Teachers Who've Taught A Legitimate Genius Reveal What It Was Like
[rebelmouse-image 18360916 is_animated_gif=Do you know any geniuses? Have you ever even met them, or have you just read about them and heard tell of them? Well, somebody had to have known them before they were well known. And it's crazy, but someone had to have been their teacher, too!
u/JaysonTatumIsMyDad asked:
[Serious] Teachers of Reddit: Have you ever taught a legitimate genius? What made them so smart?
Here were some of the answers.
Masterful
[rebelmouse-image 18360917 is_animated_gif=I've had some really, really bright kids in my classes over the years. Perfect ACT's, a kid on Jeopardy, Ivy League schools. But I think "M" might be the brightest I've ever had and quite possibly a genius. He took several AP tests without having taken the class and scored 5's. He didn't really self study them either. He just knew the subject. The AP Physics C teacher wasn't happy about it.
He was genuinely curious. Shows up at my door with an old smoke detector and CRT tv monitor and wants to experiment with the radioisotopes. I had to shoot that one down. Looked beyond the labs we were doing to find the more obscure uses or derivations that come from the lab, like the relationship between molar mass and specific heat capacity for some metals. And he understood it all. Every bit. Didn't pay attention in class because he was constantly looking something up. Incredibly frustrating for some of the other teachers. He wasn't too interested in homework but his English teacher commented that the one paper he did turn in was an original analysis out of this world - and she's a top notch teacher. He rarely used my methods for solving problems. He would develop his own that actually showed a deeper understanding of the relationships involved and it worked. Every time. Rarely was there a situation where I was actually teaching him. It was more me introducing something to him and then he would go off and master it. Come back to pay attention for the next new topic and then poof - off to M land to just get it.
He isn't just bright in one subject. If he wants to I'm positive he will master whatever is put in front of him. I tried talking him into graduating early because there's only so much we can offer him. He was interested but didn't get support from home. So I tried talking him into taking some CTE classes - like welding, autos, mechatronics. We'll see if he shows up next year.
As you would expect he's socially awkward and does not understand why other students don't get it. Comes off as cocky but he's not. I think he feels that everyone is this way - just smart. I really like the kid but he needs to move on
Lab Partner
[rebelmouse-image 18360918 is_animated_gif=My lab partner for college organic chemistry was a 15 year old high school freshman. He was taking it "for fun"since he had to wait for sophomore year for high school chemistry. He was the smartest student in the class, aced every test, perfect score on all homework, but was pretty clumsy in the lab. Gave me lots of laughs during our shared lunch hour. He used my cell phone every day to call his mom to pick him up at 5pm.
Thank Goodness For A Turnaround
[rebelmouse-image 18360919 is_animated_gif=I worked as a substitute teacher at a high school a long time ago, and I wound up getting the same girl in class multiple times over several years. Most notably, I subbed in for the school's AP Bio teacher for four months.
She clearly had problems at home, and maybe mental problems as well. Her clothes were always really ratty, and everything about her just screamed child neglect. She didn't seem to have any friends and she was hellishly awkward whenever you talked to her.
She was also one of those smart kids that wound up so bored with school that she just checked out completely at some point. By the time I got her in high school she never did homework and rarely did in-class assignments, and she almost never paid any attention to the lesson at all. She did just enough work to pass, barely. She just sat in the back and read or drew in her sketchbooks. Often the books she was reading were things like college textbooks or books in various foreign languages, and it was always kind of interesting to see what she was reading. She was an astonishingly fast reader. She'd burn through reading assignments in five minutes that took the rest of the class almost an hour, and she'd understand them when the rest of the class was struggling.
Initially I wrote her off as just being a slacker, until I subbed for that AP Bio class. Every test I gave out, she'd get every question right, and her essay answers were absolutely flawless and often really interesting. The first time this shocked me, because again this was a student that never did ANY work and never paid attention at all. And she blitzed through the test twice as fast as everyone else, and got a perfect score when even the best and brightest students were struggling to get Bs. When the AP tests came around, she took several including some for subjects she didn't take the class for, and as far as I know she got a 5 on all of them. I'm sure her ACT and SAT scores were equally amazing.
I don't know what made her so smart. She clearly had an amazing memory and was just... smarter than the average kid I guess. Or, smarter in some ways.
I've kept track of her on social media over the years. She never went to college and for a while it looked like she was just going to burn out completely. It was pretty sad. But eventually things turned around. She owns a company now and seems to be pretty damn successful.
