Ask Lemmy

Had a science teacher back in middle school that claimed to have a buddy that "designed" a way to make gas engines more efficient by running the gas line over the engine to warm it up before entering the engine. Said that GM bought the "design" with no patent, and hid it away so that it wouldn't get out. Problem is, that's not how BTUs work and GM would obviously know that. Also that's a good way to destroy your engine by misfiring.

I remember a bunch of things in science class in middle school, because I was really into science and it bothered me that they oversimplified everything to the point of being straight up false. Like a definition of "animals" being "something with eyes and a mouth". I mentioned several examples of animals without eyes, like corals, but the teacher just exasperatedly said that they did have small mouths. Ok, but your definition said eyes and a mouth, not or.

I also remember a question in a test about astronomy being "what is the biggest object". I thought about it for a moment and then wrote "the universe"; which I'll maintain to this day, was right. But it was marked wrong. The expected answer was the sun. I talked about it to the teacher, because it wasn't like I pulled the existence of objects bigger than the sun from my personal knowledge only, we'd explicitly talked about bigger stars and galaxies. But the teacher said "It was implied 'biggest object in the solar system' ". Implied how? It definitely wasn't written. I still want my point back.

It doesn't matter if I'm a good person, if I don't believe in god, I'm going to hellll.

That the civil war was fought over states rights.

I had a teacher confidently tell the class that Mt. Everest didn’t border China (well Tibet really, but that’s a battle for another day). I will say she was able to concede she was mistaken. I had another teacher hit on me when I was in high school while I was alone with her in the copy room. I had always heard some salacious rumors about her, but I always assumed they were just idle gossip until that day. That was a different kind of wrong. And no, I didn’t take her up on the advance.

I’m assuming English isn’t your first language, so just as an FYI, wrongest isn’t a word. “Most false” is probably the best fit in this instance. Just one of those weird quirks of this bastard language.

When I was 11, an entire class of students and the biology professor were adamant that snakes do not have skeletons. I knew for a fact this was false because I had seen one at the museum.

My middle school computer teacher once said that unwanted email was called "flame". I had never heard that term before or since used in the context of email.

I failed a test because I said there were only 8 planets and the "correct" answer was 9. The teacher didn't know Pluto had been demoted. Lol

I don't remember the specifics because it was damn near 40 years ago, but I had a teacher tell the class that everyone has a sort of 6th-sense sight through an invisible 3rd eye in the middle of your forehead. And her example was that blind people will pick out clothes by colors or tell someone they were wearing an ugly tie. Which I've never seen, at least not outside of some sort of Hallmark Romance Drama quality religious schlock.

I never had any problem correcting a teacher if they made some calculation error or misquoted something out of the book (I wasn't an asshole who corrected every single thing, just the ones that might be material to everyone else's understanding of the lesson).

But when confronted with a teacher spewing utter bullshit, I was at a total loss for a response. I can't imagine anyone else believed it, either, but what a fucking loon. My sister was/is blind and the only superhuman power she had was being fucking annoying.

I don't even know if that was the worst/only one, but that's the one that has always stood out for me.

I guess you could add that American Exceptionalism was taught as a legitimate point of view rather than nationalist bullshit.

RAM is memory inside the computer, ROM is memory on the disk (5.25" floppy)

Drafting on computers won't be long term.

The Russians/Soviets have guard towers on every block who monitor which rooms citizens are in at any given moment. Absolutely no true freedom of movement, unlike those of us in the free world. At the time, I figured people could trick the guards by just not turning on lights in the room when they moved about. As the years went on, two questions came to mind: isn't that prohibitively expensive? and why???

My 6th grade science teacher interrupted me while reading aloud after I correctly pronounced "tsunami". He goes "What's that?....tuh-soo-mee?". I said Yeah, he spends 10 seconds digesting it, and I continue reading aloud.

The next kid to read after me pronounced it tuh-soo-mee.

The Milky Way leads to God

Shakespeare's plays were never printed in his lifetime, they were compiled from people who saw the plays live, went home, and wrote down what they remembered.

"You'll enjoy ice skating, it's easy!" - the teacher who took our class to an ice rink... 😂

The moment I'm over the ice I become the human equivalent of a scruffed cat and people started pushing me around like I was a hockey puck and I was smiling pretending I was having fun but inside I was like