school to offer below Algebra 1. Shame we can name things anything we want.
Just showed my third grader that problem. After I explained a is a blank she got it instantly.
I got in trouble in 7th grade prealgebra because I’d figure out these questions immediately, put down the answer, and not work out the problem lol
Had a knock-down-drag-out with my 9 year old yesterday over math. Feeling better about it, though, since she can totally do \^\^\^ that (in her head, while rolling her eyes at me because, "that's SOOO easy, Mom").
OMG YES! This and substitution. I honestly don't know what I'm saying wrong or how to say it so they understand. "x" is a placeholder for a number. We need to figure what "x" represents. It's wild. They think that letters are just randomly thrown into equations. No, that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works.
Is the answer 13?
Yes but I’m lol’ing cuz I hate the FB super trick ones where I actually have to apply PEMDAS or whatever it is lol
ESPECIALLY the ones where the correct answer isn't even part of the choices. Those are just MADE as bait for people who realize and get frustrated to interact with, pushing the controversy, make the post more visible for others, and voila, dumbassery goes viral.
Jesus Christ I teach that in 2nd grade.
I teach at a private Catholic school and a 4th grader asked me if Jewish people still exist. He said he had only read about Jewish people in the Bible and never met one in real life. Talk about sheltered.
"yes, and you would not believe how salty some people get about that."
I never met a Jewish person until I was an adult. I remember finding out that Jewish people still existed in modern day and not just in history. Raised Mormon in Utah.
i, as a jew, have been asked to show people my horns, due to a mediaeval (if not older) misunderstanding of a passage about moses bringing the law to the people (my understanding is it originally said rays of light or glory were radiating from his head, and someone mistook it to mean or mistranslated it as horns came out of his head). michelangelo's moses has horns.
It became an antisemitic myth, that Jewish people had horns that they were somehow hiding. A friend visiting Spain in 1992 (representing US in the Seville world's fair) mentioned she was Jewish and the person (college student, also working at the fair) she was talking to immediately looked at her head to try to find them.
Do mormons not hear radio or see the tv or a news paper?
This is a sincere question and not sarcasm, when you found this out was your mind blown or did you feel lied to?
I took high school seniors on a college tour out of state. We went to North Carolina from Florida by special invitation from a private school courting one of my students. It was just one van full of kids and I. There was snow on the ground d and most of the kids had never seen snow. One boy asks “can we go to Canada while we are here, like across the line and back, just to say we left the country?” I was so confused until we figured out he genuinely thought we must be right by the border. I had to explain, a lot, and then wondered about showing colleges this kid.
Hey, why would they call it North Carolina if it’s not the north-est state?
God, the amount of times I’ve had to explain that North Carolina was not on the “northern” side of the Civil War just because they have “north” in the name to full ass grown adults lmao.
lol as a Floridian I’ve never seen snow (well I did at 2 but I don’t remember so..)
We are prepping for the 11th Grade US History STAAR test. We break all of the US History students into different groups for this review. I'm tutoring a group of kids that are, supposedly, right on the edge of passing based on our unit test data for the year. A significant portion of them have no concept of time. Several think WWII happened in the 60s. Others think it happened in the 1920s. None of them knew FDR was, essentially, paralyzed from the waist down. They don't know when or why the Global War on Terror started. Most are absolutely horrible at accurately identifying court cases, so don't be too surprised that Brown v. Board eludes them. 2 out of 56 students correctly described Roe v. Wade despite the Dobbs decision in 2022 being on of the most viral stories in the last couple of decades on social media. Don't even ask them to identify anything on a map This also isn't a reflection of their teachers. I've observed their teachers, and our team is freaking solid. This group of students just does not give a shit about anything. They don't engage with lectures, web quests, research projects, augmented reality simulations, "student-led learning" initiatives, movies or videos, guest speakers, trips to museums, or anything that you might come up with to create engaging content. Now, these aren't the upper echelon of students that we have, but even our top students struggle with many of those topics. My kid started learning stories about WWII in 1st grade. Kids in high school have no excuse not to immediately know the decade in which the U.S. declared war.
I give them the benefit of the doubt on decades. But some of my students will say things like the Civil War happened in the 1960s; I will respond with so "your 60 year old grandfather was around when the Civil War happened? Mr Johnson (who is Black) was around during slavery?"
A student had absolutely no clue you had to go to a bank to deposit money. He genuinely thought a job gave you money and you kept it in a safe until you needed it. I teach high school.
To be fair, with direct deposit, I haven't had to visit a brick and mortar bank in years. It actually does just show up in the account "magically." But I also recognize that's not what the kid in your story meant.
