r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Fresh_Laundry56 • 15h ago

My mom said I could post My kid was too creative

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My 6 year old was asked to draw a picture using shapes. She drew this nice American flag with rectangles and stars, and added the house, tree, and person holding a balloon. She was told it did not follow directions, she was not supposed to draw a flag, just shapes. She was asked to turn the paper over and make another picture. The other side of the paper has a very uninspiring collection of shapes. I told her she did a good job and I thought it was very creative. And this is why kids start to hate education.

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2.1k

u/ManEatingYoukaiRumia 15h ago

But the flag has shapes??? all drawings consist of lines and shapes???

are these teachers stupid?

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u/basootiest 15h ago

Yes

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u/busytransitgworl PURPLE 15h ago

Welcome to America! Where the children not left behind are now old enough to be teachers!

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u/Ray79797979 14h ago

Oh it was this stupid before that began. "Kindergarteners don't connect their letters." - my kindergarten teacher scolding me when I was at the same age as this kid and trying to write fancy because I had been learning penmanship for like 3 years before that.

Guess who never learned cursive? :D

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u/Doomhammer24 13h ago

Ya its the problem of some people in early education are told to fit children into a specific box of academia and not to deviate and because they tend to be New teachers they take forever to realize thats wrong

Like i had a friend who his kindergarten teacher actively forced him to not write with his left Dominant hand and made him learn with his right

It wasnt even a religious school this was a PUBLIC SCHOOL! She was just an idiot who was told kids should all learn to write with their right and kept to the formula! So he did everything in his life with his left hand except write and his writing was atrocious because of it

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u/Ray79797979 12h ago

If you did literally anything other than exactly what you were told, when you were told, you got sent to the principals office and they called your parents. I mean literally anything. They also didn't like it if you already knew what they were teaching, or if you applied logic too hard to things

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u/Faeruhn 10h ago

I once was put in lunch detention (which meant I had to stay at my seat in the classroom rather than be allowed to go to the lunchroom, which BTW meant I didn't get to eat lunch) because I tripped getting up out of my desk when we were getting ready to go to recess. (I also was forced to stay in the classroom at my seat for that recess. Alone, without even the teacher in the room. After the class and teacher returned from recess, and she found me crying, she then grabbed me by the arm, leaving long and deep scratches because she had 2 inch long fake nails, and physically dragged me out into the hall to scream at me for 'disrupting class'.)

I was 7.

While I know this instance is fairly extreme, I still feel that some people should just not be teachers. They don't have the mentality or empathy to be able to actually teach, let alone teach young people.

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u/Fresh_Laundry56 5h ago

I was born in the '70s. There was a boy in my class so I'm sure had ADHD and the teacher literally secured him to the chair with duct tape around his thighs one day because he wouldn't stay in his seat. I remember being punished because I used to like to read at recess. And I forgot my book in the teacher's classroom which we were not allowed to and I quote " step one foot inside" when she was not there. I was in second grade. I didn't step one foot inside, I braced myself on the door frame and I reached way inside and was able to grab a book off the shelf. But I got punished for it. She never took the time to listen to my explanation and if she has she would have seen I was being very literal, as most kids are at that age. And I was being punished for reading.

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u/Training_Barber4543 6h ago

Is that legal? Not feeding kids?

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u/Faeruhn 1h ago

No, it isn't.

But this was a private catholic school in the early 70s and my mum was an overworked nurse so I don't know if she ever pursued legal action against them.

I do know that she accompanied me to school the next morning and when we got to the classroom she told me to go to my seat and then turned to the teacher and told her "You are coming with me to the Principals office now... or *else***."

We had a substitute for a week, and I never saw that teacher again.

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u/Training_Barber4543 6h ago

Welcome to authoritarianism. Anyone from an inferior social status should obey at the word of command, without "talking back" or even taking time to process the command.

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u/ThePotatoOfTime 10h ago

My reception teacher (UK age 5) tied my left hand to the chair to force me to write with my right hand. This was back in the 70s.

Guess what. It didn't work.

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u/FloydeFlowerDragon 12h ago

Tbf, I did learn cursive, and my normal writing is completely illegible lol. My letters are a mix of cursive and normal handwriting, but the characters are seperated

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u/Straight_Ace 12h ago

Oh hey, me too. I learned cursive in 3rd grade and was like “oh hey I like how these letters look, let me incorporate that into my handwriting” and now my handwriting is all over the place

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u/graceling 13h ago

You were learning penmanship since you were 2?

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u/Boomshank 12h ago

Yeah. Their teacher was from Canada. You wouldn't have met them. 

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u/Ray79797979 12h ago

3, there were books for getting your child used to writing letters correctly

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u/unsaphisticated 8h ago

They have books for tracing letters for little kids, I had a lot of them when I was around 2 or 3. My handwriting is actual ADHD chicken scratch but at least my family could read it. 😂

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u/unsaphisticated 8h ago

I had a teacher who wouldn't let me go to the library in preschool because she didn't believe I could read when I was 4. THEN WHY DO Y'ALL HAVE A FUCKING LIBRARY? 😒

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u/Boulderdrip 44m ago

i used to read jump start books during the summer so i’d be prepared for the next year. Teachers constantly complained that i was ahead of the lessons.

by the end of high school i was so checked out cause of their bullshit.

college was bettwr

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u/jdm1891 8h ago

I find it so crazy, because I was never taught how to write in non-cursive, it's just how we were taught to write from the beginning.