Awwww
[rebelmouse-image 18347002 is_animated_gif=He built a solar powered motor for our class's robot. He wanted to be an electrical engineer when he grew up.
His parents and K teacher thought he might be on the autism spectrum because he was so strange and awkward. He didn't have any friends. He didn't really talk to anyone. Each year I usually have one or two students that I pick out as a priority. I make a goal to help that child achieve something outside of academics. That year my goal was to get this genius out of his shell and interacting with the other students. At the time I didn't know he was so smart. A lot of kids are good readers. A lot of kids know sight words and phonics. It wasn't until we started doing STEM activities that I noticed that this kid was special. He really liked an activity where we built a simple circuit with Christmas lights and batteries. After that he started reading books about electricity and engineering. I got a circuit set for him to mess around with and decided that our end of the year project would be something with solar energy. That's how the solar powered robot happened. The other kids build the robot body and he put together the solar panel and motor. It was awesome.
He was a funny little guy, but it wasn't 6 year old humor so he never spoke up. I wrote a comment in his weekly journal telling him he was funny. From that point on he opened up and crack jokes. Even if the kids didn't get it, I would laugh and they would follow suit. He became very popular with the other students. They looked up to him.
Clock Cycles
[rebelmouse-image 18360921 is_animated_gif=When I was in high school, there was a kid one grade older than me who was the smartest kid I knew at the time. Very bright, kind person, an excellent mathematician. He would regularly get perfect scores on tests and studied some advanced topics outside of class. He went on to study physics at MIT.
My high school was right next to an elementary school. One day, these parents hired this smart kid to tutor their 7-year old child in math. And when I say "tutor him in math" I mean "teach him calculus".
I would walk by a math classroom after school and see this 18-year old drawing gradients on paraboloids (so early vector calculus stuff) and lecturing a 7-year old. The older kid said once that "that kid's brain has many, many more clock cycles than mine."
When Kids Love To Learn
[rebelmouse-image 18360923 is_animated_gif=I have. The student could learn complex concepts in the span of minutes. Kid once missed an entire unit that I taught over the course of several weeks. I spent 20 minutes with her when she got back, explaining and drawing diagrams and she got it...and got it better than anyone else in the class had. It was so much fun teaching her!
Good Will Hunting
[rebelmouse-image 18345838 is_animated_gif=Yep. A medical resident. Reminded me of Good Will Hunting guy. His own history, as he'd tell it, was "I had 3 last names before I was 18. My dad was in prison for as long as I can remember and will be in prison forever. You can check my family tree as far back as you'd like: I'm the first one to ever attend college."
Scary smart. He learned Hungarian in his spare time as a trick to play on his (Hungarian) wife. When I first met him as a student I understood he spoke a lot of languages so I asked him if he could speak to a Greek patient. "I did not speak Greek". That was Monday. On Wednesday he was asking the patient simple questions in full sentences and understanding the answer. I was annoyed and asked him "hey I thought you didn't SPEAK Greek!?" Him: "I didn't. On Monday".
You could make an entire career of following him around with a notebook and writing down his many good ideas, big and small, about literally everything (which he seems to forget as soon as hey comes up with them). I do ok. I am a professor of surgery. I don't have any of this guy's pure mental horsepower.
I still know him and he's still white hot bright. But very much an easygoing dude, and still sometimes a product of a rough and tumble Early life. Years ago, I had to explain to him (back to Good Will Hunting guy idea) "you can't beat anyone be up in the hospital no matter how much they annoy you". Him, incredulous "never? But what if they do X?"
"No. Never". "But what if they do Y". "No. No beating up, ever, in the hospital." <>
Bizarro
[rebelmouse-image 18360924 is_animated_gif=I attended math classes with someone that was a literal rainman. As a junior he completed all the undergraduate and masters level math courses his elite university had to offer. They sent him to a special math program we were both in to challenge him further. He skipped 16 weeks of our very difficult advanced graduate level math courses to play video games, but aced his midterms and final exams (which included oral exams). He scored perfect on every standardized test he took including SAT, GRE, Math GRE. I never saw him put any effort whatsoever into anything he did. He also published in difficult areas of pure mathematics as an undergrad. He seemed to know everything about math and seemed as if his professors were below him. He ended up completing a PhD from an elite university in pure math. One of the smartest people I ever met. He was also very bizarre in his behavior.
