surprise and fear. and a fanatical devotion to the pope.

Omg my high school had 2 chem teachers and both were insane and took the class too seriously. The first week was making us memorize the elements and being drilled in almost daily tests to see if we could write them down.

By the end of the week, my teacher said if you didn’t have at least an 8/10 from her quizzes, to basically change classes. She and the other teacher often went overtime and ignored the period ending bell which pissed off a lot of other teachers.

The periodic table of elements was on a paper that she’d roll up during our quizzes and for the rest of the year, we had to take our quizzes with the assumption that we’ve memorized the tables and could do equations and conversions with no references. The class had to be graded on a curve since most of us 16 year olds had other school work to focus on.

In the end, I think no one from those classes ever became a chem major. It certainly made me hate it.

Our education system values rote memorization over actually learning something. So instead of teaching you how to use the periodic table, they teach you "The element of Hydrogen has an atomic mass of 1" etc.

A few teachers who actually give a fuck will do both, but they are required to teach the test for funding. Because that's how they are graded.

Common in Brazil, fucking hated it

I've also heard of this happening in the US. Although in the course of my B.S. in Chemistry they always gave us a Ptable for exams.

I went looking for a CSI Miami pun, but came out very... *puts on sunglasses*
disappointed

Because we like our unobtainium, okay?

Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)

So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.

I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)

(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)

it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with "Solarians" who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter's orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they'd pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)

meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.

the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.

meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)

Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.

My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual's instructions were basically "tell the AI to update the blueprints." which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)

And the amount of time dedicated to ox-bow lakes. Where are they all? You'd think every second meander would be an ox-bow lake by now, but I've never even seen one.

I think geography teachers made them up and hoped nobody would ever check.

I have always simply refused to memorize anything.

Thx. Makes way more sense than "Ordnungszahl" in German.

Aether. Ether is something else.