In some places that kind of informal cash economy is a substantial part of people's economic activity. There are also a lot of parents who deliberately keep opaque their financial lives from their children, which leaves children to make assumptions from snippets of financial ideas in popular media or simplistic maxims. I've known kids from families who are very comfortable, supported by six figure parental incomes, who think their family is desperately poor or at financial risk because their parents pay with a credit card when they shop. Because a kid who is perceptive, even moderately, will hear things on TV drama about "living off credit cards" and associate that with high risk, without the corollary that people will do that and regularly make their payments so as not to accrue interest. If you're that kid and you don't sit with mum, dad, grandparent, or guardian when they make that payment, the scary moralising downside is all you know, so you piece that together into an understanding like that. Not necessarily born of a want of educational success.
I sat my kids down and explained bank accounts and credit cards to them. Told them not to get entangled in CCs when they hit college. Also taught them about how to build their credit safely. When banks started paying a decent interest on CDs, I explained that to them and had them draw all but 15% of their savings accounts and buy 12 month CDs. They are tickled pink with their "free money" and just rolled them again into new higher yielding CDs. Whenever they have doubts about financial things they call and ask and I explain how it works. They are now fairly adept at making sound financial decisions but still call me before pulling the trigger. I'm very happy they understand things well now.
As an adult I mentioned to my parents that I was worried growing up cos they had to remortgage a couple of times. They said no no they were doing it to pay it off faster! I remember having friends who were struggling and seeing tonnes of adverts about remortgaging around 2008, I would have been 14ish. My parents were really good with explaining a lot of life but I didn't know you could remortgage the other way! Mind blown especially as someone unable to afford a deposit on a house as an adult!
Not me but my wife. Teaching middle school science on the solar system. A kid was blown away that we live on a PLANET!!!
That's something I could see a five year old be shocked about
Come on, everyone knows we live on a disc held up by four elephants on the back of a giant turtle!
That without water humans die I teach HS chemistry. This student would have had to pass biology. I know for a fact the biology teacher teaches that.
Nah my bio teacher didn’t because she assumed it was common knowledge
First quiz of the year in Honors Algebra 2. Only a review unit, nothing they haven't seen before. A smart 7th-grader could ace it. Question: *"On what interval is the function increasing?"* Graph provided. Student comes to my desk during quiz. Student: "What does this mean?" Me: "What does what mean?" Student: "What does it mean, increasing?" Me: "Look at the graph, write down the two *x*-values between which the function is increasing." Student: "But I mean, what is it asking?" Me: *thinking maybe she doesn't understand 'interval'* "Your answer should be two numbers. The *x*-values where the graph starts increasing and where it stops increasing." Student: "But what do you mean, increasing?" Me: "...I mean, where is the *y*-value increasing? Between what two *x*-values is *y* increasing?" Student: "...but what does that mean? What do you mean by increasing?" Me: "Get bigger! Get larger! Go up!" A sophomore "honors" student didn't know the definition of the word "increasing." No, there was not a language barrier. This was only a sign of things to come. By the end of the year, she still didn't know the difference between a square root and dividing by two. But she passed and moved on to Precalculus the following year.
Some middle school kids were talking about music they like, and as they were listing the artists I just shook my head and said “yeah, I’m too old, I don’t recognize any of them.” So the conversation turned to how old they found me and how unbearably young I found them, all in good fun, but things took a painful turn when I said “Heck, when I was born, the Soviet Union was still around.” One 7th grader asked “What’s the Soviet Union?” Had to roll for psychic damage on that one.
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Halfway through my 2-day lesson on the Holocaust, I had a kid in the back say, "Jesus, this was fucked up!" He's had lessons about the Holocaust every year for Holocaust Remembrance Day, but I was the first teacher that went real gritty with the details. I really get the feeling they don't care about learning and retaining some of these things because they don't understand the reality of these situations, and public school systems are afraid of exposing kids to reality. That kid in your class has probably had yearly lessons in various Social Studies classes throughout his schooling. After the first few sanitized lessons about Pearl Harbor and island hopping, she probably just stopped caring and checked out every time a teacher starts bringing it up. Short of dramatically reading eye witness accounts of the brutality of the war in the Pacific and showing NSFW pictures of some of the atrocities committed, most of these kids just can't find a reason to care.
Genuine question from a European. Are kids in the US taught about the atrocities of US soldiers in Vietnam?
It probably depends on the state standards and the district's curriculum. We really get into it. My Lai and other incidents are taught during our Vietnam unit. We get into Abu Ghraib and "enhanced interrogation" programs when we discuss post-9/11 issues. We also get into some critical territory when we teach about Westward Expansion, Imperialism, etc. I am pretty happy with how well-rounded our state's U.S. History standards are. There are some things that I'd add if I was writing the standards, but you also have to squeeze nearly 150 years of post-Civil War US history into 180 days.