Historic Genius Movement
[rebelmouse-image 18360925 is_animated_gif=Unquestionably a musician I've worked with is on the genius spectrum. Only one example being: We were playing a movement from John William's Five Sacred Trees concerto for basoon. It's actually quite modernist and not at all repetitive or "popular" sounding. Well... he left his percussion part at home and the show was starting in the next hour. Without skipping a beat, upon realizing he didn't have the auxiliary percussion part (which contains many different instruments all on one page), he pulled out his manuscript paper and wrote, from memory without consulting other parts or the score, his part perfectly. All different instruments, many time changes, measures of rest etc... Genius indeed and this is only one instance....
From Scratch
[rebelmouse-image 18351384 is_animated_gif=Kid came to Australia at 15 from Somali, never went to school in Somali . Both parents dead. He walked his two younger siblings out of Somali to Ethopia using a map he found. Then he came to Australia and entered into school. Picked up English and math so fluently he was able to graduate high school in 4 years.
He's doing computer science at uni now. If that kid had grown up in Australia he'd be on the news for being in uni at 12.
The Workroom
[rebelmouse-image 18360927 is_animated_gif=I'm a substitute teacher and I went to cover a middle school math class. There was one very shy kind of awkward kid who was working on an assignment involving square roots. Without using a calculator that kid was coming up with answers left and right. I thought I was some kind of joke or prank but for the heck of it I took out my phone's calculator and asked him to multiply different three and four digit numbers. Without batting an eyelash this kid would give me the answers almost as quickly as I could ask the question. A few occasions he had to recalculate things in his head once or twice but it was scary how quickly the answers came. I asked him what it was like and he said that it was like having a tiny room inside his head filled with white boards. You can go inside this room to work on calculations. To this day I have not met another kid like that.
Photographic Memory
[rebelmouse-image 18360929 is_animated_gif=My buddy was a genius as a kid he could read something and remember it exactly. It was unreal.
Smartest dude I ever met as far as every single subject. Went to Harvard after high school and we lost touch. He's a judge now.
His memory was so good.
The Seven Ways To See History
[rebelmouse-image 18346424 is_animated_gif=My one/ favorite history professor in college told me about a kid named Gabe. Gabe wasn't great with math, wasn't great with science, but this kid could create a complex map of history in his mind to be able to explain a situation in history from multiple historical standpoints.
An example was when he was in my professors Nazi Germany course and my professor was talking about Hitler's takeover in a general sense (quick overview of the course type stuff/my professor learning what people do and don't know to shape the course a little) and one questioned how they let Hitler be elected considering Hitler's jail sentence and mein kampf. Gabe apparently cited 4 or so different sources of German people at the time as well as examples of sympathizers in other countries after the Nazi take over to explain Hitler's zeal and demagogue capabilities.. My professor still uses the sources Gabe cited because he wasn't even read on them!
A Genius By Any Other Name
[rebelmouse-image 18360930 is_animated_gif=I taught a girl who was an absolute genius. She hated it when I or other people called her that, because she didn't think she was.
The main thing that set her apart was her ability to understand a concept as well as the significance that concept had to other areas based on me explaining something orally once. Most students wouldn't realize that class had started yet by the time she already figured out my lesson.
See, most students, after several attempts at me explaining something, will just memorize my explanation word-for-word and regurgitate that on the test because they still don't understand what on earth you're talking about. Bright students? They actually figure out what you're talking about and can explain it in their own words. But this girl? She not only understood, but then applied it to other areas. That's why she was brilliant.
Intense Topics
[rebelmouse-image 18360931 is_animated_gif=I once taught a four year old Chinese kid who really enjoyed talking about the collapse of Yugoslavia.
Nature Vs. Nurture
[rebelmouse-image 18355675 is_animated_gif=Yep, a few. One was a genius in math (not the subject i teach), and the other is a genius when it comes to writing/research/reasoning/etc.
What makes them both so smart is probably a combination of environment (they both have very supportive families), and an intense desire to learn on their own. Both of these guys did way more independent learning on their own than what they got in school, and the math kid is now in grad school working on electromechanical engineering and has been published multiple times. The philosophy kid is doing his own thing and writing books.
Information Intuition
[rebelmouse-image 18360932 is_animated_gif=I've taught for 12 years: all math Algebra 1 - AP Calculus, Robotics, Engineering Math, and Computer Science. All high school grades.
In that time, I have taught a lot of really smart kids. I have met a lot of really smart kids. I am not sure just how you are qualifying genius, but I am reading it to mean the truly exceptional student who displays intelligence in a way that outshines average "best" students.
To that extent, I would estimate that I have taught about five such individuals.
What these kids all have in common is that everything came naturally to them almost like it was intuition. Tons of smart kids will get bored and actually do poorly in class (they don't do their "easy" class work). But usually the genius kids have a thirst for knowledge. They are inquisitive and motivated to find answers.
