• Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    5 months ago

    Better still there were a bunch of facts that were false when they were taught to you but for some reason were still taught to you.

    Like the obvious one, the tongue doesn’t actually have different regions on it for tasting different things, a fact that you probably didn’t believe even back then because anyone with a sugar cube and 5 minutes can disprove that.

    • fitjazz@lemmyf.uk
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      5 months ago

      My 6th grade science teacher taught us that blood is red but that some people think it is blue until it touches air because our veins look blue under our skin. He explained how the different wavelengths of light are absorbed differently and they was why it looks that way. Two years later my 8th grade science teacher taught us that blood is blue until it touches air. She was not happy when I told her she was wrong. I even explained it and told her to go talk to the other teacher if she still did not understand. She still would not listen to me. Over half the class was in the same sixth grade class as me but I was the only one that either remembered or was willing to stand up to the teacher. I finished losing faith in the education system on that day.

      • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        Well my 6th grade science teacher told us that Chernobyl was fortold in the book of revelations and it meant that the world will end soon. Public school. In New England. In the 90s. The 1990s.

        • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          Yup, because people 2000 years ago knew exactly what a nuclear reactor is and that one would explode 1900 years later. How the hell do people come up with this?!

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          These stories are so crazy to me …… sometimes it seems looks I got a better secular education from my religion school in the 1970s, with nuns. For many years the science teacher was the only lay teacher, never mentioned religion and we were certainly never fed any of that creationist crap from anyone.

          It was not a Jesuit school but they really left a great impression of the long history Jesuit pursuit of knowledge and science

        • humorlessrepost@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          You unlocked a childhood memory of my insane conspiracy theorist father ranting about “wormwood” in connection with Chernobyl.

      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        A teacher not able to fathom being corrected by a student. Terrible and terribly common. Afraid to lose their authority, perhaps? I had this happen to me at around 8 or 9yo : I corrected my teacher on a specific conjugation (the infinitive of a verb), but she wouldn’t admit she was wrong. That day I swore I’d respect anybody in a discussion, even when I thought I was right and they were wrong. I would consider their take at the minimum

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        My 7th grade science teacher told us that air is a perfect mixture. I raised my hand and said “how is it a perfect mixture when some cities have smog alerts, and the ozone layer hole?”

        I want sent to the principal and told to never question teachers, they know more than I ever will. It was then I kind of gave up and saw behind the veil on education.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          This is also crazy to me - correcting the teacher was at worst a way to get extra homework and present the facts to the class.

          Except computers. Those teachers were lost and welcomed any help

    • ziggurat@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      First thing I did when I read that was to put rub something all over my tongue just as a sanity check. When I tried to tell someone they went bonkers trying to defend the school book. From that point on I never took anything school books or adults said as fact without evidence.

    • Varven@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      I remember when they taught me this in kindergarten didn’t believe them for a second

    • BrerChicken @lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Some classics:

      • lactic acid buildup makes your muscles hurt after a workout
      • blood that’s returning to the heart and lungs is blue, blood that’s leaving your heart to go do it’s thing is red
      • sugar makes kids hyper

      All three of those things have been thoroughly debunked, and are demonstrably false, and yet we teach them all the time. Sometimes it’s even SCIENCE TEACHERS that are repeating these things, and sometimes it’s right in the textbook!

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyz
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        5 months ago

        Don’t forget how chocolate, even in tiny amount, will kill a dog. My mother told this to my kids, and they were all confused because our dog ate a bunch of chocolate easter candy and she was fine.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          5 months ago

          Dogs, and cats although they’re unlikely to actually eat it, cannot eat artificial sweetener as their livers cannot break it down and it becomes toxic to them in moderate quantities. It is often used in a lot of cheaper chocolate, particularly American chocolate. Sugar’s fine though, other than the obvious issues with it.

          Somehow dogs cannot eat large amounts of artificial sweetener, got changed into dogs cannot eat small amounts of sugar.

          • crater2150@feddit.org
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            5 months ago

            I thought the problem with chocolate is theobromine, same effect as you describe, but bitter and comes from cocoa, so less sweet / more expensive chocolate with higher amount of cocoa is actually more dangerous.

            But still, as with any poison, the dose is important, this veterinary page says “One ounce of milk chocolate per pound of body weight is a potentially lethal dose in dogs”, so a dog would need to eat 1/16th of its own weight for it to be deadly, even for small dogs that’s more than a whole bar.