My Cousin's science teacher

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2005-11-02 08:59pm

My youngest cousin is 13, she's in middle school. Every day she IMs me with "stump my cousin" questions about science or nature, or questions about her homework. Today she IMed me with a doozy:

KareBuff: what makes the sun move?
Chewbacca95: it doesn't move, really
KareBuff: yes it does
KareBuff: my science teacher says so
Chewbacca95: do you mean solar flares, or how it orbits around the galaxy?
KareBuff: huh?
Chewbacca95: what kind of motion are you talking about?
KareBuff: he said it moves, and thats why the orbit of the planets is shaped like an oval
KareBuff: it moves in a direction
Chewbacca95: that's not true
KareBuff: whats not?
Chewbacca95: planets orbit in an oval because of how the physics of planetary motion works
Chewbacca95: the sun may wobble slightly, but that's not why orbits are eliptical
KareBuff: he says its cuz gravity from the sun causes planets to move toward it, but since the sun is moving they miss it and go on by. and then they come back again and miss it again, and it ends up forming an oval shape
Chewbacca95: no, no
Chewbacca95: that's really wrong
KareBuff: well then y did he tell us that?
Chewbacca95: because he probably read it from the wrong books

So then I made her go to wikipedia and read Kepler's 3 laws (I know its wiki, but the pictures are good), and then explained to her how ellipses work and how while orbits CAN be circular, they are very unlikely to exist in nature.

Then I told her to ask her science teacher why sun-movement isn't discussed in Kepler's 3 laws.

But seriously, though, this is how bad info gets into our kids. She's not old enough for Kepler, not quite, but you should at least make sure you're not teaching the kids factually incorrect information. The sun "wobbles" slightly, but it doesn't move back and forth at the center of an ellipse.

Anybody got similar stories, or want to be annoyed at stupid teachers with me? She lives in Connecticut, so if any board members from there have something to say, go for it.

Post by **Surlethe** » 2005-11-02 09:07pm

I'll bet she got it backwards: gravity from the sun causes the planets to go towards it, but because the planets are moving, they miss the sun and go around. That's the elementary explanation I tend to favor (and the one which led Newton to his concept of orbit, IIRC).

Bad teachers? I think I've been lucky enough to avoid really bad teachers during my school career; one who springs to mind was my chemistry teacher several years ago: greasy hair, buckteeth, short, classic permavirgin. I ended up practically teaching the class (or at least the people who sat near me); at one point, I was wrong about something, and he repeated it. When he got shot down by another student, he turned to me, almost in shock, and said, "But you said it was true!" Another classic moment was when he tried to solve sin(x) for x by writing: sin(x)/sin = x. The reason that is totally absurd, for those of you who failed trig, is because sin is a function, not a number or set of numbers.

Psycho Smiley · Post by **Psycho Smiley** » 2005-11-02 09:16pm

I had a highschool science teacher who said that helium came from the fusion of two hydrogen atoms (not deuterium/tritium), and the neutrons came from some other dimension.

Like Surlethe, I also did the whole "teach the class" bit in my Grade 12 math. The teacher was only trained for biology, and didn't know a damned thing. I ended up reading the text, then getting up and re-doing the lesson on more than one occasion.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2005-11-02 09:33pm

You might be dealing with teachers who were certified in other areas and then "asked" to help alleviate a teacher shortage by taking up math and science classes. It's a lot easier to find an English or Social Studies teacher who knows enough math or science to barely pass a math/science PRAXIS than it is to find a qualified math or science teacher. One of the science teachers in my school actually got his master's in history (at Yale), but since his minor was biochem, they asked him to teach chemistry class. Fortunately, he knows his chemistry and he's a good teacher, but not all of them are.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2005-11-02 09:44pm

I remember my geometry teacher actually making that part of a rant back when I was in high school where she yelled "I'm not some general education teacher they found who could pass the certification, I actually majored in math, dammit!" It's something that bugged her alot, because not all the people in my high school math department whose math education was "Math for Teachers" courses, rather than actual math majors. You could tell which ones were actually mathematicians, because they were all cloistered if at all possible teaching the IS and IB kids (i.e. advanced placement).