As for what "makes them so smart", I would say that their lucky genetics plus an internal motivation to learn is what made them so smart.
I will end by saying that I think anyone can be "smart" with enough hard work. Depending on your genetics, your environment, and your determination it may take a little bit of work or a whole bunch of work.
Several Types Of Genius
[rebelmouse-image 18360933 is_animated_gif=I've taught a lot of smart kids, and while these two stories may not be the most genius kids (I mean, maybe they were, but I can't really tell), they're good stories.
One was a little boy I had when I taught first grade. At that age he figured out that the squares of numbers always end in a pattern (0, 1, 4, 9, 6, 5, 6, 9, 4, 1 and repeat). He asked me what that was called and I didn't even know it was a thing. I spent most of his first grade year trying to teach him how to not be so obvious when he thought people were wasting his time. The kid could already read and do math, but he did not yet know how to control his eye rolling. That was sincerely the most useful skill I could teach him.
The other was a girl I taught in 6th grade a couple of years ago. Her parents had homeschooled her for a while, and basically she just learned whatever she wanted to learn. That worked for my class, so she did random reports on the history of Chinese food or essays about her grandmother or whatever. Just recently she was part of a young composers workshop, and I got to see professional musicians perform her work. She's 13.
The thing is, geniuses don't always do stereotypically genius things. The boy from the first story is now attending a pretty average state university. I'm sure he will always be smart and always be great at what he does, but that super amazing genius thing is only one aspect of a person.
A High Trajectory
[rebelmouse-image 18360934 is_animated_gif=I'm a preschool teacher so I can't accurately judge a genius or not. My students range from 3-5, but I did have one student that stood out. He was a peer (not special ed/not on an IEP) and he was one of our younger students (4). We would often let kids have some supervised computer time playing on a site with lots of letter games, math games, etc for all grades. This kid taught himself how to tell time, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and started division at the end of our school year. He had little to no help with the work. If he couldn't figure something out on his own he'd ask for help once and then be perfectly fine continuing on his own. He's going on to kindergarten now and I'm so excited to see where he goes in life.
Jason
[rebelmouse-image 18360935 is_animated_gif=Okay, I'm going to shamelessly brag about this kid. For the record, I teach high school Spanish.
We'll call the kid Jason because that's nothing like his real name and I don't wanna break FERPA. Jason played basketball and soccer. He was in Art Club and Beta Club and National Honor Society. He was even the Valedictorian. Jason basically taught himself Spanish 1, and by the time he got to my Spanish 2 class, had vastly surpassed his classmates. He asked great questions and even caused me to learn quite a few things about the subject. His Spanish was f-cking impeccable. He never made even a single B in my class. When we played games, his team always won. He studied hard, he was focused, and he was so fucking affable. And he was like this in every fucking class, including the AP classes.
He went on to the best college in the state, full ride. He's done study abroad in several countries , and he's been recognized several times in the school's magazine. And not a single person has a negative thing to say about him. He's so genuine and good. He's a serious, preppy white boy that gets along with everyone: the athletes, the nerds, the goth/emo kids. He can even freestyle.
I've gotten off track with the question, but he just makes me so proud. Jason is a f-cking genius.
Sometimes you just get a vibe or a tingle down your neck that you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It can be wise to trust this gut instinct, as we learned from many in the Reddit community.
Often those goosebumps or the voice in their head actually saved them from serious harm.
It all started when Redditor throwaway_district9 asked:
"what has been your most bone-chilling, hair-raising, "Let's get the hell out of here" experience?"
A Frightening Weekend
"I don't tell this story often but this seems like a good place. Back in college I used to drive up the Oregon coast on weekends, then just crash in my car when I got tired. I woke from a nap in the driver's seat and something just didn't feel quite right. It was just dusk and the light was fading pretty fast."
"I yawned and stretched and as I did so I turned my head to the side and just caught a face ducking down below my rear passenger window. I went to hit the lock button just to make sure and in my panic I accidentally unlocked the doors briefly and then locked them again."
"I stared at the window for a few minutes, knowing that someone was crouching just out of sight. Eventually, I started the car and thought I heard a scuffing sound. Whoever it was didn't reappear, but that was enough for me. As I noped out of there and pulled out back onto Highway 101, I glanced back and a bald figure in a red t-shirt with something wrapped around his face booked it into the woods on the side of the road."
"That was the end of that weekend trip. I drove the two hours back to my dorm room, white-knuckled hands locked on the steering wheel. I had to pull over a few miles down the road though to deal with the adrenaline shakes."
