Those were the methods teachers used to get good grades out of me, but as far as teaching me anything? I was really good at being a student in high school, but I wouldn't necessarily call myself smart, which I think I made pretty clear with the whole "magnesium + frog butts" hypothesis. When doing well in a class is separate from being smart, there's a problem. Here is the thing: The best teachers I've ever had were the ones who made me say "bullshit."

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There are so many amazing and interesting stories throughout history -- something I've demonstrated via a bunch of arbitrarily chosen facts I've included throughout this article -- and it's crazy how many of those facts aren't even included in modern textbooks.

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Why do we need to waste our time hearing about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or Abraham Lincoln being born in a log cabin when there are true stories that are WILDLY more exciting?

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The teachers who made me care about learning didn't throw a ton of dates at me, and they didn't want me to know how to build a tiny log cabin out of modeling clay and matchsticks -- they wanted me to get excited and interested.

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My favorite teachers were the ones who knew that every single lesson they taught me was competing for attention in my head with video games, television, girls, and my friends. Whatever came out of their mouths had to be so interesting or insane that I'd be excited enough to listen, read, and want to find out more.

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The most important men and women in history are as or (more often than not) more interesting than the protagonist in every Hollywood blockbuster. As far as getting children inspired to learn and excited about knowing stuff, the single biggest misstep in the American public school system was convincing children that exciting action heroes and historical figures couldn't be talked about in the same conversation.

1) Masturbating;
2) Being a high school student.

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I can't really give high school too much credit for the first one, because those were lessons that I mostly learned on the street, by which I mean in my house in the brief window between when I got home from school at 2:58 and when my dad got home from work at 3:14.

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So let's focus on that second one. When I started college, I assumed I'd be fine because I'd gotten good grades in school, and what were those grades a measure of if not my ability to function in society? If the lessons being taught in school weren't designed to prepare me for my post-high school life, then what the hell WERE they for?

More than a decade has gone by. And I still have no idea.

Great life lesson that WASN'T taught in school.

I certainly didn't use anything I'd learned in high school to survive academically in college, and if I tried, I'd get penalized. In high school, you did well on an essay if you wrote five paragraphs with five sentences each and presented something that was mostly in line with what your teacher believed to be true. The first time I handed in a paper like that to a college professor was the last time, because college professors hate shitty high school robots. College forced me to re-learn how to read, write, and think because the skills you use to figure out stuff in college are wildly different from the ones you use in high school.

It wasn't just the academic stuff, either. There were so many lessons about just being a functioning human being that high school refused to teach. Like I'd been pooping wrong my entire life.

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I mean, bad example, obviously, because it shouldn't be the responsibility of high school teachers to explain to kids how to poop, but still, someone should be teaching that lesson. And not just that one, but plenty of other very valuable life lessons that everyone should know, including the, again, completely arbitrarily chosen life lessons that I've gracefully inserted into this article.

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That teacher, unsurprisingly, burned out, became depressed, and started suffering from a number of other stress-related health issues, something that is common among almost all teachers (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, it's the 20th most dangerous job in America, and some jobs in America are jobs where people shoot guns at you). Seventy-five percent of all teacher health problems are stress-related and a result of "dwindling school resources, low pay, high expectations for test scores, changing assessments of student performance, lack of parental involvement, and pressure from administration." Teachers who aren't burning out are still becoming cynical and demoralized; they got into teaching to change lives and help children, and instead they have to deal with administrative mandates and pressures to "teach to a test," where they're encouraged to do whatever it takes to raise their class' test scores, even if that doesn't necessarily correlate to an increased understanding of the material for the students.

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Pretend you're a teacher: You got into this job because you wanted to connect with children, but if you do so in a way that doesn't yield higher test scores for your whole class, your boss will be on your case. Plus the pay is shitty and funding to your school drops every single year.

Who wouldn't be cynical?