Most annoying things about school

[Johnny Novgorod]

Good god, everything. But I hated the people the most. Bunch of clueless imbeciles...

 

[Tenkage]

I can go one better, back when I was in university one of my professors actually listed one of their own books as required reading, and the book cost a cool £29.99 and was barely more than 200 pages, seriously I'm not fucking joking. Okay it was a good book and he was one of the best and obviously knew his stuff, but still shamelessly plugging your own book like that....

I'm curious why you expected him to do otherwise; do you think he should have assigned a book from one of his competitors? Writing a textbook is very, very far from trivial. There's no reason why he shouldn't assign it.

If a person is enough of an asshole to derive their greatest pleasure by intimidating and harassing people, but is too cowardly or weak to be a real thug and too stupid to use the Internet, they become a campus supervisor instead. They would stop you on the way to your class if you were 20 seconds late, and make you wait 5 minutes while they filled out a detention form for skipping class. They knew they were the real reason you were missing significant class time too, but it didn't matter. They were having their taste of power and enjoying it.

The punishments weren't really the problem; they were so outrageously and blatantly fabricated that it was easy to get them reversed. Usually all you'd have to do is approach them while they were talking with their boss, ask them why you got a detention for cutting in the lunch line at 8:00 am, and they'd cave in and tear up the form. Really it was the fact that the school hired these guys that most annoyed me.

In my experience, high school is not a worthwhile use of time. It's run like a prison where all the staff are corrupt, some of the lessons that seniors get have no place in any grade above 2nd (one of the days during my last months of English in high school was spent on capitalization), there are no consequences for failure, success in high school has little correlation with success afterwards, and if the English, math, and science illiteracy in the US is any indication (the last Smithsonian poll found that 1 in 4 Americans don't know the earth orbits the sun), none of it makes an impact at all.

I like education and wanted to be a teacher for a long time, but what happens in high school is not education.

sorry to hear that man, I really am

 

[McMullen]

I can go one better, back when I was in university one of my professors actually listed one of their own books as required reading, and the book cost a cool £29.99 and was barely more than 200 pages, seriously I'm not fucking joking. Okay it was a good book and he was one of the best and obviously knew his stuff, but still shamelessly plugging your own book like that....

I'm curious why you expected him to do otherwise; do you think he should have assigned a book from one of his competitors? Writing a textbook is very, very far from trivial. There's no reason why he shouldn't assign it.

If a person is enough of an asshole to derive their greatest pleasure by intimidating and harassing people, but is too cowardly or weak to be a real thug and too stupid to use the Internet, they become a campus supervisor instead. They would stop you on the way to your class if you were 20 seconds late, and make you wait 5 minutes while they filled out a detention form for skipping class. They knew they were the real reason you were missing significant class time too, but it didn't matter. They were having their taste of power and enjoying it.

The punishments weren't really the problem; they were so outrageously and blatantly fabricated that it was easy to get them reversed. Usually all you'd have to do is approach them while they were talking with their boss, ask them why you got a detention for cutting in the lunch line at 8:00 am, and they'd cave in and tear up the form. Really it was the fact that the school hired these guys that most annoyed me.

In my experience, high school is not a worthwhile use of time. It's run like a prison where all the staff are corrupt, some of the lessons that seniors get have no place in any grade above 2nd (one of the days during my last months of English in high school was spent on capitalization), there are no consequences for failure, success in high school has little correlation with success afterwards, and if the English, math, and science illiteracy in the US is any indication (the last Smithsonian poll found that 1 in 4 Americans don't know the earth orbits the sun), none of it makes an impact at all.

I like education and wanted to be a teacher for a long time, but what happens in high school is not education.

sorry to hear that man, I really am

I appreciate it, though I shouldn't complain so much; it's probably not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.

In truth, I don't think I should be bothered enough by it after all these years to write a page-long rant. I don't think about it much unless someone asks me about high school, and then I remember this one guy in particular and then this whole "Oh, that FUCKER!" response happens. Probably something I should avoid indulging in.

 

[Fox12]

Wow, where to begin? I love college, but high school was a total disgrace.

How about having coaches teach our Social Studies program. The only reason they were there was because the school needed a strong athletic program. These men were hired as coaches, not as teachers. Of course, they couldn't very well have someone on payroll who wasn't a teacher, so of course we wind up with coach Derp-a-Derp as our history teacher. They had to stick him somewhere, after all. He just sat drooling in the back of class most days, the moron was barely literate. We won the football championship that year though, so apparently it was worth it.