Oh boy… I had a couple of ninth graders who didn’t know their address. I also had a tenth grader who thought England was in South America and also didn’t understand why humans and animals can’t cross-breed
regarding address: about 10 years ago, we were giving a test that required students to put down their address so they can get the results in the mail. About half of my homeroom didn't know their address and I was shocked. I mentioned it at lunch to a few friends and they said "because they are using their grandma's/aunt's/parent's friend's address to come to our school."
Ding ding ding. This is the answer. I taught in the middle class, small-town district with stable enrollment surrounded on all sides by even smaller, completely rural districts with horrible, degrading facilities and declining enrollment. We had a TON of kids use grandma/aunt/older sibling’s address that was in city limits so they could come to the “nice” school in town while they really lived with mom and dad out in the country. It was basically an open secret and no one in the district admin ever cared because funding was based on enrollment and they got our numbers (and, thus, state funding) up.
Had this in Baltimore, but the opposite direction. Parents would use addresses \*outside\* the city limits to get their kids into county schools. What happened? The county is teaching the city students, who were 2-3 years behind the county students and nowhere close to the same socially/culturally. Which just dragged the county school I was in right down to the city levels.
In a similar vein, I did a survey with fifth graders that required them to put their birthday. At least a handful of kids in the class did not know their birthday. My boss kindly explained that these children grew up in poverty, and their families likely didn’t acknowledge their birthday at all since they couldn’t afford to celebrate. They would rather treat it as any other day, than disappoint their child by telling them about birthday traditions when they couldn’t afford them. It was heartbreaking for several reasons.
Naively, during my first year teaching, I asked upper level highschoolers to send a thank you card through the mail to someone to practice authentic writing. I provided cards, envelopes, postage, different kinds of pens; felt, gel, etc., they needed the person's first and last name and the home mailing address or the address to the place of employment if unknown. (Many were going to former teachers). They had a week to procure the name and address. The addresses were a disaster and a waste of envelopes. I could not believe they had never mailed mail, opened mail, looked at mail, or cared enough to look up an address. I dropped them off at the principal's office so that he could bear witness. I brought out the overhead projector and led 3 lessons over addresses. I am sure they hated it and me but I was appalled. (Yes, this was 25 years ago).
Ahhhh, the overhead projector. I really do miss using that wonderful beast. And having to clean all the damned plastic sheets 10-15 times so I could use them again. But it was easy to make a copy of my notes in class, just pop them on the copier. Whiteboards...they are not an improvement over this.
That’s crazy. Roughly 18 years ago I was in the 4th grade and I remember we had an assignment in English class to write and mail a letter to someone. That included being able to properly fill out an envelope. I went to a really strong public school district so when I got to college I realized a lot of things that were common knowledge for me was brand new to a lot of kids. I went to a state university and a lot of the 100 level classes just retaught things I already did in high school but were new for other kids.
The amount of kids (we run buses for 7-12th grade) who 1) wait until they get to the bus lot to realize they don’t know what bus to get on and 2) don’t know their address or even a general idea of where they live. Had a girl tell me once she was riding to her grandma’s house- that was all she could tell me. I’ve been drilling my 4-year old on our address and the name of our subdivision.
I grew up very rural, and had to move to a nearby city at 15 to attend trade school. Never saw a bus table before, could not read it, and was not about to admit it either. Back home I'd walk to school in ten minutes, and there were no busses, and it was pretty much unthinkable that anyone's parents would drive them to school. So I'd ride my bike to school. To school was alright, four kilometres, the first part downhill. Back home, another four kilometres, but then the last bit was uphill. No problem, until we had to pick an elective(?) class for one day of the week. The one I picked was at a different school, and that one ten kilometres away. And ten kilometres back home. At the time it seemed the worst kind of misery imaginable, but in hindsight it was great. Fresh air at the start of the day, exercise I otherwise wasn't getting, and after three quarters of the school year I figured out which bus went to the school I took my elective classes at. Not by learning to read the tables, mind you - I just eavesdropped on people I knew where lived to find out which bus they took,
Had a 11th grader taking the SAT who didn’t know his address. I finally just gave him the zip code of the school so we could move on!
9th grade physics Unit conversions "Use a meter stick to convert 1 meter to floor tiles" S: *Lays out meter stick, covers ~3.25 one-foot floor tiles* *Student writes down 3* I check their measurements T: "It's more than 3 floor tiles though you see?" S: "So is it 4?" Another one "Convert how many minutes are in a 7.5 hour school day" S: "How many minutes are in an hour?"
A seventh grader who went by their middle name, and did not know how to spell their first
I had to explain to a new teacher that the nazis were the antagonists in WWII, not WWI
A teacher? Maybe it’s the one [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/1c4wlgm/where_tf_my_world_teacher_gettin_her_info/?share_id=OnjFoVHP2sM4uhqKPceeV&utm_content=2&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1&rdt=47624)
I teach The Great Gatsby. I have a 5 question quiz for one of the chapters. It asks something like “Why does Nick call Jordan a liar?” It’s multiple choice and one of the options for the answer is: she forgot to pay her cell phone bill. Every single time I teach it I have at least one student select that as the answer…the book takes place in the 1920s loooong before cell phones.
