Did you ever think you were smarter than your teachers, in grade school through high school?

I know that I was definitely smarter than one of my teachers. She was a model and had no idea about the subject she was teaching. She would get us to just read the book and write tests, but could never help you if you had problems. Yesh! But I did have many teachers who were great and knew their stuff. One in particular who really pushed me beyond where I thought I could go.

Oh yeah, I didn't check any of them because I didn't like them. Not all my teachers were smarter than me... at the same time they are not like G-ds, nor were they too dumb to do anything else. There should be a "Most of my teachers were great, save the occasional odd ball" option. Maybe it's just me and I am nit-picky.

Um, where's the "Yes, sometimes" answer? There are only some oddly extreme extremes here.

None of the above are true. I had some teachers who were as bright as doorknobs, and some teachers who were quite good.

I can't pick any of those, it's somewhere in between. Teachers are just other people who know some things that you probably don't yet. Their intelligence varied (though, overall was above average). Given my superior intellect, I was smarter than them at least half of the time. ...but, that hardly mattered - I didn't tend to engage them in mental battles.

No, but there were plenty teachers where I questioned their teaching abilities.

That's a hard question to answer, I was definitely smarter than my English teachers about chemistry or mechanical engineering, but not about English. There were teachers that had a lot less area under the curve than I did, but they were really good at what they taught, so they were smarter than I in those areas, which is what you want in a teacher. There were other teachers that were dumber than toast, but could read, and still others that were just brilliant in all areas.

None of the above? I did feel I was smarter than =some= of my teachers, or sometimes just better informed... I certainly argued with plenty of them. :)

There's no middle answer! I couldn't choose any of the choices . Teachers are most of the time well trained for what they do. Sometimes they're not. Some are "smart", some are not. Most of the time they knew far more about their subject, but sometimes I could interpret it better than they could.

Oh, for the love of ... Normally, I sympathize with survey creators when people complain that there aren't enough answers, but come on. Where are the "Some of my teachers were dumb, some were smart", "Most were dumb, a few were smart", and "Most were smart, a few were dumb" answers?

That's too general. There were some teachers I was definitely smarter than, there were others I wasn't smarter than.

I picked the last option, but I must say that teachers are individual human beings, not a separate species which can be categorically classified. Thank you. ***also, I make the distinction between intelligent and knowledgable. Although I was often smarter than my teachers in public school, I was rarely more knowledgeable than a teacher in the subject they taught.

i chose none of these options. i was certainly smarter than a few of my teachers, but not most of them.

None of the above. In general I would say that the teacher had greater knowledge in their particluar subject area, not really smarter.... At times though I must say that I knew more than the teacher... (English class in Sweden - a joke)

Of course, smart is not the same as knowledgeable. Regardless of who was smarter, many teachers had things to teach me. I was rarely smart enough to take advantage of that.

In knowledge: sometimes (although not typically in their area of expertise). In intelligence: almost always.
It only irked me when a teacher would get pissed at having a student be smarter than them. (Wow, that sounds conceited...deal)

I didn't find any answer I agreed with. I don't think smarts can be measured linearly anyway. In the subjects they were teaching, most teachers knew more than I did. The few exceptions sure didn't like me.

There weren't very many options. I picked that I was smarter than some teacher (the average one, maybe). I was in advanced courses at the end, though, so it only applies to a minority.

I know it's verboten to comment on the content of a survey, but the choices left a bit to be desired. I was always "Bright" growing up -- it wasn't til I hit like 6/7th grade that I felt I was smarter than some of my teachers. A couple of them were downright ornery about it. I wasn't really insufferable about it (at least I wasn't conscious of it).

Poor choice of choices. What about 'Some of my teachers were idiots'. 'Only a few of my teachers knew more than me.' My HS teachers were *much* smarter than my college professors.

In retrospect I was probably smarter than about half of my teachers, but during those years I was young enough to mistake knowledge with being smart. I don't do that anymore. I realize many more people are far smarter than I. Though most people have the common sense of a stick.

Ok...basically, we have two choices, teachers always smarter than me, and always smarter than teachers. There are no middle ground answers at all (not to offer constructive criticism or anything, because I know that invariably results in people jumping down my throat these days). I felt like I was smarter than a few, but most were very intelligent people who do something that I deeply respect. So I didn't pick any. ***BTW, I would like to thank the maker of this survey (I'm seriously not dissing you here zoomie) for pointing out to our more anal users that yes, it is ok to occasionally criticize/comment on the makeup of a survey. This will no doubt improve zoomie's future surveys and help the site to progress, not scare people away from submitting surveys at all (unless they're really really insecure).

I was smarter than everyone... I was so bored in school because of this...

I will say that this too is a loaded question. define 'smart'. do you mean knowledge (learned information) or intelligence(or the ability to use information you have) while I was in school growing up I will say that the teachers were decidedly more knowledgable. I didn't have much discussion with them to determine if this was just learned responses or actual cognative ability. If a person has knowledge that I do not, and I am interested in learning it, I will. I haven't met many people at all in my life that I would say are smarter than me. then again, I believe that it is how you are taught to think that affects this more than anything (which is probably not true).

I wouldn't say "almost always." More like "occasionally." My high school had some serious losers on faculty...

I put the one about the teachers being too dumb, but that's not QUITE what I really think. For the dumb ones it's mostly because they have no ambitions in life or because they didn't plan their life, for the smart ones it might be because they like teaching people and they want to make a difference in someone's life.

Red M&Ms

All of these are wrong. There were maybe 25% of my grade/high school teachers who were pompous idiots, 50% who were perfectly decent (if uninspiring) at what they did, and 25% who I still admire to this day.

I never saw teachers monolithically- from very young I thought of them as the people who knew something and were telling me what they knew. By highschool I felt tha tthere may be somethings that I knew that some of them didn't.

Why is there no "sometimes"?

Depends on the teacher - most were at least more knowledgable in their subject area, but some were certainly less intelligent than I was. I enjoyed most the teachers who were clearly more knowledgable and more intelligent.

While I consider myself well above average in intelligence I had the good fortune to have a number of very smart teachers in high school. What truss said.

I say most teachers are out of touch with the real world. My favorite teacher quote, when my gifted son said he wanted to be a soccer player when he grew up, "But that's not a real job". Sorry for the 'oddly extreme extremes' in the question. My son graduated a couple of years ago, but I'm not quite over the nonsense we sometimes went through.

none of the above. There were teachers I thought I was smarter than. Some subset of these I still do think I was (at the time) smarter than. I'm interpreting "smarter" here to mean "smarter"+"more knowledgable", since that seems to be what the question is about; if you really mean just smarter (ie, which one of us would do best when faced with a set of problems we knew the same amount about), I now think I have always been smarter than most of my teachers, but I never thought about it in those terms while I was actually a student.

I was smarter than they were at the same age.

none of the above. I was smarter than my teachers on a few occasions.

At times, like my 10th grade English class I was smarter than my teacher. She told me so, for real. I just had an idiot savant way of diagramming sentences. Creepy, it was.

Some of my teachers, I felt I was smarter than. Other teachers, I felt they were smarter than me.