Topic: The Nintendo Switch Thread

In 5th grade, I had a science teacher complain to my parents that I raised my hand too often and asked too many detailed questions. I had a english teacher constantly call me jabberjaw in front of other students, because I had questions during discussions. I also had a teacher tell my parents she was concerned because during lunch/recess break, I just stayed in the classroom and worked on homework.
Nevermind that I was an A/B student till senior year.

Pretty much this. I'm not a fan of memorizing steps to solve a problem. I need to know the concept behind the problem.

Damn, you guys were unlucky af. I had only two bad teachers in my grade schools, and they were both in senior year for Government and Economics. They barely taught anything and the classes were ridiculously easy for senior classes. I didn't learn anything beyond the basics I already knew.

Undertale is fun on the Switch. Glad I waited because it doesn't seem like the kind of game I'd want to take up the whole TV with.

That you can find some assistance here? Hehe.

In all seriousness, though. I could help ya with your assignment. Also, I prolly should stop talking mathematics and get back to talking about Nintendo Switch.

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I'm hyped for Ultimate?

@JaxonH Yeah, my teachers were almost all about "stay quiet, and repeat what you're told to repeat when told to repeat it." In all cases there were utter failures at the skill of educating. In some cases they were proficient at being math students, but not proficient at being mathematicians (or teachers.) In other cases they were, I think, really lacking understanding of the source material themselves and knew only how to save face and skim by by giving assignments, following book steps, and collecting a pension. They couldn't explain it because they didn't understand it themselves. They just passed enough to get an education degree. If you're taught by failures, you're probably going to be a failure.

That reminds me of the one teacher, college no less, who would mark people wrong on tests, and when the students would question it, and turn up that they had the same answer as the answer book, he would declare the book wrong and that his solution was right. You had to do it the same wrong way as him to pass. (My answers were neither his right nor the books right, because I had no clue what we were even supposed to be doing....but that's a different issue. ) It got to the point, I'd write random digits like lottery numbers in the answer fields. It had more odds of being right than trying to actually do it. I believe >50% of his students fail, I found out later. I wonder what would have happened if I told them their invoice was wrong and my $5 value is in fact correct, but I'll generously give them $8 and overvalue their services. I'm still not sure if he was the worst, the violent one was the worst, the one that despised students in elementary school, or the one that declared that they're not there to teach things the students are responsible for that is the worst.

I feel like I went to school in Leningrad or something.

@purplesodium Math homework wasn't bad, you just guess numbers for answer fields, it's like the PRice is Right!

Written essay assignments however were a serious struggle for certain individuals with a penchant for textwalls...............not naming names......just saying......

@NEStalgia I had an Old Testament teacher like that. Good times, especially when a group of us rebelled and presented what amounted to a 99 Thesis against the teacher 😂

Only 17 more bedtimes until the Smash midnight release. Is everyone’s body ready?

Man, everyone's discussing bad teachers in the US, better share my experiences. My 3rd/4th grade teacher just let me go at my own rate for math, giving me whatever materials I needed... resulting in me finishing 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade math stuff by the end of the first year with her. I also had a great one in 7th/8th who would have great conversations about math with me, and whom I owe a lot of my deep understanding of the why of math to. Though, when I got to Calculus stuff, she couldn't really help lol.

Then... we had my 9th/freshman teacher, who told us all we were failures at math, and that not a single one of us managed to pass the test to get into honors math. Somehow... I never quite believed him. He was really horrible tbh, made everyone feel awful about their skills. He retired that year thankfully.

@purplesodium A wrong answer or a wrong answer and solution is all just the same thing.

@link3710 now imagine that 9th grade guy was every teacher you ever had except for 2 that were good, and two that were nice but incompetent. I was grateful for good history teachers at least. Though I never could focus on those things as much as I wanted because the purpose of the year was to focus on cementing that "one point above failing" grade in a dire math program.

just get better teachers laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawl :^]

Is anyone here playing Civ?

The game is great, but I've been watching some Beginner videos from Quill18 since I never truly understood all the systems on PC. And it's been a while.

The port is excellent though. And the game too, obviously. I can't contain my excitement that they brought this game to Switch!

@JaxonH, I watched the beginner and also the religious vikings videos from Quill18. He makes it all seem so seamless as he’s been playing it for years from the look of things. His videos definitely helped out and provided good insight to the game.

@JaxonH I played part of the tutorial but I have too many games going on simultaneously so the massive time sink that is Civ will have to wait a while....

I'm a public school teacher in the U.S.

It's like any job: there are good teachers and bad teachers. It's just frustrating for us because people treat education like something that is common knowledge: they think they know everything about it because they experienced it. Everyone was a student at one point, so they think they know everything about teaching. This leads to people thinking they know better than the teachers, and parents pass this attitude to their kids, and especially once the kids are at the high school level it becomes apparent in their behaviors. It's tough to teach a kid who hears nothing but anti-teacher sentiment at home and on the internet.