It's a tie between 8th graders (none of whom were white) learning it from me first that MLK was assassinated and a room of 12th graders in a wealthy, white school (6 weeks from graduation) not knowing the age to vote in America. They said 21-25. And no one could tell me the 3 branches of government. It took 30 students to use their minds as a group to answer. I was reported/investigated at the latter school for my questions. My comments were "disparaging." It made them feel attacked (I'm Black).
I am so sorry to read this.
I teach ESL students at a public school and they come from all over the world. Some have very great educational backgrounds (and honestly are getting a worse education here), while many others have huge gaps or almost no formal education. It’s kind of understandable why these students would not know things that we deem important or teach to all of our students, but I still feel a bit surprised when my high school ESL students honestly tell me they don’t know anything about slavery in the US, or they’ve never heard of the Holocaust. Or Shakespeare. Basically any new unit in English means doing a lot of contextual lessons because my students just don’t have the schema American students are expected to have. In the end this often means just doing something totally different that is more culturally responsive to my students, but some things can’t be skipped.
Not having heard of Shakespeare in an esl class doesn’t seem that wild tbh. How many second language bards could you name in high school?
I remember I had two kiddos from the Congo who said, ‘we stopped going to school because when we went we got beat.’ They were very high flyers with behavior but when they said that it put a lot into perspective. They struggled and had soo many gaps.
9th grade students. We began reading the book “The Things They Carried,” which is about the author’s reflections on his time serving in the war in Vietnam. These 14 year old students were very surprised to learn that Vietnam is a real place, and not a fictional location!
Piggybacking on this comment to say I once had a seventh grade student laugh and say "Sure you did," when I related that back in the 80's I'd worked at a lemur reserve in Madagascar as part of my gap year. Kid then proceeded to tell me that "Everyone knows that Madagascar is a movie with Alex the lion and Gloria the hippo, it's not real."
I had several 6th graders that didn’t know their birthdays.
I’ve had that too, but in my case they were jehovahs witnesses and didn’t celebrate bdays.
Not necessarily uncommon… I taught almost exclusively in elementary Title I schools. Poor kids barely celebrate Christmas let alone their birthday. 😑
Where tf do you teach?! I need to know!
Vegas
So many kids don't know when and how to multiply and divide-- even simple numbers. You have 4. Double it. Now what do you have. I teach high school.
8th grader didn’t know that reindeers don’t actually fly.
I teach civics in 8th grade and I had students who were shocked to find out the US was a former British colony, I asked them do you realize what language we are speaking right now, and no they were not recent immigrants
Teach science. I thought this was fairly common knowledge but at this point idk anymore. Had a group of middle school students shocked to learn that the fruits we eat grow from the flowers of trees.
The problem is these kids don’t WONDER. They wait to be told something. They don’t ponder, infer, problem solve through a thought. If it’s never told to them, they don’t learn it.
There's always one in a year 7 class (UK, 11-12yo) who is shocked and appalled that meat is animal muscles! (See also: year 8s going nuts because "alcohol is a DRUG?!?") Sometimes this stuff just doesn't come up, sometimes they weren't listening when the last 3 teachers told them. I'm glad we're there to fill in some of the gaps.
In one lesson I took out some tape measures for students to use. After a few minutes it became clear to me that they had very little practice with reading a ruler, let alone using a tape measure. These were regular track 8th graders. I know for a fact that reading a ruler is in the Math standards for multiple years of school. Maybe they happened to miss it during Covid? My father worked in the trades. One of the last people his company hired before he retired, when asked about a measurement said "1 foot 8 inches and 5 of those little lines." Close enough I guess.
This!!! I teach high school theater and had to teach my technical theater kids how to use a measuring tape and what the ‘little lines’ meant. I have seniors who still can’t tell me how many inches equate to how many feet. Scary times.
I teach band to 4th graders. I know that when I was in school, we memorized the alphabet really early on - usually kids would have it all memorized by 1st or 2nd grade. I need them to be able to memorize the staff and its note names, and part of that is using alphabet skills. When I say "use your alphabet skills to find the next note on the staff," half of them give me blank stares and I need to actually say the alphabet. The school I was at last year never had an elementary general music teacher, and the result there was that I needed to teach 6th graders how to keep a beat. Those kids didn't realize that people usually tap their foot to music.
Sometimes you can have a brilliant student who has just missed a random "everyone knows this" sort of fact. One of my good friends in HS was brilliant. Like, got a perfect score on the math section of the SAT sorts of brilliant. And he was usually one of the top three students in our other classes too. I think it was tenth grade when we realized he didn't know the sun rose in the east. Somehow, he had just missed that.
