Rewarding Ignorance

I have many friends who are teachers. I hope they comment on this blog.

I had a vocabulary quiz today. I am not a huge fan of the definitions for these vocabulary words. They usually consist of one word and that word is not completely accurate. For example the word blatantly has a definition of nosily and the word abruptly has a definition of quickly. I was already frustrated with the class. I had to relearn words because my definitions were more accurate and detailed. I would never consider using the word close to define the word adjacent. Well, today we had our first vocabulary quiz. Here was one of the questions that used the word agnostic.

An AGNOSTIC does not believe in...
a. (obviously wrong answer)
b (obviously wrong answer)
c. God
d. Bible

Now the definition for agnostic in our study material was : one who feels as if we can't know if God exists. I happen to know that the difference between an agnostic and an atheist happens to be belief. An atheist doesn't believe God exists. An agnostic doesn't actually state they do not believe in God. They may or may not. They just happen to state that you can't know truth or aspects of a supernatural being. I decided to mark the answer as D. The Bible states that we can know God. I became nervous when I turned in my paper. I thought if the definitions are already blurring the questions probably don't require thought. I went to my teacher and discussed this matter. She admitted that my statement was correct. But because the definition says nothing about the Bible the answer was still wrong. It does not bother me that I missed one point on a simple vocab quiz. It frustrates me that the teacher was supporting an answer even when it was not correct. This means anyone who used answer C is still unaware that agnostics are different from atheist. The teacher was too determined to have one right answer that she missed the opportunity to teach. I have a feeling I will run into this issue many more times in this semester.