Can you really argue with a biology teacher?
“I haven’t, but it happened to my girlfriend during her last year in high school. She was told by her biology teacher that GMOs cause cancer and other diseases. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to it to be honest. I mean who am I to argue with a biology teacher. You have to admit that “genetically modified” doesn’t sound particularly healthy. Especially not in comparison to the buzzword “natural”. One day, while we had a conversation about the topic, I started questioning the statement. Why do genetically modified organisms equate to unhealthy organisms? I wanted to know the reasoning behind it. Digging into it already made my girlfriend a bit grumpy. For her it was like I didn’t believe that she could handle the topic on her own. It was like I was accusing her of believing what she was told without questioning it. She is definitely the type of person that questions everything, so I was surprised she didn’t do that in this case. But really, you cant blame her. A person with an academic background told her something that I tried to debunk with a few minutes on google. First we tried Youtube. Wrong move. Half of the videos we watched say one thing and the other half said the other. But then again, there are videos about flat earth on this website so maybe it isn’t the most reliable source. So I hit up Quora (answers from Franklin Veaux where especially insightful) and after that a bunch of other biology articles from websites that in my opinion seemed trustworthy. I ended up concluding that GMO’s don’t cause any kind of threat to the human body.”
What makes a flower a flower?
“There are no green flowers. In 5th grade, we had a substitute one day. Her nickname was “Cup”. To keep us occupied, she decided we should discuss plants. “Can anyone give me a color of flowers?”
“Red!” “White!” “Yellow!” Well, the easy colors were gone in a second, so I volunteered, “Green!” Cup said there were no green flowers. Having been shown grass’s flowers recently by my father, I was quite certain green was a valid choice. So, I insisted. Cup reiterated that there were no green flowers, so I insisted more.Cup was furious. She called me to the front of the room and said I had to show a picture of green flowers. (Pre-internet, this is a challenge.) I couldn’t of course, so she gave me a choice: either repudiate (not just retract) my statement or be sent to the Principal. Fearing the latter, and humiliated, I turned to the class and said, “There are *no* green flowers.” Except there are. In my mother’s orchid garden. In the flower arrangements at my wedding. And so on. A simple Google search turns up scads of images: green flowers images – Google Search It’s 40+ years since the incident and I still remember it. Cup passed on before I got to 8th grade – I am sure there are no green flowers where she is.”
Since when was spacing so complicated?
“While there are still many that debate what is better, placing two spaces after a sentence is a well-known hold over from typesetting days. This carried over to typewriters and computers and stuck around, even though putting two spaces into typesetting was a long gone, antiquated practice. I was taught strictly in school that having 2 spaces after a period before a following sentence was the only way people did things. It still propagates to today’s classrooms. Admittedly, it does increase the length of a paper with more “content” when needing to reach that 8 page limit that a professor or teacher might expect. By now, my double sentence spacing habits are much too ingrained to ever have a hope of breaking them. Though browsers throw extra spaces away, I can assure you, reader, that all my sentences have subconsciously been written with double spacing (even though I write that my opinion is contrary.)”
Is there really a purpose to a negative sign in numbers?
“In my 5th grade class, we used to use Earthwatch to learn about current events in environmental science and scientific study. One of the exercises we would always do was calculate the measures of central tendency using the highest and lowest temperatures that week around the world. My teacher asked our class how we could calculate these measures – starting with the range, given that the lowest temperatures were recorded in negative values. This was during the time before we were taught negative numbers in math class, so the majority of the class was unsure of how range worked to begin with. I answered that we needed to add the positive values of both numbers (at the time, I didn’t know what absolute values were, so I tried my best to explain the concept in other terms). I remember using an example with 5 and -5, where the range would be 10. My teacher answered that we actually needed to subtract the numbers, just as you would do for calculating any range. The only problem was she subtracted the absolute values of the highest and lowest temperatures. Although most of the students in the class weren’t aware of how the concept worked, they were nonetheless confused by how they could do this, and what the purpose of the negative sign was. Needless to say, I don’t think most of my classmates (hopefully) retained the knowledge of that lesson.”
Wait…wtf is a quark?!
“We were taught the world was made up of atoms, and the atoms themselves were made up of protons, electrons and neutrons – the building blocks of atoms. But in fact, these so called building blocks were themselves built from so called “Quarks”. Our school systems are so slow at adopting the latest discoveries that something that was discovered in 1968 has not made it into the syllabus of a student studying the subject in 2007! Quark – Wikipedia”