This is probably going to be long and annoying to most people, but my own education experiences are one of those things that still have the power to disgust me. I also get a Charles Emerson Winchester joy out of writing about them.
My third grade teacher couldn't do math. I'm serious about this. I bring it up because over at purplebanana, she was talking about greater than/less than. You know, the old > < signs?
Third Grade Teacher had a stuffed alligator just to teach this, and she'd stand in front of the board and say, "Alice Alligator goes for the greater," and then turn the animal in the direction of the larger figure.
Just one problem with this, she never taught it with regular old numbers, she jumped right ahead and tried to do it with multiplication problems. Which, again, all well and good, but Third Grade Teacher couldn't do multiplication either. I remember my frustration watching her work out a problem step by step on the overhead, arriving at an answer, looking in the answer book, erasing her answer, writing the correct one, and never explaining what she did wrong! I'm not talking about this happening once or twice during the year, I'm talking about once or twice during the math lesson.
Four or five years later, I saw for the first time the episode where Lisa Simpson steals all the teacher's answer books, and I just about cried with the truth and injustice of it all. Come to think of it, that episode still has that effect on me.
Hilariously, the math skills inflicted on half the third graders meant that the following year, half the forth graders couldn't do math at all, and the other half (for different reasons- namely, they tracked the classes) couldn't do math well. That was the beginning of the vicious arguments over math that my father and I had, because I was convinced that math was some kind of crapshoot- you either got the answer right, or you didn't, it had nothing to do with perfecting any sort of process.
That year, we started having one teacher in the morning for Language Arts based classes, and then the afternoon for Maths and Sciences. I recall playing that game "Around the World" with math problems in the morning (they were that desperate to repair the damage), and watching the stunned look on the language teacher's face as Noami and I were the only two who had any competant skills, and Noami was faster than me, so she ALWAYS won.
It's funny about Noami, I haven't thought about her in a long time, but she came with the first wave of Spanish speaking kids in the class. In third grade the school had two black kids: Curtis, who was my age, and his brother, Jack, who was Tai, and something like twenty or thirty Spanish kids. This was due mostly to the fact that our principal was from Guadeloupe (I think), and the growing minority population on that side of town. Most of these kids couldn't speak any English, or very very little, and Noami hardly spoke at all. However, I sat behind her and corrected her spelling papers, and her math papers. She was a better speller than I was, which doesn't say a lot, because I can't spell to save my life, but it occured to me that she probably didn't need to be in ESL.
She talked more right after they tested her and she got into the gifted/talented programme. I remember hearing at the time that schools generally hear about other G/T kids from G/T kids, which said a whole lot about your average elementary school teacher.
You know, like they can't multiply.
Since I'm talking about it, I'll mention that my brother is my mathematical Mycroft. Whether he came with the skills or perfected them through playing Super Mario Brothers at age three, I'll never know. (Video games were good for us- we had to read everything on the screen aloud and then my dad would invent math questions for us, never mind the problem solving inherent in Mario and Legend of Zelda.)
Middle school, for him, was where it all went downhill. He had one of those "show your work" teachers. What am I saying, every middle school math teacher is a "show your work" teacher. This means they can assign you five math problems and make the whole assignment worth fifty points, because they give points for including the steps.
While I suppose this is so that if you get every single question wrong, but you went about it the right way, you still feel good about yourself. But my brother could answer complex math questions in his head. My father and I were fascinated by this and we'd watch him do his homework, problem by problem, he'd write down the answers, and that was all, and he'd be right.
His teachers believed he was working the problems on some other sheet of paper, or that someone was helping him, or any myriad of things, so they'd fail him at everything (the correct answer, you see, was only worth one point), and insist that he show his work. He did go through a short period of going back and putting in all the steps for them, but decided it was the principle of the thing and if he was getting the correct answers, who cared how he got them?
From here, my brain segues into note-taking, and the battles I've had with teachers over those. The family motto, if you will, is "People who carry around their knowledge in spiral covered notebooks should learn how to use their brains, it's cheaper." In that capacity, we're Tristan Farnons, if you tell us, or we read it, we'll probably remember it long after you do.
Then, came middle school, where we were charged to take notes and turn them in. "Write down everything you need to," they would say, and then yell at me when I turned in papers blank except for my name. "Write it down so you can remember it," they would say, and then ask me what language I'd written my notes in. (Dwarvish Moon Runes, for the record. English, just a different alphabet. Actually, the reason I tried to learn Elvish was so that I COULD take notes in it.) "These notes are for you," they would say, and so I'd deliberately wind them up by proving to myself that, no, they're not for me, they're for the teacher, so they have something that they can give points for.
Ahh, middle school, three years of subjective do-what-I-mean-not-what-I-say paradise. Sometimes I wish I could say that I didn't try my absolute hardest to be as aggravating as possible, but at least I picked mind-games rather than outright class interruption. Made it harder to get sent to the office, but it still happened.
Gee, reading back over this, I find Charles Emerson Winchester, Mycroft Holmes, Tristan Farnon and Dwarvish Runes. I'm just full of fictional references today, aren't I? Either that or I'm just in an incredibly bitter mood, which is also likely.