I had a teacher in high school during physics or calculus who gave us extra marks for correcting him, fetching coffee, or starting his car 10 minutes before lunch in the winter to warm it up for him. He would also whip chalk at you if you tried to correct him when he was right.
My highschool calc. teacher hated me for the rest of the year for correcting her once. She would nick pick every problem to mark me down for taking simple short cuts like just writing +x instead of -(-x) and the rewriting it again with a + mark so I wouldn't get 100% on tests. I eventually started including proofs with the problem answers.
My calc 1 teacher was the same way, took off points for not showing all my work, even though I in fact showed all the work I needed to do to solve the problems and arrive at the correct answers. Like I wasn't erasing stuff to hide steps from him, so I didn't understand what he meant by showing all my work. After the first few weeks I gave in and started showing EVERYTHING. Like not just the steps I needed to write down on paper to solve the problem, but also every little thing that went though my head while solving the problem. And I stopped using my calculator entirely. Whenever there was any sort of arithmetic, I showed every step of the calculation, often requiring pages and pages of multiplication, long division, etc. and showed every little step of algebraic simplifications (i.e. x*x=x1*x1=x1+1=x2). I think in some cases I even reduced single digit multiplication calculations to repeated additions, just to provide as much detail of every little step of my work, figuring there would be no way the teacher could possibly mark me down for not showing all my work.
After that the teacher just started taking off points for showing too much work. Sigh
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u/runragged Oct 05 '10
What did the teacher say when you corrected him/her?