When I learnt that my teachers don't know

I was talking to a teenager today. He's a great programmer. He loves to code. But his parents force him to spend most of the time at tuition classes. He says all he can think about is coming back home and working on his pet project. I ended up telling him what he does on his pet project is likely to have disproportionate outcome in his life - listening to his teachers teach what they don't know, not so much. This is the story I told him about my schooling.

I was an obedient student. I was a sharp kid and I knew it - but others wouldn't believe me.

"If you don't write it on paper, how will we know that you know?" my mom would repeatedly ask me when I argued that i know the answers. Her concern was not baseless. When attempting to answer questions on the exam, I'd go for the most interesting questions first. Not necessarily the ones that I knew the answers to. So, many times by the time I got to the questions that I actually knew the answers to, time would have run out. In hindsight, it was a stupid strategy. I was supposed to be optimizing for scoring well, not for interestingness of those three hours. Nobody told me. They all thought I didn't know the answers, and that's why I didn't even attempt them. But this was at a time when I had given up on trying to score well on exams - so I might as well try to make my exams exciting, I thought.

I was particularly good at math and science. Again, I knew it. Because of a sequence of events that I'll detail below, I diverted my attention to co-curricular activities. I started participating in quiz competitions, programming competitions and anything that would let me escape the mundane classroom studies. That'd start to have outsized impact on how my schooling trajectory shaped, but that's for another blog. This one is focused on a few incidents that let me to give up on classrooms.

I was in 6th grade, it was the Math examination. I was, as usual, picking the most interesting questions to solve. This was around the time we were just being introduced to geometry. The question was to draw two parallel lines and write the steps of construction.

I knew what the teacher wanted - exactly what she had taught in class. She wanted us to draw a line; draw two lines perpendicular to the said line; cut equi-distant arcs on each of these perpendiculars; join the point of intersections of the arcs with the perpendiculars; this line would be parallel to the first line we would have drawn.

So, I started drawing these lines. Drew the first line, drew the first perpendicular and then the other. At this point I thought "Hey these two (perpendicular) lines look parallel to each other. Maybe if I could prove that these two are indeed parallel, I don't need to draw one more line!"

And ofcourse it was provable. So I went on to write in my exam that these two lines are parallel, because their internal angles are equal. I was fucking proud of this. I vividly remember coming out of the exams and telling my friends "I bet you had to draw 4 lines, but I could do it with just 3!". I don't remember what their reaction was - but I do remember what the reaction of my teacher was the following day.

When I was handed my evaluated papers, the first thing i did was to turn to the question of parallel lines with the excitement to have the approval from my teacher in the form of five glorious stars.

But instead I found a red cross mark - not just not even acknowledging my creativity, but rather dismissing it. Very uncharacteristic of my 6th grade obedient self, I went to my teacher to challenge her decision on the score she gave me on that question.

Her question was "Where's the parallel line?"

I went look here they are, pointing at the two perpendicular lines.

"They're perpendicular lines, the question says parallel" ; Clearly she thought that I didn't know the difference between parallel and perpendicular and drew two perpendicular lines instead of parallel.

"No but look they are parallel"

"Where's the parallel line to the first line you drew?"

"How do you know which was the first line I drew?" I asked thinking I'm winning this argument.

Before I knew it, I my specs were on the floor following a slap on my face - "Learn how to draw parallel lines and then talk to me", she'd quickly justify her slap.

"Look I even have proved that these lines are parallel", was going to be my next comeback. If only I had the opportunity to. I went back to my desk disheartened. My friend next to me however nodded looking at me. He knew I was right. But it didn't matter. I already knew it. But today, I learnt my teacher didn't.

This experience was an eye opening moment. In the sense that from this point on I started looking for ways to prove that my teacher didn't know something I did. It was my form of intellectual revenge that would last the next several years. Needless to say, I found dozens of instances.

The same teacher would lock horns with me only a couple months after this incident. This time the question was in algebra. The question to solve was what is "1+2+3+4...+100"? The way to answer the question was to know the formula n*(n+1)/2 and apply that. But I didn't remember that formula. However, I had come across the story of Euclid in a magazine that I loved as a kid called the Children's Digest. In that story was a description of how Euclid came up with this formula. He would write the numbers once in ascending order, and once in descending order. He'd add the numbers (1+100), (2+99), (3+98) ... He noticed that the sum of each pair was the same. So he had to sum one pair up, multiply it by 100 and divide it by 2. And that is what I did in my response to that question. It was so much cooler! But then I found myself awarded zero points for creativity. When I went up to my teacher again, claiming that my answer was right, she said "the answer doesn't matter, the steps matter more. How will I know that you know the formula?"

"If you wanted the formula, why didn't you just ask for that in the question?" I thought to myself, but from my previous experience, learnt not to say it aloud.

I'd routinely find such loopholes in my teachers' competency. Especially in math and science. Not only was i good at it, but i was deeply interested that I'd spend hours on Encarta and Britannica encyclopedias learning more than what was taught in class. So, I knew that I knew the answers but lost interest in proving it to the teacher - I found it a futile exercise.

However, a couple of years later would come another major realization in my understanding of the education system.

This time it was a chemistry class. But unlike the math classes, I liked my chemistry teacher. She usually seemed to have answers to my questions and didn't ridicule my curiosity.

We were studying the Bohr's atomic model. We were all asked to do an exercise on solving a few questions mostly numerical in nature. Unlike many other teachers, this teacher would encourage us to use calculators. I was particularly good when I had a calculator. So I was able to complete the questions in the first 15 minutes of the hour long exercise. I'd show the answers to my teacher, she'd quickly evaluate it on the spot and affirm that i've got them right.

Clearly she was bored too, so she came up to me and said "let me teach you something more interesting about the atomic model that you'd learn 2 years later". She went on to explain on a rough sheet of paper the quantum model of the atom. I vividly remember her drawing boxes of the s-p-d-f sub-orbits, filling them up with arrows to represent electrons.

It was really hard for me to follow what she was saying. But what did catch my attention was she'd sketch out the electrons and say "actually the electrons are not these dots going around in circles around the nucleus, but they're a cloud and we can never tell where exactly the electron is."

"So you mean Bohr was also wrong?", just like we had learnt a few weeks back that the Rutherford model was wrong and Bohr corrected it. But our texts didn't mention that Bohr's model too was inaccurate/incorrect. I knew because, I had read the next few chapters already and they had nothing to do with proving Bohr's model to be wrong.

"Yes", my teacher responded with a shame on her face

"So then, why are you teaching us stuff you know is wrong?" I instinctively asked

"I have to teach what is there in the textbook" she responded with a helpless shrug

And this was a moment, it dawned to me that not only are teachers not competent - but even if they are competent, they're capped on how much they can teach - and worse, they had to teach things inspite of knowing that what they're teaching is actually wrong.

This incident cemented my beliefs that there was no learning in the classroom at all. Day after day, felt like a drag in classrooms. The more I started pondering about the sad reality, the more I started learning outside class via magazines, encyclopedias, books and later the internet - I'd get more and more disillusioned by our education system. I'd feel suffocated in the classrooms.

I wished my teenage friend a speedy independence from the mundane classroom studies.