Thinking You Know Stuff That You Don't Actually Know and Presuming Stupidity In Others

I think most people probably suffer from this weird condition whereby our brains produce an explanation for why something is as it is and, regardless of plausibility, our brains then accept this explanation, even without any kind of supporting evidence, as true.

Take flat earthers as an example: 

• Child looks at the horizon, it looks flat; ergo the earth is flat.
• Child looks at the horizon, they can't see the city they visited last week with grandma; ergo the earth is at very least curved.
• Child overhears the expression "all corners of the world"; ergo the world is a CUBE.

Most of our more improbable assumptions are quickly corrected by schooling or other information we are exposed to. Which is why we point and laugh at adult flat earthers who've somehow managed to miss or ignore the memo. But there are many other things we believe we know, often without realising we have only assumed them.

The 'today years old' meme is an example of this: things that were out there being obvious but people never thought about because we tend to accept things as they are. https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikespohr/x-mind-blowing-facts-people-learned-when-they-were-today

Part of the point of these things is that they don't actually MATTER to most of us either way. I mean, what DIFFERENCE would it make to your personal life if the earth is flat, round or oblong (yes, I was watching the repeat of the Midsomer Murders episode 'The Oblong Murders' a few nights ago)? Unless you're an astrophysicist or something the truthful answer is probably 'none at all'. Similarly the bit in Sherlock where it doesn't matter to him if the earth goes round the sun or 'round and round the garden like a teddy bear'.

It is because of this that articles are written debunking urban myths and explaining commonly held but misinformed beliefs...and I don't have a problem with that, only the assumption that I the reader am as dumb as the writer thinks!

And the reason I'm thinking of this was stumbling across this 'Cats in Ancient Egypt didn't look the way you think' article from Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidanderson/2019/01/29/cats-in-ancient-egypt-didnt-look-the-way-you-think/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
From the title I thought it would be something about the evolution of domesticated cats - even in my lifetime Siamese cats, for example, have changed appearance quite dramatically due to the way they are bred. I assumed (there's that word again) that it would be about Ancient Egyptian cats more closely resembling their wild ancestors than modern moggies.
But no. 
I'm not sure who the writer was talking about but apparently there are people who assume Ancient Egyptian cats were exclusively BLACK. Why? Because most statuettes of cats are rendered in black stone or dark bronze. *FACEPALM* As the article sites paintings of cats in tabby colouring a similarly wrong hypothesis that all Ancient Egyptian cats were black or tabby could be proposed! 
This in turn reminded me of my Open University studies where the course books would prattle on for several pages about some wholly absurd hypothesis - which would invariably enrage me to all caps comments and angry face doodles in the margins about how bloody stupid and utterly wrong it all was - before belatedly debunking it. Those detours along assumptions I had never made drove me loopy.
It just seemed such an odd premise for an article to start with... By all means write an article explaining how it might be assumed...but honestly, it's not an assumption I would have imagined anyone could make! Maybe it's because I have an interest in Egyptology and learned at primary school how Egyptian art (excluding the Amarna period aka Akhenaton's reign) is stylised and unified by convention, not realistic. Or perhaps because this is something I had previously shared on Facebook:

There's another one I have come across in a similar vein. There are those who assume Ancient Egyptian people were red-skinned because of artistic conventions and those who assume Ancient Egyptians were black-skinned because Egypt is in Africa... *sigh* What's more, I've encountered people who accuse the discipline of Egyptology of 'whitewashing' and who do things like assert (on no evidence) that all pharaohs (including Cleopatra VII who as a Ptolemy might be reasonably supposed to be of largely Greek ancestry) were in fact black.
Where do I even begin with that?! First off there's basic geography. Yes, Egypt is on the African continent but depending on how old the Sahara Desert is there has long been a barrier separating north and sub-Saharan Africans; meanwhile, even in antiquity Egypt had thriving ports on the Mediterranean coast meaning contact with paler skinned Europeans would be common. 
The Ancient Egyptians depicted themselves in art as paler skinned than their Nubian neighbours. Was this merely a convention to differentiate themselves? Was this an ancient form of colourism (where paler skin is perceived as more attractive)? Or was it FACT - just as modern Egyptians are lighter skinned north Africans, not all historic Africans were darker skinned sub-Saharans.
There have of course been DNA studies on mummies...and so far these have found that the Ancient Egyptians tested were less black African than the modern population. 
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530115141.htm
So Ancient Egyptian art conventions can be taken to be both fact-based and differentiating themselves from other populations...and yet clearly not realistic because, regardless of familial resemblance, not all pharaohs could have looked so alike. That, and the fact female pharaoh Hatshepsut was represented with a symbolic beard! 

