Republicans vote to defund Planned Parenthood.

[Nikkoru]

Teachers are obligated, obviously, to teach. They are under no obligation to make you learn.

Sink or swim, in the end it's your choice.

eh ive seen plenty of teachers who dont teach. Especially shitty history teachers, they just tell you to reach chapter x-y or pages x-y and then give you a premade hand out that came with that edition of the books and a test along the same lines. No teaching involved

Never met one of those. The worst teachers I've had, one was a university professor with tenure who never taught below a post-graduate student, and insisted on talking to us without explaining anything.. and then making it more complicated. It was like listening to an adult on Charlie Brown, some other students seemed to have a vague impression of what the hell she was saying, but 3/4 of the class sat in utter terror that she would make us say something.

The second, taught a class she clearly had no real insight into the material - she marked things without explaining the reason for her grading - I spent a good 4-5 classes at 90 minutes each (this being high school) where people came up complaining about their marks. Ironically she gave me better marks for stuff I frankly put little effort into it at all compared to the students who obviously were gunning hard for an A+. She read more or less what was in the text books, and didn't take questions. She had no rubric, and only left only a vague impression of what we supposed to do on anything. The class was full of contentious people who were going to send their grades into university. I suspect she spent more time arguing with her students then actually doing anything. It was hilarious, but counter-productive.

I got a 96 in that class, no idea how I got it or why I didn't get 100. To be fair, she was a substitute for the original full-time teacher who was on maternity leave.

Most of my teachers, even the one's I personally dislike, have been exemplary.

[jaybug]

I was never good at learning new math principles. For some reason, I am just not mathematically disposed. And now that I got old, found that I should not have stopped taking math, as soon as they said I didn't have to take any more math classes. Luckily I still got a 550 on the SAT a year after my last math class.

And the best math teacher I found in college, was the guy who wanted to teach college math. He was doing what he wanted to do, not being forced to teach dumb math to lesser mortals. But he was required to teach as part of his graduate studies. Other than that, the best math in college was at community college level. They only go up two years, so you don't have that vast disparity between the gifted and the rest of the world. And you are taught by professors, not the gifted who teach to the ones who can do math.

[vicious796]

I've found every math teacher I've ever had to be strikingly similar to the one before them. They all tend to believe mathematics as the only thing "real" in the world - everything else a theory.

Literature teachers I find the worst - most have never showed anything other than dread in going over the same passages from the same literature over and over again.

History is hit or miss. Some teachers I've had have been the best - going over what each part of history meant to another. Connecting the dots, if you will. Others have been as said before, read x-y and recite.

[Nikkoru]

I've found every math teacher I've ever had to be strikingly similar to the one before them. They all tend to believe mathematics as the only thing "real" in the world - everything else a theory.

Literature teachers I find the worst - most have never showed anything other than dread in going over the same passages from the same literature over and over again.

History is hit or miss. Some teachers I've had have been the best - going over what each part of history meant to another. Connecting the dots, if you will. Others have been as said before, read x-y and recite.

I'm not sure if its the teachers doing, but I get the same vibe about math some times. It's as though they are teaching formulas in a manner as inexplicable as a cheat code for Metroid on the NES, lots of random figures that somehow work out. I got the same thing in chemistry and physics, mechanical memorization of ten dozen apparently arbitrary formulae and what problems you use to apply to them. The practical aspect, the deeper explanation as to what these figures mean, why they do what they do, and how people came to this conclusion is lost. There are a lot of things you have to know, and apparently too little time to explain them in full detail.

I can understand how a person can look on it with dread, particularly if you are mistake prone in your calculations, or are like me and absolutely hate to show my work.

My problem with English teachers only usually comes when they have an authoritarian marking style. I make mistake, quite a lot, and have a fundamental difficulty in revising my text as I tend to read it as I wrote it in my mind rather than how its written on the page. What I am trying to express is usually pretty clear, it just seems mean spirited to me. I don't know how it is for them, but I enjoy revisiting a text I've read before (and liked) to discuss it with newcomers, a single text is an endless source of ideas and discourse if you have fresh perspectives to bring to it. I'd have a far less enjoyable time reading a high schooler's essay, essays in general suck, they get worse with inexperience.

History teachers, I like them better if they bring something to the discussion that makes the history seem less dry. My professors in history, and my high school teacher were all older, fountains of information and anecdotes. Memorizing names and dates is just mind numbing, a good discussion is pretty stimulating though.