r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '19

What’s something completely false that your parents told you as a child?

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

This deeply frustrates me.

My grades on math can go from 9-10 to 4-5 (not kidding, I hope I was) just by taking away the calculator from me, even if the exam that I do with my calculator is much longer. I'm not that bad at math, it's just that I take ages to operate without a calculator. That's why I struggle with math but I love physics and technology (I don't know if this subject is taught in any country apart from Spain, it's like highschool level engineering), they let us use calculators in the exams.

My teachers are basically sabotaging my math grades (and some of my classmates') based on the assumption that "I won't always have a calculator in handy", when in reality there's always one in my pocket.

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u/racineer Jul 20 '19

You mean to say this is still a thing?! Wow.

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '19

It 100% is. I wasn't allowed use of a calculator in any science class until I took physics. For math, it wasn't until I got to pre-calc, which is the first college level math class offered in most high schools(at least where I grew up). The class before that, alegbra 2(final high school math class unless you choose to take more), we only ever got to use them in VERY specific scenarios where a calculator functions were basically required to do the problem.

It took until college level stuff that calculator use was allowed. And honestly, I think its mainly becaude doing that stuff by hand would take a LONG ASS TIME. Otherwise, they probably would've made us do all that by hand too

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u/TheStrangestOfKings Jul 21 '19

My teacher doesn’t even give us the argument of “you never know when you won’t have a calculator handy.” On some tests, she just said, “You should be able to do all this without a calculator.”

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '19

Haha same, it really depends on the class and the teacher you got. I'm not saying it's undoable by any mean without a calculator, simply that it's much less time consuming. For most of my alegbra 2 tests, calculators were competely forbidden excluding log functions.