Or maybe our stupid fucking standardized testing. The majority of what we learn in school is wrong, either because of propaganda or through the ignorance of the school system. I already knew more than most of the teachers, and I'm not even all that smart. I literally had a Lit. teacher who failed her own test once, no joke.

Or the fact that the school system punishes the victim and protects the abuser in the case of bullying. As a result of our zero tolerance policies, anyone involved in a fight is punished. If you defend yourself, you get suspended, period. The teachers treat you like shit afterwards too. The assholes didn't care of course, they barely showed up anyway, but the victims actually had something to lose. As a result bullies knew they could do whatever they wanted, and it wouldn't get reported, and the victim wouldn't defend him/herself. I got mad when I caught some people messing with a friend of mine at lunch, so picked up someones food tray and threw it at their table. I about got my ass kicked by six guys afterward, but they leaved my friend alone after that. The teachers just kinda watched. I actually heard them making fun of the guy later.

The level of ignorance in the public school system is a total disgrace, and people wonder why Americas education is so poor. It's because it's 50% propaganda and 50% bullshit. You can't just throw money at a problem and make it go away America. Thank God for college. Angry rant over.

 

[mysecondlife]

Making you take English, Anthropology, etc. even though you're an engineering major.

Ugh.

 

[xshadowscreamx]

When I think back now, I think how did I put up with going 5 days a week. Blows my mind... now that I am use to going to TAFE( kind of like community college) less days then that.

 

[Caine Master]

What has been annoying me lately is the amount of work that I need to do outside of class. I'm a art major and some of the projects can take a long time to do. So it doesn't help when I have projects and reports to at the same time. Then the teacher lectures you because you didn't spend enough time on a project.

I'm willing to work hard, but don't expect me to work only on your stuff.

oh, and classes that require a book, but than don't use it.

 

[krazykidd]

Teachers. I hate their holier than thou, i know everything you know nothing attitude they have. Not all teacher, but a good majority.

Also bad teachers. Yes i know teacher isn't an easy job. But hell some people are good at it and some aren't. I know you spent a good chunk of your life studying to be a teacher, but of you are no good at it, you should find another vocation.

 

[Random Argument Man]

I've been a student and, for a small time, a teacher. Both groups have annoying things they have to deal with.

For teachers: Forced professionalism always got me a bit angry. I understand the need to be professional to a certain point. It stops problems before they start. However, I've met people who got chewed out and almost fired because they offered opinions in their classes. It was nothing controversial. It's a bit stupid when somebody calls the school because they don't want their child to hear a political opinion. It's even more stupid to hear cases of people getting fired because their Facebook profile picture shows them with a small glass of wine.

Also, it's bad when I hear a statement like "X course has no purpose. Why am I forced to learned this?". I can understand it coming from students since most teachers don't take the time to teach WHY IT'S IMPORTANT. It's worst when I hear it from other teachers. That gets my blood boiling. There was a specific program with clear objectives constructed to educate children. It's not a "teach them x, y and z" list. It's a goddamn program. It just shows one of the biggest problem in education: Lack of passion. Why should a student learn or a teacher teach if there's no joy into it from both side? Why teachers haven't took their time to learn the needs to teach a class? Knowledge brought our civilization to the biggest peak we've seen. We still have problems in this world. If we can't awake an interest from the next generation, how can we improve as a whole?

AND FOR PETE'S SAKE: No teachers likes to hear "Will this be on the test?" at everything we teach. It's basically saying to us "I'm only listening up to this point".

For students:

I've always detested reading in turns. It's the most dull way to teach a text. "Hey Susie, can you read this easily understandable paragraph? No, anyone else can't read in advance". It slows the class for nothing and prolongs what should takes a few minutes to a whole period.

I don't hate group task if they're well-structured. The teacher created a number of tasks to be done. Just identify who's doing which task and give them the proper points for their parts. Letting the students chose themselves the structure often brings the famous scenario of someone doing all the work while the rest is doing nothing. If you have the scenario where some group members want to do more, let them do more. They'll get the social skills that you want to develop and they'll even be able to act independently to get what they need.

 

[viscomica]

I hated high school through and through. PE class was the worst and I couldn't relate much to anyone there. I usually just went there, did my homework and never tried to interact with people I wasn't interested in.
College... well, I like it. I feel confortable around people and even with very snotty and stuck up individuals I feel like at least we share one common interest (graduating). It also helps that I can choose the classes I attend to.

 

[Valkrex]

I hated how almost every single class I had only taught for the test. Didn't matter if it was AP or not, if it wasn't on the state specified standardized test, we didn't learn it. This royally pissed me off because history and the sciences are incredibly interesting topics, but when you learn for a test you don't retain anything, you don't learn any of the truly important things, you don't learn the "why?"'s and the "how"'s, but what answers you would need for the test.

