34 Parents Share The Stupidest Things Teachers Have Tried To Tell Their Kids

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mattstaff
Nov 18, 2018 7:00 PM EST

These teachers needed to learn some serious lessons of their own. 

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  • 01
    Text - Oronoguy 3h "You can't read novel books at your age." To us "You are putting him at a disadvantage by encouraging this, he is too far ahead of the other kids"
    via u/Jenezid
  • 02
    Text - Puzzleheaded_Diamond 4h Son's 3rd grade assignment: draw your dream house. He got an F because his dream house was unrealistic. He failed another "student choice of topic" assignment he did on dinosaurs, because dinosaurs weren't real as they weren't in the bible. He got detention when he told her neither were air conditioners. Public school early 90s in rural Texas.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 03
    Text - Puzzleheaded_Diamond 4h 4th grade gym/health teacher told us that sleeping on your stomach causes stomach cancer
    via u/Jenezid
  • 04
    Text - Tiny_Parfait 3h Learning about food webs and nutrients in 9th grade biology class. I ask the teacher a question. Me: Where do mushrooms and other fungi fit in all this? What kind of vitamins or other things would I get from eating them? Teacher: Because mushrooms aren't part of the food chain and feed only off dead things, they wouldn't have any nutritional value.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 05
    Text - Waggy Tails 4h Me: How do you spell "barely"? Teach: That's not a real word, you can't use it. Me: Yes it is. Teach: No it isn't The other students seemed just as confused as me
    via u/Jenezid
  • 06
    Text - johnnybravo1014. 4h My 7th grade science teacher condescendingly told me there was no such thing as dry ice.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 07
    Text - Ekizpea 3h I was the child, but a teacher told me the book I was reading was too advanced for my age and I must just be PRETENDING to read it. She confiscated my copy of the golden compass, which I had paid for with allowance money, and made me choose a new book from her collection Her books were essentially glorified picture books.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 08
    Text - hypo-osmotic 5h My little sister's math teacher recently docked her a point because she wrote something like "their data suggests" and the teacher wanted it to say "his or her" instead of "their." In the teacher's defense, she was foreign and not entirely fluent in English and genuinely wasn't that using "they" to refer to an individual whose gender isn't specified is pretty well accepted in English. But still, why dock points for grammar in math homework?
    via u/Jenezid
  • 09
    Text - casualstr8guy. 3h Stupidest thing a teacher told me. I had a teacher in high school that said that if you shine a light on the back of someones knee they don't feel nauseous on an airplane - thus disproving evolution Utah...
    via u/Jenezid
  • 10
    Text - ContentSyrup5 6h Me: "I am going to publish this essay on my FTP server, so I can download it later." School Librarian: "You are going to do what?!" Me: "I am going to put this on the internet" School Librarian: "You cant just put stuff on the internet!!"
    via u/Jenezid
  • 11
    Text - Ersh777 5h A couple of years ago my daughter went to 3's preschool and the teachers were fully aware that she's in speech therapy and wasn't verbal yet. On the first day of school she got a bad mark because she wouldn't verbally tell the class what she did over the summer. WTE? That was the first in a long string of issues with her teachers that lead us to pull her out of that school before Halloween of that year.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 12
    Text - FrightenedOfSpoons . 4h When my son's college instructor noticed him using duckduckgo as a search engine, she told him she would give him a zero if he did not use google, as duckduckgo was not a "scholarly" resource
    via u/Jenezid
  • 13
    Text - Krunzuku 3h My parents always make this joke about me, that my first grade teacher told them that I would have problems learning how to read, because I couldn't skip. Literally. I could already read, and was reading books on a daily basis after school just fine.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 14
    Text - wolfdaddy74701 6h My son's third grade teacher told the class that birds do not eat other birds after watching the Thanksgiving Charlie Brown special where Woodstock sits down to eat turkey.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 15
    Text - Im_alwaystired 3h No kids, but my middle school history teacher told me that "you can't actually prove anything with science." We were also told that our science fair projects had to relate to the Bible in some way, or we'd fail the project. /edit: yes, he was technically right. I get it. He was referring specifically to things like gravity, evolution, and the fossil record.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 16
    Text - EscaJ 4h Not my child, but my sister. Instead of admitting she didn't know what it ment, my sisters English teacher told her that 'oats' was a shortening of the word 'goats' All of us has English as a second language by the way.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 17
    Text - Maxwelldoggums 3h My kindergarten teacher told my mother that was retarded, and would never learn to read. I never went back to that school.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 18
    Text - Sea_Kangaroo. 3h That she became a science teacher so she could disprove the things she religiously disagreed with and be taken seriously.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 19
    Text - Its_Just_Me_07 . 4h Not my kid but my niece, she was being bullied and her teacher told her to let it go and think about how the bully feels and that it's his way of showing her he likes her. Or my favorite line, you guys are all young and kids will be kids-just deal with it.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 20
    Text - nlaporte 3h I am American, but I spent fifth and sixth grade in The Netherlands, where kids start English lessons in fifth grade. In fifth grade my teacher insisted to me that the word tortoise was pronounced tor-TOY-zee. No amount of insisting on my part could get through to him, he just kept telling me that "maybe that's how you say it in America, but this is how it's really pronounced."
