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[–] 24 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Being smart enough to recognize what's going on but not smart enough to envision the future from the present and not smart enough to come with concrete solutions on my own absolutely sucks. (There is a difference between being able to visualize the future based on knowledge of things like how poverty drives crime versus being able to actually predict specific crazy shit like the Proud Boys harassing the country during 2020-2024. I was able to envision poverty going up, not the political violence that came with it)

Turns out I was right when I was ranting and raving about how the Bush admin was basically using the PATRIOT Act to turn everyday American citizens into terrorists. It sucks so bad to have seen it all coming and have been successful at doing fuck-all to stop it even though everything went as badly (or worse) than I predicted.

I hate being smarter than the dummies and dumber than the smarties. Knowing just enough to know I don't know shit.

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  • [–] 11 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

    Teaching ability and intelligence are two separate things. I think one of the most important things a teacher can do is model that it's okay to not know everything and normalize admitting when you're wrong.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

    They are still highly related. Teaching just also requires good communication skills, which won't get you far if you don't know what you're teaching.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 child)

    Teaching is more important and a separate field by itself. Obviously the teacher needs to understand the curriculum, but they don't necessarily need to find the level at which they're teaching interesting.

    I had two physics teachers in middle and high school who knew each other personally. Both of them had gone through university and obviously knew a whole lot more than what they were teaching at each their separate levels. They exchanged info on students. Middle school teacher would send notes of the students who were transferred, and the high school teacher would report back how it went. This was all off record and prior to GDPR, but I found it interesting how they'd compete by basically sending "drafts" of students. Like, a good student might be send off with high regards but failed at a higher level or vice versa. They didn't care about the students or physics, but only about what they could achieve with the potential of students. Their success was not about grades or physics. It was all about the pedagogical skill. That was the entire game, because they were teachers and not scientists.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    Interesting story. Not sure how it relates to topical knowledge or communication skills. For all we know, they could've both been asshats who barely knew college physics, barely knew how to communicate what they did know, and merely gossiped about students.

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  • [–] 11 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

    I definitely had a couple of these teachers through the years.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

    I grew up in Texas and had a middle school history teacher who told us that no real historian calls it The US Civil War, since it was called The War of Northern Aggression. And he went on to teach us all of the other stuff you'd expect from a dumbass who would say that.

    I wonder how many kids he fucked up with his propaganda. I didn't have a reason to doubt most of what he said for years. Probably until my history class in college.

    What an asshole he was. Making the world a worse place.

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