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Comment by emidln | Hacker News Reader

>> you as an adult get asked to “stop helping them get ahead of the class” > Whether by parental training or self study, some teachers treat it almost as a crime to understand the material before the class starts.

I remember a 7th grade math teacher confiscating my workbook when she found out I had done the entire workbook in the first week. I never really understood why. I spent most of that year telling the teacher she already had my homework and refused to do it again on principle. I ended up taking a 0 on every homework assignment and had a C in the class instead of an A+. Fuck that teacher.

> In college you can sometimes talk your way out of the Intro To XYZ classes and go directly to the upper level stuff.

I did this for first year history, computer science, and calc classes. Highly recommend giving it a try.

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I ended up taking a 0 on every homework assignment and had a C in the class instead of an A+. Fuck that teacher.

I'm curious why/if your parents didn't step in to correct the injustice.

I did something similar and caught flak for being dumb enough to intentionally get a bad grade

I would have done the same. The teacher being WrongTM does not mean I should have to redo all the coursework to get the already earned grade for It. In the described situation I know I would have been able to recruit support from multiple people to get the teacher to behave correctly. Fortunately, no teacher in my life would have been able to defend refusing to give credit for work done within the written academic standards.

Although, I did once transfer into a school whose headmaster refused to accept transcripts from another school. He claimed I couldn't have begun grammar school when I did, because my birthday was after his school's deadline (despite him acknowledging the other school's later deadline!), which to him meant that I 'must' have started a year later and therefore 'must' either go back one form or if we didn't like that, have my entire transcript rejected and repeat all forms. (Madness!)

Good read on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Underground-History-American-Educatio...

The famous story of young C. F. Gauss adding 1 + 2 + . . . + 100 by noting the familiar formula.

Brought it up to his teacher.

Lucky for him the teacher recognized this was no ordinary pupil and contacted the Duke of Brunswick, who paid for his university education later.

Today, he'd be lucky not to end up handcuffed in a squad car.

That's another reason to pay 50K for a private school for your kids if you can afford it.

Also, for getting into upper division classes, I wish I'd had the sense to do it, looking back.

Whereas I, not understanding the high school textbook or teacher explanations on some problem, but having reversed a procedure from the problems which had answers in the back of the book, was told one day:

- It probably doesn't work for all problems in the set (but was given two chances to prove it from the unassigned problems and some the teacher made up on the spot).

- Okay, but you can only use it on homework and still have to write every step; can't use it on quizes, tests, or extra credit because it takes up too much space and takes too long to grade.

- If I could find a math symbol for the key operation within one day, I could use it ONE take-home extra credit that had been due that day.

The key operation? For all positive N, f(N) = N+N-1...until N=zero. I couldn't find the requested symbo l.

When I took my first uni maths class, I asked my prof. He answered and wrote it before I even finished describing:

"Oh, sigma."

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