Things you were shockingly old when you learned

My HS history teacher was also a gym teacher. That sort of thing.

Just found out what birdlime is and what it does.

Also that expression "doing bird" for being in prison is Cockney rhyming slang...
Bird lime = time.

OK, didn't know that was rhyming slang, good one!

I knew the word "birdlime" existed but for some reason had never read about it in context, until today when I was reading about someone smearing it on trees to catch birds! I think I assumed it was a polite word for bird shit!

That's one of the things I'm currently wrapping my head around. Not the notion itself, which, y'know...doy, but rather the precise ways that that has historically shaken out.

― Stefan Twerkelle (Old Lunch), Wednesday, 10 March 2021 13:11 (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Its the most interesting topic there is imo

Anyone should track down the three part sebag montefiore programme on byzantium

Hes a fucking dose but its a good runthrough of the histories

As a product of American public schooling, I feel I have to express just how profoundly, profoundly ignorant I am on a wide variety of subjects that I didn't properly learn about in college or pursue on my own.

I think you're being a bit hard on yourself, Old Lunch. I'm just a bit confused because I think of the phrase 'ethnically x' as meaning people with roots in x who aren't necessarily nationals of that place, eg 'ethnic Albanians in Kosovo', though that phrase did puzzle me when it was first all over the news and I'm not 100% what it means.

I wasn't aware myself, if that's what you mean by it, that most ethnic Turks have their roots in the outer reaches of the former Ottoman empire, rather than the current borders of Turkey. Are you referring to people who currently live in places that used to be in the empire?

Recently I learned that Case Western Reserve University got its name because that part of Ohio used to be part of Connecticut (!).

that whole Ottoman Empire thing

Hey, they just wanted to provide the world with comfortable furniture.

Constantinople or Byzantium was the capitol of teh Eastern Roman Empire so would presumably have been somewhat cosmopolitan prior to the rise of Islam.

My father, who is a classicist, was on a tour there one time and he got epically cranky with American dudes who were wearing, like, safari vests and adventure-travel gear to walk through a market. "'Istanbul' literally means 'to the city,' you ignorant fools! It's derived from Istam Polis!"

I wasn't aware myself, if that's what you mean by it, that most ethnic Turks have their roots in the outer reaches of the former Ottoman empire, rather than the current borders of Turkey. Are you referring to people who currently live in places that used to be in the empire?

― Alba, Wednesday, March 10, 2021 8:06 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Rather than make a dog's breakfast of a topic of which I'm still barely cognizant, I will just post this wiki link that appears to be about the phenomenon in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkification

My father, who is a classicist, was on a tour there one time and he got epically cranky with American dudes who were wearing, like, safari vests and adventure-travel gear to walk through a market. "'Istanbul' literally means 'to the city,' you ignorant fools! It's derived from Istam Polis!"

Your dad is awesome.

I heard Terry Jones going into the name derivation somewhere presumably i his series on the crusades, so was semi aware of that to teh city thing. Could remember teh way it derived from a portmanteau word construction but couldn't remember exactly what it broke down to but I was thinking it was something along those lines.

I feel like I could actually go a ways in state politics if I just railed about how we don't have brontosauruses or nine planets anymore. "If Science indeed has the last say on everything, then why all the changes?"

accuracy?
Breing able to test and refute hypotheses?
I thought that was the thing with belief you can change what you believe to fit what evidence shows.& evidence only works within a paradigmatic network which will change as new things come to light.
Change one element within a field and you change the field and fun stuff like that

My HS history teacher was also a gym teacher.

Stevolande, you wouldn't go very far in my state's politics.

those textbooks were from the 1960s. i feel like i have a right to sue tbh.

forks, I have the same story about my HS English teacher, he had the job because he was too old to teach PE, and because I had bad handwriting and was bad at doing homework I ended up in the second-from-bottom English set, something that still stings nearly 30 years later.

The sum total of my legit education in high school (ie, material I both learned and to some extent retained and which served as a foundation for subsequent learning) came via my awesome junior/senior year AP English teacher. And also typing class. Aaaaaand that's about it.

xp That sounds even worse than my AP Gov. teacher, who insisted (this was immediately post-9/11, for context) that we all stand and pledge allegiance to the flag every morning and anyone who didn't want to stand would have to wait outside and be marked late. Then when students complained he got all huffy and said it was HIS FLAG and he was TAKING IT AWAY and no one would be able to pledge and it served us right. Then parents complained about that and he brought it back. That's all I remember about his class, so he can't have been a very good teacher. The year after I graduated, I heard that he had gotten into a fistfight in the hall with another teacher who used to be a pro wrestler, lost the fight (obviously), and then gotten fired.

oh lol, growing up in the 80s and 90s nobody ever gave pushback on the pledge of allegiance.
i remember my first extensive period being bullied in seventh grade at morning public assembly (where they threw all the kids into the gym on bleachers while we waited for an hour for all the buses to arrive from the farflung route they had to take to bring us all to this trash heap) and i figured out how to skip that hellhole and read in the band room instead... until the vice-principal found me and asked what i was doing there and, when i told him honestly that the other kids were throwing things at me and making fun of me for reading and occasionally hitting me, that fucking asshole ordered me to go back and stand up for myself against a posse of 7th graders and checked to make sure I was on those bleachers for months afterward. I had to start taking antacids in the morning on the bus so I wouldn't puke from nervousness. eventually i snapped and jumped one of the kids and banged his head against the wall for awhile so they mostly left me alone after that.

i think it speaks well to us that we're not all gibbering suicidal idiots after surviving US public schools

The only thing I learned in public school...was how to survive. (cue ominous beating of kettle drums as I tie filthy bandana around my forehead)

xp Jesus, what an awful thing to do to a kid.