Also the ACT's. For those non-American's the ACT is one of two standardized exams that all high-school students are required to take and it essentially governs the rest of your life as colleges won't accept you if you have a low score. Now I can understand the logic behind that, but the ACT wasn't a test on what you know. It doesn't test critical thinking, it doesn't test writing skill, it doesn't test analysis, it doesn't test actual knowledge in any way. Its a test on how well you take tests. The 'science' section is particularly offensive as all you do is read a chart/graph/table and answer purposefully deceptive and poorly worded multiple choice questions on it.

My other big complaint was my school had a "Zero Tolerance" bullying policy. What this meant was that fighting or "bullying" of any kind would be met with extremely harsh punishments. All fine and good until its put in practice. If someone were to attack you, as in they initiate a fight and they throw the first punch, you can NOT defend yourself. If you get jumped and try to fight back just so you don't get your skull cracked open, then YOU get punished just as bad, if not worse, than the person who was trying to injure you. BUT WAIT! It gets BETTER! For whatever reason my high school had GLOBAL jurisdiction. If you got in a fight or insulted someone off of school grounds (like in public or in your neighborhood), you would get punished in school for it. My brother and his friends had a guy come at him with a wrench (long story as to why that happened, but my brother and his friends were innocent, the guy was an asshole) in front of OUR HOUSE and my brother and his friends got into a fight with this guy, resulting in several black eyes and bruises. All of them were suspended for defending themselves against an attacker that happened to be a fellow student, OFF OF SCHOOL GROUNDS.

BUT IT GETS EVEN BETTER! A friend of mine got jumped by a would be thief while visiting family out of state, but with the help of some kind passersby he was able to force said thief off without any resulting injury. He gets back to school and understandably told his friends about it when asked. The higher ups heard about this, and he was suspended for "Violent Behavior".

Friends of mine who went to different high schools have given me similar tales, and the fact that schools seem allowed to police you world wide is just BS.

 

[Mr Companion]

It's either the students or the teachers.
The students are half baked personalities dick waving their way up the most idiotic social structure conceivable by endlessly professing their extensive knowledge of genitalia and regurgitating jokes they heard on Little Britain.
The teachers are the most cowardly kind of bully, the dysfunctional social rejects intent on taking their anger out on whatever weakened targets they can find. They are pitiably eager to prove their dominance over 12 year olds and utterly apathetic to the children they are bound to safeguard and educate.

Personally I dislike the teachers more. Sure they probably ended up in this state because of constant exposure to the gleefully idiotic children but the kids at least have the excuse of not knowing any better while the adult teachers really should.

Edit: Also dislike the pedophile gym teacher, the psychopath IT teacher and the humorless corpse French teacher. So glad to be free of Humphery Davy school I can tell you that much. Also no really the gym teacher really was, it was in the papers and everything. What a lovely place.

 

[Tenkage]

Gym

In most if not all other classes I could easily avoid all those people who would eat me for lunch, but in Gym I was forced to mingle with them.

Gym classes in school taught me to hate exercise. It was only after I graduated that I learned I really, really like exercising. I just hated my schools' approach to it, because my schools always had this notion that it is only exercise if you are somehow in competition with every other student. Whether it was sports where you get points for moving balls of various sizes into goals of various shapes, or running the mile where the students who were slow were visibly behind the students who weren't, everything was about not beating my own weakness, but comparing myself to students who were already more athletic than me.

It just runs against my psychology. When I am at the gym on my own, exercising by myself, I sometimes easily outperform the people around me. This isn't because I'm competitive and want to beat them, it's because I want to beat myself. I want to make myself stronger, endure more, and more graceful than I was before. So I'm always pushing myself, looking for my weaknesses, looking at ways to overcome them. But in my teenage psychology where I was terribly insecure about how I compared to other kids, the message was always, "They already beat you, what's the point in keeping at it?" Plus, the things we did in PE always struck me as kinda useless. So the President's physical fitness challenge says I should pick up the eraser and run back past a line in a certain amount of time. I don't care about that. I will never need to pick up an eraser and run past a line in my life. It would surely never happen because it would have been a nightmare insurance wise, but if my school had taught us skills that were directly usable in real life, like parkour or aikido, I would have thought PE was the greatest class ever.

Oh man I knwo that feeling, the only thing I liked about PE was when we played dodge ball...good times LOL

 

[lacktheknack]

I actually very much enjoyed school, wasn't bullied at the end, was encouraged to do well in gym class, etc, etc. In University, I loved the change, had fun in the classes, met new friends, etc, etc. My schooling was great.