– jasonhackwith
What Could It Be?
"Me and a couple of my friends were walking around at night when we were around 11 or 12 and I specifically remember all of us feeling like something was off and we started joking about someone or something getting us and saying to each other we’re not afraid of anything. Then we heard a raspy growl that we all agreed had to be a mountain lion."
"All of us were in a dead sprint to my house, scared sh*tless as soon as we heard it. I didn’t live in a place where they usually are so people mostly didn’t believe us, but shortly afterwards and after some more sightings, a mountain lion was caught just 10-15 miles from my home. In hindsight it definitely wasn’t very close to us and we didn’t actually see it, but we definitely exaggerated and acted like it was right next to us."
– bringeroflightning
Not So Abandoned
"A friend and I were exploring an abandoned factory in North Philadelphia about 8 years ago, and when we got to about the third floor...I discovered a booby trap in the stairwell."
"Basically it was a trip wire that swung an axe down from the ceiling."
"Right as that fully set in, we heard someone from up above shout "YO!""
"Time to go."
"I've never covered that much ground so fast. I think we were two or three blocks away before we realized we were riding each other's bikes."
– PlayerH8rsBallz
Furniture Troubles
"When I was 16 I had a pickup truck and my parents asked me to pick up some new furniture on the way home. As I’m driving home it starts pissing rain and I was worried the furniture would get destroyed, so I pulled over on the side of the road under an overpass to wait it out."
"As I’m waiting, another car pulls up behind me. An overweight bald man steps out and begins walking towards my car. I tell him I’m waiting for the rain to stop so I don’t ruin the furniture for my parents."
"He was acting very odd and telling me he would help me out as he was fingering his belly button. I was creeped the f*ck out."
"He says one minute he has to grab something to help and leans into his car window. All of my alarm bells are going off so I figured f*ck it and just sped off furniture be damned."
"So glad I did, who knows what would have happened"
– DrPeterVankman
Volunteer To Prey
"My wife and I were on a search mission for some missing fern pickers. We were volunteers with the local search and rescue (SAR) team. We decided to stay in the search area that night and had built a pretty nice fire. We were sitting there and it was about 0200, hoping this dude would wander into camp."
"I had heard animals around us throughout the night. No surprise, we're in the middle of the woods, I'm used to animals stalking around outside my camp."
"I knew there were two animals, one one each side of us. It was at about that point when we heard a bird chirp. It came from about the place I figured one of the animals were. Then another, from the opposite side."
"I immediately realized we were being watched and stalked by at least two cougars. We very quickly climbed into the back of my truck. It's got a camper shell and is outfitted for truck camping."
– SGTRhoads16
Drive Off
"Driving Uber one night a couple years back. I picked up four guys from a club, listening to them talk I realized that two guys (one of them ordered the ride) had met the other two at the club and were on the way to get drugs from one of their cousins."
"There was an odd vibe, some of the conversation didn't seem the most linear, and I was hyper-aware that these drunk dumba**es were heading with two strangers to a drug deal. And I was the one driving them."
"I did not want drugs in my car, and I was very aware that we might be on the way to an ambush. If we'd been heading anywhere remote or sketchy I had to figure out how to end the ride."
"The two wannabe dealers kept trying to get in touch with their cousin via cellphone, went to an apartment just off a main street, and after both had gone into the building I just said "should be leave?" to the guys and we did. I still don't know if it was just a ploy for a free ride, guys too drunk or dumb to pull off a basic drug deal, or something nefarious that didn't finish."
– verminiusrex
Trust Your Gut
"I was in an upstairs lab in med school, just a friend & I practicing surgical skills. There was a main enclosed staircase down to the lobby/classrooms & a weird outdoor stairwell that nobody ever used except in fire drills. It wasn't a fire escape, but the old main entrance to the lab classroom. When I put my hand on the door handle to the main stairs, I was FILLED with a weird sense of "Get out! Not that way!" Just absolute fear, I felt trapped & anxious. For the first time in 3 years, I said "Let's take the outdoor stairs..." My friend had literally no idea there even WAS another exit."
"The next day we found out that at the exact time we were taking the outside stairs, one of our classmates was pulling a gun on the admin & students in the lobby at the base of the main stairs. He'd been kicked out of the program for his grades & snapped."
"My friend still talks about it & tells people to always trust my instincts. I actually asked her to stop telling people, because I felt so weird about it. I'm sure I just heard something in the distance that gave me that feeling, but Gavin de Becker would be proud!"
