Not everything said here is completely wrong. His views on Christopher Columbus, Socialism, and Tom Hanks being a suitable lesson plan are abjectly erroneous, but the others at least hold some merit. Marco Polo did explore China. I mean if you know something I don't, please tell me. The accounts of it are quite embellished, but I wasn't aware there was any big controversy over this.the spud said:My history teacher is a complete dumbass. Let me give you a list of some the things he has taught us:
Christopher Columbus was the first to find America because everyone else thought the earth was flat
Marco Polo was a great adventurer who explored China (he probably didn't)
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb (in reality he just stole the idea from someone else)
The civil war was the bloodiest war (that was actually WW2)
If you are a soscialist, you go against everything America stands for
"Obamacare" is completely unconstitutional
And finally, he decided he could just skip a section if he just showed us Forrest Gump.
Edison...god that man was a dick...but while he didn't actually invent the light bulb by any means he did improve them to the point of being much more practical and therefore more commercial. He took bulb life from something like 40 hours to 1200 I want to say. Did he invent them: hell no. Did he bring them to the people: kinda.
The Civil War may have been the bloodiest American war. The fact is, Confederate casualties records seem a bit sketchy. It's hard to find two sources that agree on casualty totals for the Civil War. It seems to vary from 800,000-1.1 million. Going strictly by American deaths and not casualties in general, Civil war-625,000 WW II- 405,399. You've got to remember that in the Civil War, both Union and Confederate are tallied together. More than likely, that is what he meant.
As for Obamacare, I'll be interested to see what the Supreme Court decides. It's a legitimate case. Health is laid out as part of State's Rights in the Constitution, but the courts have long held that Federal Government reigns supreme. Honestly, it could go either way. In fact, it has gone back and forth in the lower courts as I recall. I haven't been watching it too closely though. I'm just waiting for the end game.
Don't let the fact that any of his information may have been correct alter your opinion of the man though. Just because someone happens to spit out some truth along with their endless founts of bile and idiocy doesn't take away from the inherent truth that they are complete morons. I had a Computer Maintenance teacher like that. Mr. A was...I think the guy must have killed his brain huffing glue in the 80's or something. He'd just drone on about computer specs, maybe tell us a little bit, and then we'd spend most of the class watching videos of cats.
Either that or we'd do what in theory was a great exercise. He'd have tons of computers out, all purposely rendered inoperable, and once we fixed them the entire class could have an Unreal Tournament LAN. The faster we fixed them, the sooner the LAN. That sounds great right? Like a really good way to teach practical experience with an actual reward for doing so. The guy never actually did but one thing on ALL the computers, and usually it was something we could fix in 2 seconds, like leaving a floppy disk in. And the entire time he'd be telling us how we were going "slower than dog snails." Upon questioning as to WHAT THE FUCK a dog snail was, we were told that a dog snail was a dog with a giant heavy snail shell on its back so that it had to move very slowly by just pawing with its front legs. We eventually got someone to draw a picture of it and made it the background for every computer in the place. Because all them windows 95 computers was slower than dog snails.