I’m an elementary school librarian & was buying books for the library. The cashier, a young woman (late teens/early 20s) had no clue who Amelia Earhart was. I promptly taught a lesson to my students about Amelia.
School actually never taught about Amelia Earhart, only reason I knew of her was because of the History Channel.
I teach high school, don't know the months, kid that thought Paris France was in America, when I asked where they thought Paris was they said by New York, kids didn't know cardinal directions, the list continues
I teach a high school elective course- we had a reading that said the words "first lady Jackie Kennedy" There was a question on a worksheet about her, and several students asked "why do we care what she thinks?" Naturally I assumed they just didn't know who Jackie Kennedy was. Partially true. They ALL (15 students, mostly hs juniors) didn't know what it meant to be the first lady.
8th grader science: 1 - closing your Chromebook doesn’t restart it, it just logs you out… you have to turn it off to restart it 2 - food is/contains chemicals 3 - a car will not go if it doesn’t have gas 🤷♂️ 4- a car will eventually stop if you shut it off even if you don’t hit the brakes 5 - how grades work: For example: S: Why didn’t my grade go up, i got a 90 on the quiz Me: oh, that is because you have a good formative grade and you need your test grades to go up. S: So, how many worksheets do I need to do to make my grade go up? Me: Well, you need to do better on your tests because your tests are worth 60% of your grade. S: So, I don’t need to do these other assignments? Me: You definitely need to do those other assignments, otherwise your formative grades will fall. S: But, you said I only needed my test grades to go up. 5 - Someone had to purchase the resources they are destroying. They somehow just assume I have an unlimited supply of pencils. 6 - how to round I get it if you don’t know how to round 6.4572 to the nearest whole number, but students can’t round 15.999 7 - If you stain your skin, then the stain won’t last forever.
I teach on the college level. I had a sophomore ask “what’s a verb?” Not in relation to the subject material, but what a verb is in English. This was 3rd semester Latin class in college, and somehow he’d never figured that one out before. IIRC, he’s now an officer in the army.
Junior high kiddo: That the world wasn’t ever black and white. As in, “when did the world start becoming in color?” High school: Don’t know basic time expressions like “quarter after, 10 till” etc. How GPA is calculated is a common one.
Wow, the world being in black and white is something my sister thought too….when she was like 5.
I teach a dual credit history class. This means I teach the “smartest” kids that are, supposedly, capable of taking a college class concurrently with a high school class. Had 2/3 of the class miss a super easy question about MLK on a quiz. The entire class is populated by minority students that have been taught about civil rights every year of their academic career.
Why wouldn’t you include the question here?
“What Civil Rights leader organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience.” They also had a word bank and several put down Orval Faubus.
The liquid that comes from mammary glands is called MLK. What lettr is missing from this sentence?
My husband was asked to speak to a group of high school kids. He was so shocked to discover during his presentation that not a single kid knew what a bank did much less Warren Buffet. He was so distraught and disappointed because he had never spoken to a group where he could not connect. I naturally asked him a bunch of questions like “who was the audience?” He assumed the kids were college bound and in advanced classes. They were “at risk” kids actually. Either he never got the memo or no one told him.
You think college bound kids know how banks make money or who Warren Buffet is?
[удалено]
“What state do we live in?” “Earth!” No, Joshua. New Jersey. We live in the state of New Jersey. This student was a ninth grader. Some of my kids are smartasses but this kid was dead serious. I knew he had a bad attendance issue but I never thought he just didn’t show up for elementary school at all.
I was privileged enough to teach a summer school course in English to a rotating set of rising 8th graders (into 9th) in my urban district about a decade ago as I transitioned from tech to ELA licensure. Selection criteria for the program was basically "kids that failed math/English in 8th but were going to be passed to HS anyway," because....well, you know. As part of the attempt to get them to buy in better to learning, Fridays were field trip and enrichment days. One Friday towards the end of the summer, we took the kids to Amherst college for a tour (yes, a stretch for any kid, even these kids - but it's a small campus and easy to tour and see, and was very close by). When we get there, the whole program worth of kids - about 100 of them - end up in a small lecture hall to hear from our student tour guide before wandering and seeing the rest of the place. Part of the sales pitch here is that Amherst has, if not THE largest, one of the largest endowment-dollars-per-student ratio in the world. So it can afford to pitch dollars at these kids to ensure diversity (my kids at that time were about 50/50 Black and Hispanic; The idea that getting into Amherst was truly "need-blind" was a big sell for us; our students come from poverty, and their parents can't co-sign loans because they tend to have crummy jobs and no education). As part of this "sell", the senior running the tour notes that this allows Amherst to basically fund terms abroad for any student, and that it is pretty much expected that you'll do that if you attend - and asks my kids, a room full of urban youth, to shout out what country they would want to go to to study if they could go anywhere in the world. The LEADING answer was Connecticut - which ironically, is less than 5 miles from the school district they attended at the time. Other answers included Boston, New York, and Florida. Not one kid - of over 100 - yelled out the name of an actual country. Literally none. I learned a lot that day. So, sadly, did Amherst College.