It's also a paradoxical sort of job when it comes to fulfillment. You would think teaching can be one of the most rewarding careers out there, and it CAN be, but it's uneven. Every now and then I receive emails from students who are doing excellently in college and beyond, and they thank me for my influence, but most of us go long stretches with only hearing the negative. And there's also the all-too-common flip side where former students go downhill quickly and are in jail or overdose on drugs or do something horrendous. It's unlike a lot of jobs where task fulfillment is swiftly followed by results (good or bad) or a debriefing of sorts. You may teach a student and not know your impact on that kid for years to come. Also, the government and its constantly shifting tests and goals and policies created by politicians who haven't stepped foot in a public school in decades is infuriating.

It's also not "Woo! summer's off!" like everyone thinks. I've been teaching for 12 years now, and I've never had a summer totally off. All my summers have been spent in graduate school, coaching sports teams, or attending meetings with my department for next year's lessons. I always say to people: If you want to criticize teachers, then here; take nine months in my shoes with my salary. Let me know how you feel after. Get ready to not only have academic demands placed on you but also incredibly heavy emotional and social burdens. You effectively have two levels of coworker: your actual coworkers/peers/other teachers and staff, and the students. There are reasons most people leave teaching after five years.

I like a lot of you guys, but some of your comments are indicative of the common misunderstandings spread by people who have never been teachers or involved in the public education system.

I wonder how common this'll be, seems odd.

@rallydefault Thanks for teaching, sounds like you're passionate about it. I work in the public health sector, so I can empathize with some stuff regarding funding and directives driven by policy makers and not field workers.

I know at least what I said was actually experienced by me, though. However, I had some awesome teachers, and I remember their names just as much as the rough ones.

@grumblevolcano Maybe for changing to new bundles?

@rallydefault Bad teachers are still bad teachers. That has nothing to do with salaries or the emotional struggles or long term impacts of teachers, or everything else listed. Teachers that are unskilled/ineffective at teaching are unskilled/ineffective at teaching. I'm sure it's not a localized phenomenon.

If you're one of those, the defensiveness doesn't undo it. If you're not one of those then you probably can smell those from a mile away and can name a dozen by name. Some of them are otherwise nice people who just suck at the core task of their job. I don't think you'd want a doctor that isn't very skilled at being a doctor just because of the emotional struggles of his job justifying it (though sadly, a lot of those exist, too). Few people genuinely are skilled at teaching. Perhaps the problem is the teachers of the teachers. Perhaps it's just a rare knack. (Hint a lot of it is the former, when you've seen the failure that's been teaching the failures, it's obvious what happened.)

All too often a lot of what comes out as teachers (or at least what did, 25, 30 years ago, I can't speak for today) were people who, instead of being skilled teachers, were very good professional students. They were good at "doing school", good at being students, thus good at scoring well on their own academic path....which naturally lead them to be teachers to remain in that environment. The problem was they never learned how to teach, only how to be students. Some are purely apathetic. You don't need to be a teacher to recognize someone apathetic at teaching, you need only to attempt to be taught by one. Some want to care, but they simply aren't skilled at teaching.

Ironically, when you have a string of terrible teachers in your youth, what actually teaches you that they're terrible is that rare moment when you have one that isn't terrible. That's when you realize what actual teaching is supposed to be, and precisely what's wrong with the others. It's the good ones that highlight the bad ones. (And in my own experience, the bad ones form little political cabals to pull strings to make life miserable for the good ones. I've seen more than a few run out of town by that. The bad ones come back again and again like a plague, the good ones that really worked well end up there for a year or two then are gone. It's like the problem police have. There are good cops, but once they're stuck with dealing with the bad cops they either leave, or get forced out so too many departments get stuck with the bad ones who are there for the wrong reasons.)

As it happens though, those good ones seem to be a lot farther and fewer in math than in other disciplines. It's amazing what a difference they make. But they're a minority presence. And that has a spillover effect when students have to put all their energy into trying to pass by compensating for faulty teachers that they then need to basically take debt from other subjects and only work on bare minimum so that all their energy can be put into staying afloat in the bad teacher's classes.

If you're one of the good ones, great! It's a shame that you're as rare as a gold Mario Amiibo.

Overall though, something needs to change somehow in the system. And just throwing money at it will eventually have diminishing returns. Work smarter, not harder.

@JaxonH I'm not sure if you're into reading, but there's a book called The Pea and the Sun, it's about the Banach-Tarski theorem. I read it a while back; conceptually it's not the easiest thing to wrap your head around, but it's pretty cool to understand how it's done.