SInce I wasn’t there, I can’t judge what really happened.
MAYBE the teacher was really being a jerk. But MAYBE the teacher was TRYING to ask a super easy question with a self-evident answer, and was flummoxed to find that the kid didn’t get it.
I’m old (53), and I remember hearing teachers or patronizing adult relatives asking all kinds of silly questions LIKE “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?” Sometimes the question contained the right answer. Examples?
“What color is the White House?”
“Who painted Whistler’s Mother?”
“How long was the Thirty Years War?”
Usually, teachers who asked these questions were trying either to make the kids laugh or to give a ridiculously easy question to a kid who’d gotten some tougher questions wrong.
Problem is, nowadays, if you don’t live in New York City (as I did), you may never even have heard of Grant’s Tomb (it’s not as big or prestigious a landmark as it once was). And many little kids don’t know yet who Ulysses S. Grant was.
So, what seems like a softball, gimme question may actually perplex a little kid. If that happens, the teacher should immediately reassure the kid that it was a joke question.
Another, slightly technical, and really only a viable trick question to someone who’s had a high-school-level education in biological sciences (and specifically taxonomy):
As long as we’re being pedantic about words and dictionaries, I submit that it would be rare if any of you who said so were actually laying in your beds. Rather, you were lying in your beds. As General Grant and Mrs. Grant’s bodies are lying in Grant’s Tomb.