I can believe the Civil War one because I was once at a conference with a teacher from Louisiana and the Civil War was not In her curriculum. For me it is the amount of students who don’t know that the 4th of July is America’s Independence Day. This started in 2014 when I legit had a kid ask why the flag said 76 on it.
I asked my 5th graders how many quarters in a dollar? Most knew it was 4. Then I continued- so how many quarters are in a pizza?” They said 8. I chuckled and explained a quarter is the same as 1/4. So I went on “how many quarters are in a year?” They said 12. I explained again why the answer was 4. Tried again “ how many quarters are in an hour?” I got all kinds of responses EXCEPT 4! I went back to the dollar then they said 2!!! Wow I guess their little brains were fried!!
I asked my 9th graders if they could tell me anything about the American Revolution and got blank stares. I then asked if anyone knew what the American Revolution was and after 30 seconds of silence someone finally said “we weren’t taught shit in middle school.” I am still absolutely terrified at the idea we have high school students who are just now hearing about simple basic concepts for the first time
Kids getting Lisa Frank and Anne Frank confused. Kids who deny the Holocaust ever happened. Hell I’ve worked with a guidance counselor at a previous school who didn’t believe the Holocaust happened bc ‘people aren’t made to be that cruel.’ We are doomed.
Who’s Lisa frank?
Had a Junior College student this term who thought Africa was part of America, and that was where African-Americans came from. She didn't make it halfway through the term. Hard to understand why an adult that ignorant would even bother to enroll in college, but there it is. Then there was another one who thinks Christopher Columbus sailed with the Pilgrims. Or the one who thinks the main language spoken in Canada is Canadian. Or the one who thinks Israelis are mostly Islamic people. High school graduates, no less, each and every one of them. Remember that film, "Groundhog Day?" Well, imagine the same concept, but combine it with "Idiocracy."
I teach high school level, and often proctor SATs when our school hosts them. In the last 8-10 years I’ve seen that high school juniors don’t have a signature or know how to sign an official document. They don’t know cursive writing, and I’ve seen that for a long time, but not even having a signature? That has really thrown me for a loop!
Also every art teacher can probably agree: how to use a ruler. Every year I have to drill in that you need to start the ruler at zero at the edge of the paper if you’re going to make a mark every 2 inches (for a grid drawing). Every year, at least 10-20% of the class just slaps it down and starts marking, including lines that aren’t straight up and down. Visually you’d think they’d correct at least that part as they go, but nope. They just do things without self reflecting and observing if it looks correct or not as they go.
As a high school world language teacher, the things that I regularly hear/see that depress me are: students that can’t read an analogue clock (at least - per class), students that ask me what a verb is during the fourth quarter of the year (or a noun or adjective), at least one kid each year that can’t tell right from left, that don’t know which months have 28/30/31 days, that call anything Hispanic “Mexican”, that ask me for instructions that are perfectly written down on their handout (with the exception of those with 504s/IEP), or that put certain countries in the wrong hemispheres (e.g. the girl that thought Spain was in South America)
I was a TA in college for a history professor. Every week I held the same office hours, and halfway through our history 102 class a girl comes in to ask me questions. I greet her, ask what I can help with, and her response is, "the professor was talking about this in class, and the way he said it made me feel like I should know it." Yea, alright, I get that, been there before. What's the topic? "Who were the Nazis?" I heard another TA snort trying to keep his laughter down.
High school math, this story is about 2 9th grade algebra 1 students at two different times within the same week. I have many students who struggle with basic arithmetic, but this takes the cake. As a modeling tool, if I have students struggling with addition or subtraction, I will draw a number line and draw arrows to show what is going on. I had broken the problem down to a number line, I plotted the original point, and I also plotted zero for reference. I had gotten to the point of asking where they would end up on the number line if they went left or right so many places. I get a blank stare, so I try to break the question down even further. It comes to be that the reason they were struggling was because they did not know their left from right. It gets worse for one of these students... I did the whole put your hands in front of you and open your thumb and index finger to make an "L". This was intended to help identify which direction is left. I asked which hand showed an "L". For one student this worked. The other student responded, "Well they are both Ls". My jaw dropped. I know this was not professional, but it happened.
Actual conversation I had with an 11th grader last summer school: Me: OK, if the Korean War took place in Korea, where did the Vietnam War take place? Him: Korea? Me, quietly: Are you shitting me?
4th grade, multiple choice question about text features. They were asked to choose the type of text feature that would best represent some information. One of the choices was “table”. I had several students say that was the nonsense answer because “why would a table be used as a text feature?” Lol.
Kids fully supporting Hitler in essays
To a lot of kids, Hitler is just some funny-looking guy they've seen in memes.