Obviously, for people not well versed in Egyptian art this might well be counter-intuitive but the phrasing of an explanatory article makes a world of difference. Put it in terms of "Did you know...?" rather than "You know how you always thought...?" Quit dumbing things down to the lowest possible level and assuming your readers are as daft as a box of frogs. In my humble opinion anyone who assumes a thing must actually look the way it is drawn / painted / sculpted is pretty damn daft. Just look at the trouble Henry VIII had over Anne of Cleves!
I'm not the brightest spark and I've assumed I've known all sorts of things I didn't but I'm not about to assume other people have made the exact same mistakes either. By all means admit your failings if you feel the need but please stop short of assuming others did the same.

Complaining about what you can (and probably should) change: a rant from someone who is up shit creek without a paddle

Disclaimer: If that title doesn't tell you that this may not be the most well-balanced of arguments you might try Reading Comprehension 101. This is me, letting off steam that one career path is given a curiously privileged status.

This video is one of a set on the BBC site: "I wanted to crash my car to avoid teaching" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hampshire-46738445/a-teacher-s-story-eat-sleep-teach-repeat 04 Jan 2019

Other titles include: Why teaching is making me ill (18 Sept 2018), More teachers seek help for stress (03 Sept 2018) and PE teacher left 'sobbing like baby' (17 Sept 2015).

*seething intensifies*

Stress happens in EVERY walk of life. The stresses this teacher talks of are stresses faced 24/7 by many parents - especially lone parents, and even more so homeschooling parents who aren't even getting funding for the materials their kids need, let alone a pay-cheque for doing the job.

You can argue that homeschoolers brought it on themselves but often parents homeschool because traditional schools can't don't or won't meet their kid's needs. I homeschooled my eldest after she'd been effectively excluded from the main body of the school because that was the easier path for them to take than to address the severe bullying she faced daily. I homeschooled my youngest because she was held back a year for being "too smart" to need the stimulation of being in the correct class. I homeschooled because professional teachers failed my kids.

*and breathe*

The point I really want to make is that teachers are well paid, highly qualified individuals with transferable skills. If teaching is so damn stressful change careers! Try being exhausted and stressed in a minimum wage job (7.5 years as a part time cleaner, struggling to keep afloat - 6 months of that homeschooling, another 5.5 years of it putting myself through uni in the hopes of a better future...yeah, that didn't work). Better yet, try being exhausted and stressed in a NO INCOME role such as welfare-dependent single-parent or full-time carer for an elderly & disabled parent. 

This is how I have spent virtually my entire working life. I have virtually no experience, minimal skills, no savings, no pension fund...my degree is just a piece of paper. I don't have the freedom to pursue a better future. If I have a breakdown (as I have before) I don't get 6 months off; I've never even had anti-depressants. Why? The NHS has failed me for 28 years of mental health problems. One ex GP told me in no uncertain terms he didn't care about mental health, I asked for help so many times that the rejections mean I'll never ask again.

My kids already have these problems and my youngest is still at uni. My eldest just quit her retail job cos the stress is too much...fortunately she has qualifications and transferable skills. Curiously, she is thinking of taking up teaching. 

*breathe*

Some people are in especially stressful public service jobs which deserve a bit of extra TLC - emergency services, air traffic control, ER staff, the armed forces... - but teachers? Maybe you've been lucky and had amazing teachers who've nurtured you / your children and done amazing things. My experience, my children's experiences, somewhat different. Some, of course have been good. A few have been very good. Most however, poor. Several, bloody dreadful.