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2005-11-02 09:55pm

At a guess I'd suspect her science teacher is teaching out of his field of expertise. I recall a history class in which I learned nothing. If the teacher refused to let me sleep through it, I mocked her incessantly as she was certified in English and was basicly teaching straight from the book (which was too PC for its own good and didn't provide her with a pronunciation guide). What you didn't know that there were black slaveholders? What you didn't know that the Cherokee prohibited any tribe member from teaching blacks to read? No Beecher's Bibles weren't really Bibles. No Free Soilers weren't pro-slavery, they were anti-black and anti-slave.

For any given planet, the teacher actually is 'correct'. We can 'easily' pick a frame of reference in which the sun has motion and the orbit ends up ellipitcal. However if we do so for say Earth, then the orbits of Mars and Jupitor will no longer be elliptical.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2005-11-02 10:46pm

I think the thing Cap'n Chewie was getting at was that the planets orbits aren't elliptical because the sun's "motion".

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2005-11-02 11:00pm

I think the thing Cap'n Chewie was getting at was that the planets orbits aren't elliptical because the sun's "motion".

No arguement. I wouldn't even begin to try to explain frame equivalence to a middle schooler with this example. It is possible that someone who actually understands relativity and orbital mechanics made a passing one liner that you could choose a frame that makes things thus and thus true ... and the teacher has since had the brainbug run away from him.

The bug got in there somehow and that is the closest thing resembling fact I can come up with.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2005-11-03 05:41am

tharkûn wrote:
I think the thing Cap'n Chewie was getting at was that the planets orbits aren't elliptical because the sun's "motion".
No arguement. I wouldn't even begin to try to explain frame equivalence to a middle schooler with this example. It is possible that someone who actually understands relativity and orbital mechanics made a passing one liner that you could choose a frame that makes things thus and thus true ... and the teacher has since had the brainbug run away from him.

The bug got in there somehow and that is the closest thing resembling fact I can come up with.

That's what I figured. I'm just making every effort to exterminate all the brainbugs that get into my cousin's schooling.

Anguirus · Post by **Anguirus** » 2005-11-04 02:36pm

Oof. I've been pretty lucky when it comes to teachers, but one of the Bio teachers in my high school was a Christian IDer who told the school paper that she only taught evolution because it was her job.

I'm sure this kind of stuff happens all the time in education, and only a really exceptional student will pick up on it. Hell, when I was 13 I might have swallowed that (I'm hardly an astrophysics expert).

Zero · Post by **Zero** » 2005-11-04 06:59pm

My bad teacher was my Chem teacher last year. Furguson... he wasn't good at explaining things, and most of the time, I ended up doing my lab partner's homework (never my own, ironically), and I had to explain shit for folks about to take the test. I understood him well enough, I guess, when I was awake, but nobody else in the bloody class seemed to get it.

Of course, this year's AP chem teacher's fucking crazy! Ms. J is evil...

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2005-11-04 07:25pm

It's not the teacher in my class. He's mostly competent, it's the fact that all the BLAZING FUCKING RETARDS in my chem class get confused so easily it takes him an entire 80 minute block to explain the rules on filling out the principal energy levels of an electron (that was today btw. I'm more than a little pissed because it took him a half an hour to get to something that wasn't in the reading for last night's homework and then it took him like 50 minutes to get the fucktards to get it). An example, he filled out each orbital and then repeated his point. He got to 37 electrons (Rubidium, since this wasn't an Ion) and asked what element it was to some fucktard. The idiot sees it has 1 valence electron and goes "Hydrogen!". NO YOU FUCKING IDIOT, HYDROGEN HAS 1 ELECTRON TOTAL GOOD JOB, NOW WE GET TO SPEND ANOTHER HALF AN HOUR ON IT.

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2005-11-04 10:39pm

I educated quite a bit of my 9th grade Geography class, since the teacher's knowledge of geography stemmed from her travels to different countries, without a lot of knowledge from books.

