What was a fact taught to you in school that has been proven false during your lifetime?
-
Oxford comma for life!
I was taught to use the Oxford comma by my parents, Ayn Rand and God. I had a strange upbringing.
-
Study and work hard will make you successful.
Broadly speaking, failing to put in effort does tend to lead to worse outcomes.
...Unless your parents have the last name "Musk" or "Trump".
-
This post did not contain any content.
The D.A.R.E. program.
-
Pluto is a great test for what types of person someone is.
If someone says Pluto is still a planet. They have a personality where they are immovable and can't accept scientific change.
If they do say pluto is a new kind of dwarf planet they arw more accepting of new information and belive in the scientific method.
It's a great quick test when meeting news people.
I know - can the person accept hundreds of planets and that ours is less special, or do they need to change a definition (including exceptions) to keep their world view.
-
That I was a republican. The teacher gave out this political alignment quiz that was incredibly biased asking things like "do you like lower taxes or higher taxes?" and "do you like more freedom or less freedom?" All the questions basically lead you to the same answers. So the entire class basically had the same result.
This was in middle school so I wasn't even politically engaged yet. I didn't realize how crazy this was until years later.
I hated this so much in high school.
-
Basically everything I can recall being told in D.A.R.E program classes (war on drugs era propaganda taught in public schools in the USA) was utter nonsense and fabricated bullshit. After actually having personal experience with most of the substances they vilified, none of the effects - good or ill - are what I was taught in that ridiculous program.
On the contrary, some of the fear tactics they used made me curious to investigate on my own. The breathlessly scared rural teacher describing the mind bending effects that "magic mushrooms" was supposed to have sounded fascinating to teenage me. In reality, they are very fun and therapeutic to use, but nothing like the wild Alice in Wonderland mind journey they made it sound like it would be.
Drugs Are Really Excellent?
-
Yeah, I remember that one. We even did an experiment to "prove" it. I was like, "I kinda taste it everywhere". I don't remember what the punishment was exactly, but it was pretty severe.
I remember getting detention on first grade for telling my classmate that a whale had beached here in finland. It happened, it was on the news. Same thing again after I told my classmate about some asteroid that is going to kill us all. On 6th grade the whole class was given detention for not having music books with us because the teachers had decided to change the schedule that morning.
-
tape backups are definitely still a thing. it's one of the cheapest ways to store a shitload of data for a long time
I spend a portion every day removing tapes, shipping them offsite and inserting new tapes
Annoying but must be done
-
Idk you can only ‘learn’ them if you have one and even the shittiest tape drive I could find as a consumer doesn’t help me at all with a tape library. We have our tape admin (=our architect) who we thank god every day for because we didn’t have to bother with it. Now he’s retiring this year.. F
We had one in the lab though and just ignored it
-
This post did not contain any content.
You'll wet your bed if you play with fire.
-
You'll wet your bed if you play with fire.
Never heard this before!
-
Never heard this before!
Could be a Portuguese thing.
-
Physical Vs chemical changes.
It was typically taught that physical changes are differentiated from chemical changes because they could be "undone" or that they had "no chemical reaction." Which was very confusing, because you can't uncut paper, and dissolving stuff in water clearly results in different chemicals being produced, yet both were examples of physical changes (actually the latter is sometimes taught as a chemical change). Furthermore, most chemical changes are actually reversible.
It has since been recognised that this classification is BS, and most changes actually exist on a continuum.
I distinctly remember my fifth grade teacher trying to pull that.
-
This post did not contain any content.
I was taught that Jupiter had 17 moons, Saturn has 12 and Pluto has 1. Many more have been discovered since.
Then there's the whole "different areas on your tongue taste different flavors." Like you only taste sweet with the tip of your tongue, the middle tastes salty, etc. I remember being given various substances by my fifth grade teacher like sugar, coffee, lemon juice, table salt etc. and we tried putting them on different areas of our tongues and we were like "...no, we taste everything everywhere."
-
The United States operates on the principle of three co-equal branches of government, which check and balance each others power.
This is painful.
-
Physical Vs chemical changes.
It was typically taught that physical changes are differentiated from chemical changes because they could be "undone" or that they had "no chemical reaction." Which was very confusing, because you can't uncut paper, and dissolving stuff in water clearly results in different chemicals being produced, yet both were examples of physical changes (actually the latter is sometimes taught as a chemical change). Furthermore, most chemical changes are actually reversible.
It has since been recognised that this classification is BS, and most changes actually exist on a continuum.
I am teaching this next week. It is sometimes painful how simplified we have to make content for middle school. You are expressing what science teachers hope for from students. You were curious enough to explore further and ask questions, the true purpose of science.
-
Gene sequencing wasn’t really a thing (at least an affordable thing) until the 2010s, but once it was widely available archaeologists started using it on pretty much anything they could extract a sample from. Suddenly it became possible to track the migrations of groups over time by tracing gene similarities, determine how much intermarrying there must have been within groups, etc. Even with individual sites it has been used to determine when leadership was hereditary vs not, or how wealth was distributed (by looking at residual food dna on teeth). It really has revolutionized the field and cast a lot of old-school theories (often taken for truth) into the dustbin.
Wonder how many new ones it's creating.
Scientist: 'Look at this science thing that is definitely true because DNA!'
Narrator: 'It wasn't true' -
Sure. You're very funny.
Funny? Do you think religious schools don't exist?
-
This post did not contain any content.
That glass is actually a very thick liquid. It's actually much weirder than that. https://gizmodo.com/the-glass-is-a-liquid-myth-has-finally-been-destroyed-496190894
-
This post did not contain any content.
I have one that was proven false, and then later re-proven true: the existence of the brontosaurus.
When I was in elementary school, we were taught that they existed, they were big, etc. Then, at some point while I was in college, I discovered that actually what we thought was a brontosaur was a brachiosaur or an apatosaur. And then, when my kids went to school and learned about the brontosaur, I discovered that actually, they did exist!
