What depresses me the most, as a high school physics teacher, is how right you are. Too often I see a lack of desire to actually think about things, rather than rely on the data.

I want to scream at some points when the students are doing labs/I'm grading their labs.

"Data is king! It determines truth. If it doesn't match with what you expected, one of two things is going on. Either your expectations were wrong or you didn't do a good enough experiment."

You'd be surprised (or maybe not, this is Slashdot...) how many students think "I did the experiment once, my data is perfect, nothing could have possibly gone wrong." If they would shut up from talking about how their weekend went and actually think about what they're doing it would all be so much easier.

Ok, I've gone off topic. My apologies. But seriously, stop, examine data and where it came from. Don't go by who told it to you, go by what was told.