– ittybittylurker
Lightning Strike
"One time I was out in Colorado with some buddies hiking near the top of a mountain. Some bad weather started to roll in but the top was only 15 mins away so I went ahead while they went back down. As I was getting to the top I felt static in the air and the hair in my head started to stand up. I immediately started to panic cause I thought I was about to get struck by lightning so naturally I ran down without ever getting to the top. I’m not sure if I was gunna get struck but I sure as hell wasn’t sticking around to find out."
– shlable710
Bone Trail
"Hiking in the Rocky Mountains, on a trail I knew pretty well. I was leading a group of kids, maybe twenty or so middle school aged children from the camp where I worked."
"I turned a corner and saw a jaw bone of a deer. Pretty cool, showed it to the kids. Didn't have any flesh on it, so I assumed it was pretty old."
"A hundred feet further down the trail I find another bone. Femur maybe (I specialized in insect populations, not deer anatomy.) This one looked a little fresher. Another ways down, another bone."
"I'm getting a little nervous at this point, so I explain that we should probably turn around and head back. My students all groan that they want to see more dead stuff, but I shepherd them down the train and back to camp."
"Two days later we got a call at the camp that someone had been attacked in the area by a mountain lion. Apparently a mountain lion had set itself up in the caves on the cliffside and it had gotten pissed when someone got too close."
"I'm glad we left the area, even if my students would have loved to see more dead stuff."
– SalemScout
Yeah, I would've left too!
Do you have any similar experiences? Let us know in the comments below.
It's never a good feeling to learn that your partner has been unfaithful.
Hearing this news almost instantly gets your mind racing, wondering what it was which led them to do this.
"Was I not present enough?"
"Have I let myself go?"
"Do they not love me anymore?"
If there's anything that could make you feel any worse than this sad list of possibilities, it's whenever they try to justify their behavior.
Often coming up with the most ludicrous excuses for breaking their partner's hearts, which they somehow thought might actually work or at least earn them a little sympathy.
When the only thing they likely got was an open door and a swift goodbye.
"People of Reddit, what is the dumbest reason your (ex) partner gave for cheating?"
So Much For "Till Death do Us Part".
"'You are dying! Do you really want me alone when you are dead?'"
"I was fighting cancer."
"He also told me that I was disgusting and he felt gross touching me."
"Luckily, both types of cancer are out of my life."- Mr_BigDuck
You Could Have At Least Left A Message!
"'You didn't answer your phone, was I supposed to spend Saturday night alone?'"
"I was at work, and so were you, we worked together you f*cking moron."- sixesand7s
Love At First Sight... Or Not
"She met someone that she immediately saw herself marrying."
"A month after we broke up she moved across the country, got married, called me to tell me she made a mistake, got divorced, moved back home, got pregnant and then got married again."- Zarrush
Gonna Have To Do Better Than That...
"Her response once I caught her was that she was flat-out horny."
"But after I said that’s why you have a boyfriend it was kinda funny how she went dead silent."- PuzzleheadedFarm7417
Um...
"He said that he cheated on me because I wanted to have too much sex."
"More than 5 years later I still can't find any logic in that."- Etrixie
So Much For Commitment
"'It's not like we're married'."
"Apparently I can't expect respect from someone who goes from calling me 'love of my life' to blowing her high school shag toy when he comes back to town."- FortGeek
Cartoons Button GIF by NickelodeonGiphyIt Never Is...
“'It’s not what you think it is!'”
"After I walked in on them making out."
"While she was on his lap."
"Both without shirts."- MrSirChris
Two Whole Weeks...
"I couldn't have sex for two weeks so I could recover from surgery so she thought it wasn't cheating'."- Henchforhire
What The Actual...
"My ex-girlfriend said I forgot you were alive."
"For details, I wasn't in the military, I was at university."- Ali8ly
scared star wars GIF by Hyper RPGGiphyThat Only Makes It Worse
"It was his kid's mom so it didn't count."- kittenxx96
"In Sickness And In Health"...Oops!
“'I have needs for sex you aren’t helping me with!'"
"Said to me the day I get home from spending a week in the hospital with kidney failure (lupus)."- EndlesslyUnfinished
We Can Only "Open" Our Hearts So Much...
"Well, I know this guy that was convinced he was in an open relationship, except he forgot to let his girlfriend know.."
"She found out 7 years into the 'open relationship'."
"With multiple women, in 4 continents."
"Oh he also had a book where he'd categorize them."- ProfessionalSpite866
Episode 2 Player GIF by ABC NetworkGiphySanta? SANTA?!?!
