These days, I do understand that teachers are human beings. However, thanks for the idea that teachers are expected to have "magic", and that this is unreasonable.
I've heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don't know whether those claims are true.
If it's any consolation, I only disrupted classes less than a dozen times, possibly less than half a dozen.
One of the questions I asked in those informal surveys was what the respondents liked about school, and the answer was always something about being social and never about learning things, even though the school was probably academically better than most.
I've heard claims that some teachers can get useful dominance quickly over otherwise difficult classes, but I don't know whether those claims are true.
I don't know either. Most examples come from movies, and fictional evidence is unreliable. In the movies the teachers are often doing risky things which succeed only by a good luck, and a different result could bring them serious trouble. Also the solution (in movies) seems to be that students strongly care about something; the teacher notices it and shows that he cares too; initially students don't belie...
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?