Examples of our own experience include but are not limited to:

• Calling a child a liar in front of the class...because the teacher doesn't believe the kid is going to a particular place on holiday. Or, memorably, because a teacher decided what my cousin's wife's name was!
• Humiliating a kid in front of class for being illegitimate.
• Calling a child a cheat for getting answers right.
• Calling a child stupid for getting answers wrong.
• Deciding a child is a troublemaker because of their height...and then thinking it was okay to tell the parent that!
• Setting a class insane amounts of homework to counter the fact that the teacher just didn't bother teaching the class - literally sitting at the front telling the class to read in silence for the entirety of the lesson.
• Teaching a GCSE class one part of the syllabus only so they all flunked the exams...
• Dropping a GCSE class mid year (and so 'entrusting' their chances to the whims of various supply teachers) because writing a novel is more important than their futures.
• Calling kids names and making up nicknames for one particular child.
• Punishing one kid for the wrongdoings of the entire class.
• Punishing a child for being bullied.

Yes, I am 40 and my kids are 20 (tomorrow) and 23 (next week) so obviously a few of those things happened a good while ago but believe it or not many of those teachers will still be teaching; teachers in their 20s or 30s when I was in my mid teens would now be in their 50s and 60s.

In my years of education I had THREE really good teachers. And I went to four schools. Three. That's not a good proportion at all. Our kids deserve better and we're well aware that our cookie-cutter results-only education system is failing a proportion of kids that is scandalous. This is why I refuse to put teachers, as a whole, on a pedestal. 

*tense pause for glaring*

Teachers do not save lives, they do not put their lives on the line. And the moment Ofsted 'threatens' to hold them accountable for teaching standards they strike! Yes, teaching is an important job but it's also, supposedly, a vocation. What it is not is a life sentence - you can just hand in your notice and go do something else if the mood so takes you.

With this in mind, why is the stress experienced by teachers somehow a special case? Teachers have it easier than ever before with classroom assistants (didn't have those in my younger days), high tech teaching aids, and (generally) far smaller class sizes - an average of 20.4: "...the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the UK had some of the smallest average class sizes in the developed world" (Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38506305) and the same BBC article - from nearly two years ago - cites a year 9 maths class of 46 students...but when my mum was in primary school in the late 40s, early 50s that could be the size of a single form, not just one lesson, yet somehow teachers complain more than ever about their inability to cope. WHY? In what way is the job really harder and / or more stressful than it was in the past?!

One of the biggest complaints of teachers seems to be that the poor lambs they're struggling with performance targets and reviews...like that's not a nasty feature of most 21st century jobs! For heaven's sake, I worked as a cleaner in a school and it was all regular reviews and performance appraisals! My last job came with a whole bunch of unrealistic sales targets - partly cos you can't make customers by crap they don't want and partly cos the town was being redeveloped and people were largely going elsewhere so as to have a less stressful shopping experience. Unrealistic pressures, unreachable targets are just a fact of life nowadays. Also gonna say that I was put in charge of a shop (against my will) with virtually no training and minimal experience. I still think it's a minor miracle no one died on my watch! Teachers are at least trained and prepped for the job they do...and they sought to do it and are (contrary to their own PR) actually pretty well remunerated for it. 

I have struggled with depression virtually all my life and it is damn hard to see people act all hard done by for the career choices they made and could potentially change without much likelihood of difficulty. This is not to negate the stress they're under but I feel giving teachers some kind of special status it diminishes the stress suffered by others; their stress is not more important than anyone else's. EVERYONE who suffers stress should be entitled to support and help. There needs to be a shift in how we treat all workers in this country.

Even the headline annoys me - oh, so you wanted to crash your car to get off work? What about the emergency services called out to your rescue and NHS staff who'd have to look after you? What about the tax payer who has to cover your sick days, especially if you faked your injuries? What about the sub who has to cover your classes? What about the scare that'd give your students and the disruption to their learning?

INSERT HERE: I was run over at age 7,

my kids were at a school where a teacher died in an RTA.

At risk of sounding like a snowflake this is a really triggering thing to even suggest doing

to a class full of kids who might easily have a past trauma of this nature.

And more to my personal viewpoint...what about those in jobs where you're not entitled to paid sick leave? People who've struggled through incredibly painful shifts cos they simply don't have the luxury to recuperate. What about those struggling through life unable to drive and / or unable to afford a car? The sheer PRIVILEGE involved in that statement makes me livid.

Okay, so it's a wild statement born of severe mental distress rather than an actual action but all the same...

It will never not bug me that people who have the education, pay grade and personal freedoms to change their circumstances don't, and those of us at the bottom of the heap with no way out just have to make do. No one wants to hear about the stress of being a single parent, a cleaner, a sales assistant. We don't have the same allure, obviously.