"My serial cheater ex-once told me while in a fit of tears."
"'I can't stop cheating, I just have so many issues, my mom lied about Santa when I was a kid and it really f*cked me up'."
"'I don't think I can trust people because of it so I cheat'."- pastelflorist
No One Likes To Be Treated Like A Piece Of Meat...
“It’s like if you order the same subway sandwich for a year, eventually you’re gonna get bored of it."
"But you try another flavor and when you go back to the original one it’s better than you remembered'.”
"Felt not so good being compared to a 6 inch BLT tbh."- NucularOrchid
Oh, nothing, except commitment and fidelity...
"'She was prettier than you, what did you expect?'"
"We were engaged and had been dating for 3 years."- kathjoy
No doubt all these poor people are grateful for dodging the bullet that staying with these people would have been.
Even if it can't quite make up for the pain and embarrassment these experiences brought them.
History is full of mystery.
There are things we may never know.
That is true, but some answers have to be possible.
Are we looking hard enough?
Humans have murdered, robbed, and pillaged their way all over the Earth.
We've left a trail of unknown scattered throughout time.
This is why history is so fascinating.
There will always be new and obscure topics for documentaries.
Redditor InsertBurnsHere wanted to discuss the world's most unresolved issues, so they asked:
"What is the biggest unsolved mystery in human history?"
The mysteries that haunt me are all murder stories.
When will we find the killers?!
The Absconded
Bank Robbery Heist GIF by ADWEEKGiphy"Who was behind the Gardner Museum heist? Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art was taken, and we have little to no clue who was behind it, and none of the paintings have surfaced."
Stillwater215
The Linear Truth
"In 1893, British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans purchased some ancient stones with mysterious inscriptions on them at a flea market in Athens. On a later trip to the excavations at Knossos on the island of Crete, he recognized one of the symbols from his stones and began a study of the engraved tablets being uncovered at various sites on the island."
"He discovered two different systems, which he called Linear A and Linear B. While Linear B was deciphered in the early 1950s (it turned out to represent an early form of Greek), Linear A, above, has still not been deciphered."
"There is an entire culture of information that predates much of our history, a window into ancient humanity that is simply locked away from us because we don't know how to read it."
Atamask
Exact Dates
"An active one in the archaeology world is the exact time frame of when humans made it to the Americas. The date keeps getting pushed back with more controversial discoveries that then just turn to evidence as they pile up. It’s a fascinating story to see unfold."
DocAuch22
"Yeah I like this one too, I think many of the traces of early settlement are likely submerged. Sea levels were much lower during the ice age and the majority of human settlements are along the coasts so a huge piece of our history is probably lying on the seafloor completely undisturbed and possibly well preserved."
who519
Monarchs
"So the Monarch Butterfly migrates to Mexico and back every year. During the year there are a full 4 generations of butterflies that live and die during the journey. Upon returning back from Mexico, the butterfly manages to find the same trees it's relative started out at despite never having been there."
MasonS98
Dark Energy
Loop Space GIF by xponentialdesignGiphy"We like to think we understand the universe and that physics is a well grounded discipline, and in some ways it is. However we have no idea what dark matter or dark energy is and yet we think it makes up 27% and 68% of the universe respectively."
Ok_Passenger_4202
The Universe is vast and scary, like the sea.
The End
Kimmy Schmidt Netflix GIF by Unbreakable Kimmy SchmidtGiphy"The final words of the emperor Titus were 'I have but one regret'. We don't know and never will what that regret was."
Ayearinbooks
5000 BCE
"That most of human history is undocumented and we will never know our entire history as a species. We didn’t start recording our history until 5000 BCE, we do know we shifted to agrarian societies around 10,000 BCE but beyond that we have no idea what we were like as a species, we will never know the undocumented parts of our history that spans 10s of thousands of years."
"We are often baffled by the technological progress of our ancient ancestors, like those in SE Asia who must have been masters of the sea to have colonized the variety of islands there and sailed vast stretches of ocean to land on Australia and New Zealand."
"What is ironic is we currently have an immense amount of information about our world today and the limited documented history of our early days as a species but that is only a small fraction of our entire history."
patlaff91
How Big?
"I don't know about 'biggest,' but I always thought the Voynich Manuscript was very interesting. A huge book written in an unknown language or cipher that has never been translated or decoded with diagrams of plant species that don't exist. Lots of theories surrounding it, but no definitive answers as to the origins or the content."
AbortionSurvivor777
Who made it?
"Not sure if it's THE biggest mystery. But the Antikythera mechanism is pretty wild."
