An Irrational Teaching Method

(I am in seventh grade math class. We just started learning about rational numbers. My sister is in high school and was super excited to learn about advanced math, specifically imaginary numbers, explaining the basics to me. I knew, for example, that the square root of negative number two is not a number at all.)

Teacher: “A rational number is any number you can think of. Can you give me some examples?”

Classmate #1: “Twelve!”

Teacher: “Yup! Rational.”

Classmate #2: “Negative five!”

Teacher: “Rational.”

Classmate #3: “Pi!”

Teacher: “Rational.”

Me: “The square root of negative two!”

Teacher: “That’s rational!”

(I had a newfound respect for “irrational numbers,” until I learned about them in eighth grade and figured out that she just had no idea what she was talking about.)