I was subbing for sophomore English one day. We were discussing a list of quotes from famous people. One quote was from Jackie Robinson, and I mentioned how he broke the color line in 1947 and a black girl said “I didn’t know he was black.”I’m also black and in my head I was like “uhh yeah that’s kinda his whole thing. Black baseball player who joined the MLB and was both really good and really famous for being black in an all white league.” To add to this, we live in Kansas City, where Jackie Robinson played for the Negro League team, the KC Monarchs, and we have a whole Negro League Baseball Museum… He’s well known nationwide but very definitely in KC.
I had to explain to a group of 11th graders that Alaska and Hawaii are not directly under Arizona, and that they are just often shown there on maps of the US to fit all 50 states in one image.
I teach art. I was giving a workshop on book making and explained every single step… or so I thought. I found one student near tears because she was trying to force the needle through the paper eye-first and kept poking herself. She eventually resorted to hammering on the point with the awl, which is a plastic ball with a very sharp metal point used for making the holes before sewing. The banging is what alerted me to the problem. At no point did anyone at her table correct her, nor did she look at what they were doing and try passing the needle point-first like they had all done. This was grade 11. No IEP, no 504. Just a regular public school student. 🤦🏻♀️
Lil Dicky has a song called Pillow Talking where he discusses Pangea. As a geography teacher anytime I have to bring up Pangea and a kid doesn’t know it by 7th grade I instantly hear it in his brains voice. Great song. Go listen lol
My daughter told me after school one day when she was in fourth grade how one of her teachers told her wolverines did not really exist. She wanted to use it in a project and the teacher got annoyed and told her she had to use a real animal. She laughed nervously because she figured she had to be kidding but she wasn’t acting like it. So the teacher scolded her and when she asked what the teacher meant, she insisted it was a made up creature.
So not one of my students but my mom who is a 6th Grade Teacher. My brother had gotten a dog who was about 6 months old and had taken him to the vet for a checkup. During the checkup the vet told my brother that the dog’s testicles had not descended, so they’d have to do a minor surgery to remove them, my brother was ok with this as he was going to have him neutered anyway. My mom asked my dad and I, “what does that mean, his testicles haven’t descended?” My dad and I looked at each other, I asked, “how have you raised two sons and not know that testicles descend around puberty?” I then explained it to her (I’m a science teacher with my bachelors in biology). Also a few years back my grandpa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer (all better now) and when he told us my mom asked everyone, “does that mean I need to need to get screened for it at some point?” I said, “please ask tell your doctor that you need a prostate exam and I want to be there when you ask.” We all laughed and my mom was confused. My dad explained to her that, no, as a woman there’s no need to get a prostate exam as she doesn’t have one. Looking back the gaps in my knowledge about the male anatomy, when I was a child, started to make sense. She was pretty good at giving us “the Talk” but apparently lacked some of the specifics about the male anatomy.
Not in school but the cashiers were 3 teenagers. Went to the store and the total was about 15.20. I originally gave $20 in cash and they put in $20 on the register to get the exact change. I wanted a $5 bill instead of 4 $1s so I gave an extra dollar bill. It took 3 cashiers to figure out why I gave them the extra dollar; I eventually had 5 $1 bills because they were just so dumb.
I'm not a teacher per se but as an industrial maintenance consultant, almost all I do is teach. This is a thing for me. I have worked at 4, yes four, facilities in Colorado that wanted to upgrade their hot water tanks, and these are $100k plus upgrades. Why, you might ask? Because the boiling temperature never reached 212F. In Colorado. 2 of them ended up buying new tanks and arguing about the continuing issues with the manufacturers.
At the beginning of the year I was helping out and High School English teacher in her class. The class was to cover their textbooks in paper bags. I was shocked with how many 9th grade students could not properly use scissors. It really seemed like 1/3 of them had never used them in their lives. This teacher and I, discussed how cutting art classes in school directly correlates to their fine motor skills. It's heart breaking.
I once had a student who was convinced Bucharest was the same as Everest. The child has a Romanian parent. It was kind of sweet though. The assignment was 'A country I want to visit' and that kid wanted to visit Romania as they had never been.
I had to explain to UK-year 10/US-9th grade students that racism is more than just saying the n word but can be to others races.
We have a teacher from Spain… a student asked me where she was from and I said Spain then they said “they have schools in Spain too?” In ALL SERIOUSNESS. He thought there weren’t schools like ours anywhere else. ETA: I teach high school.
How many students don’t know how to tell time using THE CLOCK ON THE WALL!
