Thanks Joanne!
Joanne Jacobs mentioned my snide little comment about teachers and Jay-Walking earlier this month in her
column over at
Foxnews.com. I've added her to the blogroll (my heading), she's a good compliment to
Number 2 Pencil.
I will add two stories from 6th grade. When my teacher graded me down because she said I was "wrong" to contend that many of the settlers of Virginia came looking for gold, I accepted it. I didn't think I was wrong, but I realized I should have just gone with what was in the Social Studies book. But sometimes she would go over the line.
For instance, one day the class was talking about how it gets cold in winter because ... the earth is farther from the sun in winter. I was a bit confused as to what they were talking about, and realized their misunderstanding after pay attention to the theories being thrown back and forth. I raised my hand and volunteered that the axial tilt of the earth is the primary reason for seasons, and this explains why the southern hemisphere has winter during our summer. The teacher seemed irritated and dismissed me by saying that was "part of the reason."
The second incident in 6th grade was when the teacher from the other 6th grade class (I was in the "Academically Talented" class, which meant there were minimal standards) switched with my own teacher for the last two hours of every Friday. We liked her because she was a lot less strict. One day, we were going through the science section of the day, and she asked us what a "Deciduous Forest" was. My friend Ryan Hancox answered correctly. To most everyone's total shock, she said that Ryan was wrong, that a "Deciduous Forest" was a "flat treeless plain." I, being the most obnoxious member of the class, pointed out that by definition, a
treeless plain is
not a forest, and so therefore, well, you get it, right? She was livid, and simply repeated, that the correct answer was "C, a flat treeless plain." I wasn't going to push it at this point, but I realized that the woman just didn't want to admit she was wrong.
In any case, I'm sure everyone can volunteer these sort of stories. But it's stuff like this, and
not just Jay-Walking that really makes me not think too highly of teachers (things changed to some extent by High School, but even then you had Social Studies teachers explaining to kids how Sicily is in Spain!).
Godless adds:
Many (most?) high school teachers are moronic idealists. Usually their charges are just as ignorant as they are, so no one is the wiser. It's just another illustration of Hayek and Von Mises in action. The government monopoly on education causes substandard goods to be allocated to those who don't really need them.