Ask Lemmy

We watched an educational movie from the 1950s by Frank Capra, which my 8th grade science teacher had liked as a kid. He admitted they were somewhat dated, but still basically accurate.

In it, the scientist explained that they still don't understand how chloroplasts transform sunlight into energy. The cartoon chloroplast hid what she was doing and said something like, "The Russians don't know either."

I was pretty blown away by a scientist admitting they didn't know something, at that age, but when I looked it up, I discovered that scientists had pretty much figured it out, but it's very complicated.

Clip if you're interested: https://archive.org/details/our_mr_sun around 36:09

Or yt: https://youtu.be/VEfomqnif34?t=36m09s

“The human eye can only perceive 60 FPS”

This was in a graduate level class studying optics for virtual reality systems.

I shit you not. I believed this for far too long.

I'd surprisingly been thinking about this just a while ago. Definitely not the wrongest, but one of the weirdest things I have been taught was the theories of the origin of life. I remember being pretty confused by most of them (though the most accepted one made sense to me), but the one that said that life came from a meteorite from space was the one that tripped me up the most. AND WHERE DOES THE FREAKING LIFE THAT THE FREAKING METEORITE BROUGHT TO EARTH COME FROM?! It told me pretty much nothing.

I searched it up just to see if it really existed, and lo and behold, it is the seventh theory of the first result that I found which states exactly what I thought haha

I spent first 8 years in a Christian school, took me to adulthood to learn that evolution theory is not just a "unproven hypothesis"

"Medieval armies didn't use crossbows when attacking castles."

My hand immediately shot up. "What are you talking about? Of course they did."

My elderly history teacher replied "no, they didn't."

Me "Why do you think that?"

Her "because crossbows fire in a straight line so they would just shoot over the castle."

I looked at my classmates, hoping they would see how insane this is. They were looking at me like I grew a second head.

Me "that's not true. At all."

Her, getting slightly annoyed, "how do you know?"

Me "well for one, I've fired a crossbow, I know how they work. For two, they had GRAVITY BACK THEN, the bolt comes back down!"

Her, and some of the class "ooooh!"

...

Her "well anyway...." And continues the lesson.

This was a college class.

I had a Mormon science teacher who told us that there was a giant planet in the middle of the universe that astronomers could see and that was where god lived I never believed anything he said after that

that super size me was a reputible documentary

In 8th grade my family had to leave my home state of wisconsin to be in Mt.Ida, Arkansas for 9 months or so. During that time I had to attend the local public school and I remember the science teacher saying "matter cannot be created nor destroyed." I've always loved science and was a huge nerd during that awkward time in my life and I knew well it was ENERGY and figured she just said it by accident. Easy mistake. I said that it was energy, not matter, that can't be created nor destroyed and she argued with me and was dead serious when she insisted it was indeed matter.

I said something along the lines of hydrogen turning to helium inside the sun, and wouldn't ya know it, she didn't believe the universe was old enough for that to be true and only god can create matter... Yup, she was a 7-day creationist who wholely belived the universe was 5000 years old teaching science in a public school in bumfuck Arkansas. I gave up and a lot of things she said before finally started making sense but in all the wrong ways.

This bumb bitch was a fundamentalist Christian. The rest of the brief time I was there, and for the first time in my life, I didn't give two shits about a class that was usually one of my favorites.

My Spanish teacher would teach us Spaniard Spanish and claim it was Mexican Spanish. One day I found out the hard way.

By the same civics teacher: All unions but teacher unions are obsolete. Welfare queens are having more kids just to collect more. Realestate only goes up. He also said that the Waltons(of Walmart) were second to fifth riches people in the world. I did fact check him with a Forbes printout on that one. I think there's more neo-con bs that I'm forgetting at the moment.

Computer teacher: Your muscles contain memory cells and that's now typists can type so fast. This was a very creative interpretation of "Muscle Memory".

Media teacher: AM radio travels in beams and can go farther then FM radio that travels in waves.

School therapist: If you get into that harder class, you may fail and feel sad. Guess what? Now having succeed at someone else's expectation, I feel sad all the time. That may have been the moment were I could have fixed the direction my life was taking if I pushed back. Chances are they would have come up with other reasons to deny me though.

Karl Marx was russian(by a history teacher)

Adults with autism dont exist, but kids with autism exist; the moon is an artificial satellite made by aliens; scientists are saying that 2+2=5 (by a logic teacher)

There is a conspiracy(organized by the jewish world leader) in romanian schools to trick children into starting HRT by saying to take some pills so they wont look pale right before going to act in front of an audience so they would become infertile and stop overpopulation(by a biology teacher)

This one is a little different. On the first week of some college introductory economics class, the teacher was basically just reading from the textbook we all had, some historical figure who was a member of the "Council Of Seven" or something like that, when a student raised her hand - "Ma'am, what was the Council Of Seven?" - the teacher paused, and said - "Can you bring it tomorrow, as assignment?" - and actually giggled. This was in the 90s, pre-internet, looking up something like that was not a trivial task.

The teacher might have thought she was being cute and/or deflected her own shortcomings, but the actual effect was that we immediately lost all respect and trust for her, no one ever raised a hand again in her class, we all immediately went into rote robot mode for the rest of the semester, disengaged on a gut level.