"Dated to at least 60BC, possibly as old as 200BC, it's as complex as clockworks that didn't show up until the 1400s, over a millennium later!"
"It's just such a strange technological anomaly. Who made it? What else did they make and why haven't we found more stuff as advanced?"
SmokedMessias
Magic Tins
Video Recycle GIF by Jenny LorenzoGiphy"Why did we all just globally decide that those blue Dutch cookie tins hold sewing supplies?"
MysteriousStaff3388
"They’re large enough to hold sewing scissors, along with other notions, and made of metal so that the scissors and needles can’t poke through them. Or at least that’s the consensus r/sewing seems to have come to."
butter_milk
My grandma had like 20 of those tins.
Good times.
Do you have any mysteries to add? Let us know in the comments below.
CW: Domestic violence.
Sometimes family are the ones to avoid most.
That whole blood and water thing is true.
Evil is everywhere.
Even in our blood, our DNA.
It can be daunting to learn that someone you share something so intimate with can be darkness incarnate.
But really, that's probably a statistical truth for all of us.
So how do we cope?
Redditor onlyusemefeets wanted to hear about the worst of everyone's family, so they asked:
"When did you find out that someone in your family is evil?"
The Reddit community rose to the occasion to shed some light on their family skeletons.
Money Issues
Wild West Fighting GIF by Buyout FootageGiphy"When they ripped apart 3 generations of my family almost immediately after my dad died for a measly $37,000. He's a millionaire. That kinda money is pocket change to him."
Good Lord
"When my 11 year old cousin got cancer."
"Her mom and boyfriend were shooting up her pain medicine. My cousin was in so much pain, she told her Doctors. Thats when the doctors stopped giving her mom a prescription and the nurses dispensed her pain meds at the hospital. Unfortunately they could not keep track of medication while at home so they reported it."
"CPS removed her. She died shortly after in foster care. Parents were never charged."
dead-parrots
Death
"When my dad died of covid my Aunt tried to say she was entitled to some stuff of his since it belonged in the family. She even called a lawyer on us and it was big deal and my mom didn't need to deal with that trying to raise 3 kids on her own so f**k her. She still bothers us about stuff and all it is like plates and some pictures and some other things."
"Sunken Cost Fallacy"
"My brother's addiction has led to him spinning some ridiculous stories. I'm not sure if he is very convincing or if my father chooses to believe him because of some 'sunken cost fallacy,' or he genuinely refuses to give up. But my brother has told lies and stories about me and my siblings to the point that he's the only child who talks to my father anymore. He convinced my father that I forced him to do drugs."
"But I knew my brother was evil when scared away my sister with physical violence. Last month, he went missing for a weeks only to turn up after flipping his car high on pills. My father doesn't know it yet, but my mother is planning on leaving him because my father chooses my brother over her. No one can convince my father that he's enabling. No one can convince my brother to stop. Hard drugs really destroy entire families."
sleepypanda59
A New Family
Frustrated Skip Bayless GIFGiphy"When he purposely excluded his 4 year old son (from a previous relationship) from his wedding to his new spouse, deleted all photos of his son from his social media, and legally signed away all parental rights. He has since had 2 more kids with said new spouse."
FeminaCanadiana
How can parents act that way?
Failure...
"I don't know about evil, but my dad got remarried and has a kid and stepson with his new spouse. All of that would be fine if he didn't pretend that none of us (offspring from first marriage) exist so he can pretend this family is the first family and we never happened."
"Once this realization hit me, I stopped contacting him, and once I stopped putting in the effort, everything else dissipated. We haven't spoken at all. He does not care in the least. I honestly believe that he wishes we never even existed. He is a failure as a father and as a man."
Raindrops_On-Roses
Oh Brother
"When my husband's brother (1 of 5 siblings) said he couldn't make it to our house to plan their mother's funeral because he had to work. Meanwhile we found out he wasn't working because we caught him on ring doorbell entering the moms house to rifle through it while the rest of us were planning the funeral at my house."
Legitimate_Energy257
The End
"When my ex said 'you've been a godsend, I want a divorce.' I had taken time off from work to take care of her parents. She told me this right before her dad died, and she inherited. She found a boyfriend while I was with her parents. She got the house by declaring I had abandoned it. I was with her parents."
rollercoaster_5
Evil
Season 5 Nickelodeon GIFGiphy"When my dad tried to throw my 6 month old sister when he was drunk. That man is a monster in disguise"
iinattanii
So many people really need to be screened for their abilities to raise kids.