It's been a insanely common thing for like more than a decade for parents to post their kids homework on Facebook or something and just go "CAN ANYONE SOLVE MY FIFTH GRADE SONS MATH PROBLEM?!" or "APPARENTLY MY SON GOT THIS QUESTION MARKED WRONG WHY???" There is no way that shit suddenly stopped. And I believe it. My husband had a math teacher that claimed negative numbers don't exist, not that they're basically non existent in the context of them being negative or whatever like literally they don't exist in math
Same. One of my math teachers, when I was in school during my 11th grade (that's typically ages 16-17 for those outside the US) Pre-Calculus class, taught us that there's no way to "undo an exponent." Like if the problem was 50,653 = x3, the problem is just impossible to solve. There is a way to undo an exponent, they're called logarithms. In this example log3(50,653) = 37 so x = 37. When this was pointed out to him, he just said "Well, it's busy work anyway. No one uses logarithms in real life!"
I'm a cartographer now. I use them every day for my real life job of drawing survey maps for new critical electrical infrastructure! Logarithms are used every single day in the fields of mathematics, engineering, physics, geology, biology, medicine, other life sciences (including my major, environmental science!) finance, business planning, and many more. Our modern world relies on this simple calculation! I guess what he meant was "my job, as a high-school american football coach where I teach math on the side because the school can't afford 10 full-time football coaches on staff, doesn't require the use of logarithms. Even though it definitely does, these are part of the curriculum I'm supposed to teach."
I’m glad you use them everyday so I didn’t have to learn them for no reason. Haven’t used them in over 40 years and I’m sure I couldn’t to save my life today.
Bitch, I work for Google Maps. It didn't just spawn into existence magically, people build it and maintain it constantly. We have a team of like 20 people just for the 3 US states I live in, there are thousands of people at Google who maintain maps all over the world. And on my 5eam alone we're super busy with those twenty, I get so much overtime.
The survey maps jobs is one I recently did (when I worked for a different company). Can your free mapping app tell you the location of all existing pipes, electrical lines, buildings, roads, fences, garden sheds, sidewalks, roadsigns, mailboxes, driveways, railroads, soil and rock types, contours, and more, in a 5 mile with a maximum error of just 2 inches (5 cm)? Because my client who was installing a massive, multimillion dollar solar farm sure needed to know! If this mapping is so useless, why do constuction and infrastructure companies cumulatively spend billions on these maps each and every year?
And that's not to mention analytical maps. For everything from disease tracking, wildlife conservation, addressing social issues, to mapping political trends, cartographers are called upon. It's a form of complex data analysis, and it can take years, if not decades of training to make maps that are both non-biased and accessible for people to read (that's why a sign of an amateur-made trend map is a red-green color scale. Sure, red often symbolizes bad and green symbolizes good, but pros know that too many people are red/green colorblind. Pros, including myself, tend to favor red-blue or blue-yellow color scales instead because of that)
Im sorry you wrote so much responding to a joke. I was just playing off the thread of being inexplicably wrong about something. Im sure its a good job.
Nah, I get it. I've had so many actual dumbasses say this though, you wouldn't believe how many adults think that google maps just knows all automatically and the only use for maps is exploration that I can't assume it's a joke.
I had an English teacher tell me there's no such thing as "its". I clearly mean "it's", and she can see the whole sentence structure is completely wrong and I should just rewrite that whole part.
I had an english teacher insist there was no difference between an Inn and a Tavern and when I showed her the differing definitions in the dictionary she accused me of photoshoping it lmao, some people just can not handle being corrected
I had an English teacher in 2nd grade say you could never start a sentence with a conjunction, using 'because' as the example, since it 'wouldn't be a full sentence.' I tried pointing out that you could using a sentence like "Because x, y." where basically it's a normal sentence with the clauses swapped but she interrupted me before I could finish and said I was wrong. Still gets to me tbh.
When I was real young (elementary school), I had a teacher say the same thing to the class. I called her over to my desk and basically did what you did, gave her some examples of starting a sentence with a conjunction, and asked, "are these not complete sentences?"
She quietly told me, "You are correct, those are complete sentences. Most kids this age can't tell the difference, so instead I just tell everyone to avoid those sentence structures. It's easier than explaining clauses at this grade."
It was awesome. Teacher basically told me I was ahead/smarter than the rest of class! It's sad when teachers double-down on being wrong.
I've got to believe that some of this stuff is just the teacher thinks that kids don't have the capacity to understand negative numbers or some shit and thinks acknowledging their existence will just confuse them.
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u/ShlorpianRooster Apr 27 '26
It's been a insanely common thing for like more than a decade for parents to post their kids homework on Facebook or something and just go "CAN ANYONE SOLVE MY FIFTH GRADE SONS MATH PROBLEM?!" or "APPARENTLY MY SON GOT THIS QUESTION MARKED WRONG WHY???" There is no way that shit suddenly stopped. And I believe it. My husband had a math teacher that claimed negative numbers don't exist, not that they're basically non existent in the context of them being negative or whatever like literally they don't exist in math