    via u/Jenezid
  • 21
    Text - gorilla9793 4h First grade teacher thought I was diabetic because I kept wanting to drink from the water fountain
    via u/Jenezid
  • 22
    Text - Kthulhu42 6h It's not really stupid exactly, but my son came home from kindergarten and started talking about God and heaven. That was a difficult conversation for us because his uncle had recently been killed, so he wanted that comforting religious idea, but we wanted to not force religion and couldn't say whether it was true or not.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 23
    Text - foxymcfox 1h My mom was once told that I was disrespectful because I corrected the math teacher in Second Grade (Multiple times). My mom's only response was, "Well, is he right? Because I'm not punishing him for being right." And that's how my pedantry has survived into adulthood.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 24
    Text - Not Teri 5h The paper had 2 goldfish bowls and the question was how many ways can you put 10 fish in 2 bowls. My daughter (2nd grade I think) decided (correctly in my mind) that putting all 10 in one bowl doesn't meet the requirement. The teacher marked her paper with 2 wrong because all in one and all in the other were correct options. We went in together to discuss it and the teacher stood her ground. Daughter "but I'm supposed to put them in 2 bowls" Teacher: "you still got 2 wrong." B
    via u/Jenezid
  • 25
    Text - Bashfulapplesnapple 4h My kid loves dinosaurs and started school knowing full well that flying and swimming reptiles were not dinosaurs. Cut to them calling me a liar a month later because their kindergarten teacher told them pterodactyls are dinosaurs
    via u/Jenezid
  • 26
    Text - OverThereBy TheDoor 1h When he was about 5, my son's teach decided she'd try to cure everyone in the class of their worst fears. At the time he was afraid of the dark, so said teacher sat him in the middle of the classroom with a blanket over his head to convince him there was nothing to be scared about. She wasn't at the school the next year. And very long ago in my own childhood, our head teacher explained to the class how heavier things fall faster. One little 10 year old brainiac went
    via u/Jenezid
  • 27
    Text - Rossomejen 1h Just yesterday my daughter's teacher told her (and the whole class) they would get in trouble if she didn't bring 2 cans of food for the food drive and that "your parents have $1 for 2 cans of food I of course gave her the two cans but she decided not to turn them in after the talk we had with her about how giving food is a good thing but being forced to and bullied into it is not ok. She said "I will see what trouble I get into She did not get in trouble.
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  • 28
    Text - ironman288 1h I had an assignment for art class to print a picture of a person and then draw that person. I was instructed by the teacher to go to the school library and print the photo I wanted to draw off of the internet. When I printed my photo the librarian wouldn't give it to me because I was infringing on the person's privacy by having their picture... which they had freely published online. The art teacher was furious, tore the librarian new one, and I got my photo in the end.
    via u/Jenezid
  • 29
    Text - PvtOrange 2h Not my child, but me. I was born in Cali, eventually moved to India for a few years, and then came back to the US. Since I was so young, I learned a lot of my English in India, where learning British English is the norm. Basically, I came back to the US and went into the second grade. Remember, this was back in the day when we needed to ask the teacher if we could use the restroom. But, instead of saying "May I go to the restroom", I said, "May I go to the toilet" at which sh
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  • 30
    Text - UofLBird 1h Not my kid but: my teacher told me "nostalgic" wasn't a word. She taught English and I was a junior in high-school. You naturally may think; oh I bet you spelled or said it wrong. Nope, I used it, she asked what I was trying to say and I explained, "ya know, like when you are remembering something nice from your past."
    via u/Jenezid
  • 31
    Text - Sea_Kangaroo 52m Not a teacher but the school nurse advised my mother that I/all senior aged girls should be taking a daily folic acid multivitamin because she had learned that pregnancy is counted from two weeks before your missed period and so we should all be assumed to be pre pregnant at all time in our child bearing years. I didn't even date in highschool. I was completely offended. Public school in the early 2000s
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  • 32
    Text - JohnCenasLeftElbow 1h In 5th grade, my teacher told the class that the percentage of alcohol in drinks determined how much alcohol was in your blood. She was saying how some drinks would make your blood 40% alcohol and other would only be 6%. I told her that it didn't work like that and she just said "No JohnCenasLeftElbow, you're wrong". Then after class she stopped me from leaving and told me l was right. She just had to "simplify it" for the other kids... but was giving out totally fal
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  • 33
    Text - Megabot555 53m Was the child. I was in an ESL class back in 1st grade, and we played a game where you're given a letter and find an English word that starts with it: A-Apple, B-Book,... I got the letter "I, and no one believed me when I said "igloo" The teacher was adamant that I use something like "ice cream. Apparently I wasn't allowed to use a "big" word that I learned from reading books... Same thing happened a year later in a different class, I had D, so I went with Doom, because I w
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  • 34
    Text - kylop 50m I was a senior in high school and I got hammered on a trip to a band competition. The next week for my punishment my parents had to come to school with me. My dad usually has 3-4 books on his nightstand at one time. He reads A LOT. When it was my dad's turn to sit with me we were in American History. I couldn't tell you exactly what the topic was for the day, but my dad listened for about 2 minutes, stopped the teacher, and proceeded to teach the class what really happened in hi
    via u/Jenezid

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