Yeah, I definitely grew up pledging allegiance in elementary and middle school too, but my high school never bothered with it before 9/11, so it was a very sudden shift from "yeah, we don't do this" to "you can't enter the classroom unless you do this," and it was coming from a teacher rather than the school so it ended up being a big deal.

heh well tbh it was probably good that i toughened up just a little around then but fuck that vice principal forever

The year after I graduated, I heard that he had gotten into a fistfight in the hall with another teacher who used to be a pro wrestler

wait hold up

I mean, I am not going to be picking a fistfight anywhere, let alone my place of employment, but just say for the sake of argument I did; I would not be challenging the former pro wrestler

Also these stories are reminding me of the time in middle school when I was spat upon for 40 minutes straight by some assholes before I snapped and spat back at them and I got punished along with them.

(This was on a bus back from a trip to see My Fair Lady and there were teachers chaperoning the event whom I complained to while this was happening but somehow no discipline was enacted until I fought back, how peculiar)

Jesus christ.

Is there a 'traumatizing shit that happened to you when you were a kid' thread? If not...maybe we don't actually need one. I could see that turning into a nightmarish trigger-fest.

I threw applesauce at my PE teacher once

My Tianenman Square

weird. I was just telling a friend about how my high school physics teacher set aside a day to lecture us on how homosexuality was a disease (this was circa 1995)

was spat upon for 40 minutes straight by some assholes before I snapped and spat back at them and I got punished along with them.

The origin story of 'BOTH SIDES!!!'

TIL Vir from Babylon 5 is the guy who played Flounder in Animal House.

Idk why it took me this long to recognize him

My school was good, some kids were assholes, but deficiencies in outcome were my own.

my junior year HS history? current events? civics? I don't even remember? teacher was the baskeball coach would give you a quiz on his mimeographed handout of the rules at the beginning of the year, wore the same pants every day (we kept a tally), and took 15 minutes to take roll every day, during which time we would often try to make each each other pass out.

Every week we had to turn in a report on a current event and my friends started doing them on things like BJ and the Bear article from the "TV Stars 1982" book in the library or the trading cards of En Vogue and Linear from the side of a Pop Tarts box. A guy named Wilhelm found an article in the weekly world news about a car called the wilhelm that ran on urine and turned it in as if it had been from popular mechanics. The teacher came in the next week with a stack of Popular Mechanics from the past year to prove Wilhelm was lying but didn't do anything because he was too lazy.

that Mike Muir and Infectious Grooves have beef with Rage Against the Machine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8l2UtJ83I4

I went to public school up until 8th grade, so survived the hell of public middle school. My private high school had its own deficiencies– I remain terrified of math, fwiw— but we read and wrote like nobody's business. My freshman year, I wrote a 35 page research paper on the EZLN and land struggle in Mexico, and my sophomore year English teacher just had a poem published in the Editorial section of the NYTimes this past weekend.

(It was a very progressive Quaker school, and yes, I had a partial scholarship)

All that said, while I can do a lot of mental math of the four basic functions pretty easily, anything beyond that is off the table. I don't remember how to do most algebra, or geomentry, and I got a C- in trig and never took a math class again.

I once wrote a poem about President Bush (H.W.) getting lost in a mall

anything beyond that is off the table

Tee hee.

I once went on an epic rant about neoliberalism in my senior Philosophy seminar, stormed out of the class, then returned after smoking cigarette at "the corner," which was within sight of the school, but was technically off school grounds.

Good thing that teacher loved me.

pvmicc

-c

yep, some things haven't changed

I use geometry all the time (graphic design, technical drawing, even just practical interior stuff like how do we arrange our furniture). Geometry is lovely.

Algebra I can still kinda manage, but trigonometry, calculus, etc. simply never happened for me and never will

pvmicc

― Canon in Deez (silby), Tuesday, March 16, 2021 4:28 PM bookmarkflaglink

this is the way Crips post to ILX

I have quite fine spatial reasoning and use geometry in some form quite a bit, as I think many people do. But if you asked me to write out a proof, I'd be baffled

I only just realised that the (derogatory?) name for an Irishman, paddy, is from Saint Paddy. I must be a total idiot.

I assumed it had something to do with potatoes but yup that seems more accurate

I don't think it has anything to do with St. Patrick directly, it's more about Patrick being a common first name for Irishman, or perceived to be, they're also called Micks and Scotsman are called Jocks for the same reason.