...except, in University, I took too many courses.

That backfired and caused me a LOT of stress, and ultimately made me flunk out.

 

[Phantom Kat]

I had a science teacher that was a creationist. He was also a smug, self-righteous ****, and made me hate taking science.

I'd have to say the most annoying thing is exams. I'm terrible at exams. I can be doing excellently in my studies during the year but as soon as I get an exam, I do terribly. I'm just so much better at doing things like essays and practical tasks.

 

[MysticSlayer]

So I'm sitting in Civilization I with people who think Cleopatra built the pyramids and that Rome and Greece were the same place. They listen to the lectures (as far as I can tell), but never do the reading outside of class, so the discussion portion tends to be myself and the professor.

I'm not necessarily great at history, but man, it sounds like something seriously got messed up in those students' education to think Rome and Greece are the same thing. I know students in my history classes had some weird ideas about what had happened in history, and they knew next to nothing about geography, but that is seriously a new one to me.

I want to be surrounded by people who really want to learn, who are passionate about the subjects they're taking. Not more of the dullards I went to secondary school with, who don't care and are only here because they have to be. This is university, no one has to be here anymore. If you'd rather be somewhere else, go be there. Or get with the bloody program.

Unfortunately, I wonder how many of those people are there because they have no idea what else to do. I still understand the frustration. I get incredibly annoyed when I make it a point to come to class early, work hard at the subject, and pay attention and participate (when applicable) in lecture and then notice students who come to class late every day, put in next to no effort, and hardly pay attention. It's just completely disrespectful, especially when they start blaming everyone else for their problems. Still, I can't help but wonder if they really don't want to be there but just don't know what they would be doing if they weren't.

I'm not trying to excuse them. I'm just saying that they may not all be there because they want to.

 

[bat32391]

How the dipshits setup my class schedule last year. Someone thought it would would be a good idea to give me advanced physics, Spanish, and algebra as my first, second, and third periods. Made me hate mornings.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I had a science teacher that was a creationist. He was also a smug, self-righteous ****, and made me hate taking science.

Oh, crap, were my science classes before college horrible for that very reason! I was on a Fundamentalist Christian curriculum, so every science class we had to learn about all the "problems" with evolution while having to endure constant railing against the "corrupt evolutionists" that were "twisting science so they could rebel against God" if not just being plain "ignorant". I literally tried to skip science during my final year of high school to get away from it, but then they worked it into other classes! If they had actually told us what evolution actually is, come up with decent arguments, and actually presented the counterarguments to their own positions, then I may have enjoyed it more regardless of disagreeing with them. But nope, it was all the same horrible straw man and "second law of thermodynamics"[footnote]Actually, what is rather humorous is that they constantly misquoted the Second Law of Thermodynamics whenever talking about evolution. Basically, they conveniently left out the "in a closed system" part of the law. However, when they taught the concept in chemistry and outside of the Creation/evolution "debate", they quoted it correctly. Yes, they essentially laid out for the vigilant student how to piece together the fact that they were blatantly lying to them![/footnote] arguments.

The curriculum was decent for other things, but oh boy did it have its problems!

 

[Tenkage]

I had a science teacher that was a creationist. He was also a smug, self-righteous ****, and made me hate taking science.

Oh, crap, were my science classes before college horrible for that very reason! I was on a Fundamentalist Christian curriculum, so every science class we had to learn about all the "problems" with evolution while having to endure constant railing against the "corrupt evolutionists" that were "twisting science so they could rebel against God" if not just being plain "ignorant". I literally tried to skip science during my final year of high school to get away from it, but then they worked it into other classes! If they had actually told us what evolution actually is, come up with decent arguments, and actually presented the counterarguments to their own positions, then I may have enjoyed it more regardless of disagreeing with them. But nope, it was all the same horrible straw man and "second law of thermodynamics"[footnote]Actually, what is rather humorous is that they constantly misquoted the Second Law of Thermodynamics whenever talking about evolution. Basically, they conveniently left out the "in a closed system" part of the law. However, when they taught the concept in chemistry and outside of the Creation/evolution "debate", they quoted it correctly. Yes, they essentially laid out for the vigilant student how to piece together the fact that they were blatantly lying to them![/footnote] arguments.

The curriculum was decent for other things, but oh boy did it have its problems!

Wow seriously....my head hurts a bit

 

[Ducky]

I once had a physics teacher who tried to convince me that you could have a distance of -60 meters. During the unit where he emphasized the difference between scalar and vector quantities.
ssssiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.