# Pet peeve time: Underestimating kids and with bad info



## Psilo (Apr 29, 2009)

I just want people to share their stories of times you were given just wrong information in school, or otherwise felt treated below your comprehension level. 

What I'm getting at, is I hate having to relearn information. You can absorb so much so easily as a kid, why waste my time with information that is quite correct. 

For example, my sister was 6 years older than me and loved to come home and show me what she did in school. Because of that, I could read before kindergarten and was generally ahead of my peers in math. This memory sticks with me as the first time I saw the fallibility in teachers. In first grade, my teacher said you can never subtract a larger number from a smaller number. "But what about negative numbers?" "Don't worry about that." "Well you said you can't but you can!" "Well, we aren't going to do that."

Or If I could go an amend every 1-8 grade science textbook that says "There are only 3 states of matter" to say "There are many different states of matter, the ones you encounter most are..." I think my life would be complete and I would die happy.

I'm sure someone who is more of a history buff than I can give examples of our Euro-Amerocentric view of world history.

Do we not feel kids are capable of understanding open ended information? Why do we use absolutes in scenarios that aren't? Why do I have to unlearn what I was laugh in younger years, shouldn't I be learning things more in depth? 

Maybe it doesn't matter in the long run, but I feel that I could have accepted an idea like "This is all we will go into" instead of having "There are only three states of matter" drilled into my head year after year until they go "Lulz, there are four!" When they mean "There are many... Here are four common ones!"


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## Darien Kirst (Sep 15, 2011)

It's sort of how history classes in elementry school convientiently skip over tragic events in history. A perfect example being early American history. They'll tell it as, pilgrims land on plymoth rock, have a big party with the native americans and then on the next page it's years later and the settlers are gaining their independance from England. I wish at the time I would've asked, "well...where did they all go" and the teacher would've been like, "uhh...ummm...they...uhhh...moved..."


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## Balmaki (Jul 12, 2011)

I am wondering how much of this has to do with the idea that Kids Are Innocent and The World Is Dangerous and so we need to Shelter Them from the Dangerous elements of the world, and how much of this has to do with the pragmatics of the educational system in the way we have it (i.e.: "we can't teach negative numbers right now because the Rest Of The Class isn't ready for that, and at any rate it's beyond your Developmental Level so...")

...Excess capitalization all intentional.


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