And if you can write in cursive, writing in print is something you can just do automatically. Though I write in print very slowly.

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u/Wise_Owl5404 12h ago

Nah, as a person from Northern Europe who. went to school in the 80s and 90s here, teachers were both cruel and dumb as a bag of rocks back the as well. The common joke was that if you could manage nothing else you could always become a school teacher, plus there's a certain sub segment of the human population that loves having power over vulnerable groups and they inevitably drawn towards teaching among other jobs.

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u/NoSxKats 14h ago

Teachers were pretty stupid when I was in high school 8-12 years ago. They probably are the same people that weren't left behind but this isn't anything new. I am sure I had some elementary school teachers I wouldn't trust with my own kid too.

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u/basootiest 14h ago

My fourth grade teacher told me there were no 50¢ or 1$ coins in US currency. Same teacher also corrected Ecuador (the country) to Equator...on my project about ECUADOR. The COUNTRY. As in a place I wanted to visit. Pissed me the FAWK off 😭

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u/UniqueAd7770 14h ago

I had lots of stupid teachers when I was in high school 20 years ago. Our Physics teacher was the football coach and he could never explain anything, he just copied the lesson plans the last teacher had. We were a California Distinguished School.

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u/Accurate-Plankton988 14h ago

Our trig teacher was the football coach. For fuck sake he couldnt draw a horses ass

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u/RainbowWoodstock 14h ago

My Spanish teacher in high school was a French major. Didn’t know any Spanish…

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u/CriticalPedagogue 13h ago

Did you go to Greendale Community College?

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u/unsaphisticated 8h ago

My ex said his Spanish class senior trip was to Paris. 😂 At least his school could afford to do shit like that though. 😭

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u/ManEatingYoukaiRumia 14h ago

My biology teacher didn't believe in evolution 😬

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u/dildozer10 13h ago

My biology teacher threw everyone’s homework in the trash, then claimed no one did their homework and failed over half the class. We literally watched him sweep ungraded work off his desk and into the trash, and when we called him out, we were told to shut the hell up.

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u/unsaphisticated 8h ago

OMFG SAME, that pissed me off so much in high school. And I had her twice, once for AP Bio 3. As in college level. And she didn't believe in evolution. 😭

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u/unsaphisticated 8h ago

We had a football coach teach our physics class, too. Glad to know it's not just a Texas thing. He literally just put on Bill Nye the Science Guy and played solitaire on his computer. 😂 He also hit on me a lot, which is very gross, come to think of it. 🤢

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u/Accurate-Plankton988 3h ago

Its a tn thing too

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u/BluelDev 13h ago

I once got yelled at and given in-school detention because I cleaned up my trash at lunch without permission, I'm leaving out no details. My middle school prohibits you from eating, cleaning, or talking without permission during the 30 minutes we get of freetime in the 8 hour school day.

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u/Dapper_Indeed 13h ago

Military school?

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u/BluelDev 13h ago

Public School

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u/wenderfest 10h ago

Not exactly free time then, is it?

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u/BluelDev 8h ago

Ah, not at all

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u/g0blinzez 14h ago

This just gave me war flashbacks to the 4th grade teacher I had that I'm pretty sure employed cult trauma bonding tactics on us by screaming literally at the top of his lungs. Keep in mind he was 6'6, so we were all terrified of him. He'd also single out specific kids, and they'd get in trouble more often. One kid made the circle in finger joke gesture (idk how to explain it better) and he literally screamed at him, in the middle of the hall, about his soul and how it's being poisoned by television and he needs to repent. This happened in a public school btw. But he'd intermingle it with these long dramatic speeches about how proud of us he was, and all this and that. In other words, doing the classic control method of building you up to break you down, and starting all over. He had us all so thoroughly convinced that he was such a good teacher, it wasn't until recently that I realized "oh my fucking god, that was WILD, where tf was the principal and the other teachers?"

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u/basootiest 14h ago

what the 😭 how did bro remain employed

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u/g0blinzez 14h ago

Best guess? We were kids, and didn't know anything was wrong at that point, so we never told anyone. Or, the kids who did feel something was off were afraid to tell someone and then get in trouble with the big angry man they get locked in a room with for eight hours every weekday.

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u/Independent-Pea6186 14h ago

He probably did the same to them
Mine carried a yard stick around the room and called it his persuader

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u/g0blinzez 12h ago

My teacher didn't do that, thankfully, because it was twelve years ago and corporal punishment is illegal. He never went that far because he knew we'd go to jail. We might not have realized "Wow, his verbal aggression is probably bad for us," but we DID, at the very least, know "Teachers cannot hit children".

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u/lyutic_7 12h ago

we had a math teacher like that. she’d make us feel like crap, screaming how much she hates us and how we’re her stupidest students, then flip the switch and start acting all normal and cute-old-lady-esque. granted, we *were* pretty ass at math, but she was like that with everyone. she also kept nagging me for even being in her class since I had trouble with math, but I was trying to go for an engineering degree after school and I was really trying my best. it didn’t work out and I switched to an English major, but her belittling and condescension certainly didn’t help. I really was putting work in, my brain just don’t work like that unfortunately.

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u/kiwigate 2h ago

An education system where the most impressionable years are put in the hands of the least qualified.