Straha · Post by **Straha** » 2005-11-05 01:16am

Gil Hamilton wrote:I remember my geometry teacher actually making that part of a rant back when I was in high school where she yelled "I'm not some general education teacher they found who could pass the certification, I actually majored in math, dammit!" It's something that bugged her alot, because not all the people in my high school math department whose math education was "Math for Teachers" courses, rather than actual math majors. You could tell which ones were actually mathematicians, because they were all cloistered if at all possible teaching the IS and IB kids (i.e. advanced placement).

One of my English teachers in high school had a PHD, in American History. She taught no history classes, just four english classes (one advanced, three normal) and the school suffered dearly because of it, and because they couldn't fire any of the crap American History teachers they already had to give her a job where she would have excelled (even though she looked/acted/talked/sounded like a 28 year old vulture (CAW!)) beyond all but the few other good History teachers.

That was a pity.

Ariphaos · Post by **Ariphaos** » 2005-11-05 10:39am

CaptainChewbacca wrote:That's what I figured. I'm just making every effort to exterminate all the brainbugs that get into my cousin's schooling.

This place needs a glossary. It's not always possible to pick out the meanings the first few times (brainbug wah?)

I had a 'teacher' once claim that the Sun was the biggest star in the sky. She was right because an old guy told her and old guys are always right and as a 6th grader I knew nothing.

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-11-05 01:59pm

Psycho Smiley wrote:I had a highschool science teacher who said that helium came from the fusion of two hydrogen atoms (not deuterium/tritium), and the neutrons came from some other dimension.

Shit, that's what I learned too. But no one ever told me that was wrong.

...I've been victimized! How does helium form?

Ariphaos · Post by **Ariphaos** » 2005-11-05 02:18pm

wolveraptor wrote:Shit, that's what I learned too. But no one ever told me that was wrong.

...I've been victimized! How does helium form?

All sorts of ways, but the most common IIRC is a deuterium atom + a tritium atom (both still technically hydrogen), collide to form a helium 4 atom + a free neutron, which will eventually make a new deuterium or tritium atom.

Naturally, there's more to the internal process of the sun than this, but two naked hydrogen atoms cannot fuse.

Ariphaos · Post by **Ariphaos** » 2005-11-05 02:36pm

Err wait

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-proton_chain

I was wrong :-/

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-11-05 05:37pm

Eh, wikipedia holds about the same credibility as your post; they're both constructs of an anonymous person over the internet.

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-11-05 05:41pm

Actually, sometimes they have references, so in those cases, it's pretty credible. But that page didn't, so I'm somewhat skeptical.

Darth Raptor · Post by **Darth Raptor** » 2005-11-05 07:08pm

I had a history teacher in middle-school who was really a sports coach forced to teach an academics course. Your answers to test questions had to be verbatim from your notes or the text, even if you had the concepts down but just worded them creatively. This was, of course, because he didn't have the concepts down himself. Also, he couldn't pronounce any word he encountered that was outside the mainstream vernacular. When he read the word "Buddha" it came out like "boo-da-huh". In highschool, I fought with my 11th Grade English teacher over the correct pronounciation of words. I tried telling her that "sentinel" and "centennial" were not homonyms, and that "elementary" had five syllables, not four.

Still, that pales in comparison to my brother's fifth grade teacher telling him cavemen wiped out the dinosaurs. Meh.

darthdavid · Post by **darthdavid** » 2005-11-05 07:56pm

Darth Raptor wrote:Still, that pales in comparison to my brother's fifth grade teacher telling him cavemen wiped out the dinosaurs. Meh.

WHAT, THE, FUCK!!!!!!

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-11-06 01:14am

Where the hell do you live? Hicksville USA?

Jawawithagun · Post by **Jawawithagun** » 2005-11-06 05:22pm

Xeriar wrote:Err wait

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-proton_chain

I was wrong :-/

Also the somewhat faster CNO cycle. Both have in common that they fuse four hydrogen nuclei into one helium nucleus. They do not require the hydrogen nuclei to provide any neutrons but generate them along the process.

Setesh · Post by **Setesh** » 2005-11-06 09:15pm

Granted he was a substitute but, we had a ap chem. sub who declared we had all failed a quiz because deuterium was a metal. After 3 minutes of uncontroled sustained laughter he ran from the room in tears. Never did find out what happened to him or what he had training in.