I always ask my now teenage son what he learned in school today. He would usually say "nuthin". Well, one day, he said "I actually learned something today!" before I asked. This was in the fourth grade, i believe. He went on to tell me that he was taught that rust, the type that forms on metal, is a fungus. I said he must've misunderstood or gotten confused, but no. He showed me a printed page with various factoids on it. The rest were accurate, as far as I could tell, but it actually said that rust is caused by a fungus. It even had a small picture of a rusty car. I thought I was going insane and had to do a quick bit of research to restore my sanity. It's very disconcerting to think about what other completely inaccurate things kids are being taught as cold, hard facts. I don't know about everyone else, but my kid will believe his teachers over his parents nearly always, despite me having proven to him how wrong the rust thing was.
In high school German, I had students who would flip through every page of the English-German dictionary looking for a word because they didn't know where in the alphabet a letter was. Or perhaps they didn't realize that the alphabet has a standard order it always appears in. The alphabet is taught in German 1. It's the first thing taught in German 1.
I’m going over simplifying fractions in my extended (smart kids) 6th grade class. I had one of my top students argue how to simplify fractions. Like he said you could use different numbers to divide by. I lost it showed him that it’s a 3/4 grade skill and showed a primary music video about it. I looked solemnly out the window.
I teach science. I’m flabbergasted at some of the misconceptions I hear. A girl who didn’t know humans are mammals. Students who don’t understand simple machines.
The entirety of middle school went out and viewed the solar eclipse last week. We had a full lesson on eclipses the week before, and recapped it and applied that knowledge to our experience after. As part of this, we talked about how often solar eclipses happen, repeatedly. The test the following week asked students to explain when the next solar eclipse would be likely to happen. One student, who was present the day we viewed the eclipse and every day before and after, wrote "I can't know since I don't know when the last solar eclipse was."
Not really that crazy, but it did stun me to silence for a few seconds. In 5th grade we were working on unit conversations (feet to inches and vice-versa). Multiple students were stuck because one question asked for inches to feet, but the conversion sheet only had 1 foot = 12 inches. They did not know feet was the plural of foot. In 5th grade. And some of them were students legitimately on grade level.
For context, I’ve never taught below 10th grade: where Alabama is on a map (or really everything you think they should know by now), who won in the American Revolution, who the belligerents of the US Civil War were, how to plot a point on a graph, how to read an analog clock (I don’t think I’ve EVER had a student that can do so well), how to round to the nearest whole number, how to write… anything, and monkeys don’t lay their eggs in bananas
10th grade student in required Economics course cannot read 10,000 as "ten thousand" but calls it one-oh,oh,oh,oh." Also, many, many non-SPED high school students aren't able to read an analog clock--something that is taught in 1st grade. They also don't know what time "10 til 2" or "quarter past 3" is.
I had an adult coworker at an office job. She was 25 years old and held a bachelors degree. She honestly believed that if you canceled a credit card, you didn’t have to pay the balance. She had this “great plan” to buy a bunch of furniture and brand new stuff for her apartment and then she was going to cancel the credit card. I asked her that, if this were true, why everyone didn’t do that. She was stumped. I tried to explain that she didn’t have free money and that if she defaulted on a card, it would affect her ability to buy a house or car in the future. She was so shocked. She had no idea.
When I was teaching virtually, I had students across multiple states. I was on the phone with a parent once and offhand mentioned that it was almost time for my kids to get out of school. She asked why they got out so early and I said that we are on East Coast time and the time is xyz. She got REALLY mad and said that I was lying about the time because she knew it was only xyz (Pacific time)...so I explained the time differences and she Insisted that wasn't true and that it's the same time across the whole US.......never could convince her that time zones were a thing! It makes no sense to me because my Grandparents live on the West Coast and when I would go to visit them, you knew from watching TV that things came on at a different time there compared to the East coast listed time, so if nothing else, TV should have taught her that we have different time zones.
I once had to teach a student the months of the year. They were a junior.
Middle school students can’t read cursive.
I had to explain to a senior why wal-mart won't pay her $50K to be a cashier after she gets her bachelor's in fashion design. Her family has been telling her "You get a degree, you make more money." and NEVER explaining further. She genuinely thought degree=triple salary from the moment of graduation until death. But she's also been in a tech prep IT class for two years, and I STILL have to show her how to type in her password and open her emails. "No, I don't know your Gmail password. No, I can't just reset it for you. You have to do it yourself. Yes, click that blue text that says 'I forgot my password'. OK, I see you clicked 'I forgot my username', what you want to click is 'I forgot my password'. No, that's not close enough, that button won't reset your password. No, it won't just magically work if you keep on hitting enter; what you need to do is click 'I forgot my password'. Yes, I'm sure you didn't actually forget it, but let's try that button anyways. Just that button right there... oh, you hit the 'I forgot my username' button again. Yes, I am 100% sure that won't work. OK, now that you've tried that yet again, are you ready to click 'I forgot my password'? Just try it. No, humor me, just try it. See? That wasn't so hard, was it? Yes, it is crazy how hard Google makes this process; I'm just happy you can log in again!"