Because everyone makes mistakes and that’s okay.
Correcting the 18 year old seems fine - regular shooting the breeze conversation. Bringing up the da Vinci thing again to the 12 year old was jerkish. He’s 12. You get no points for one upping a 12 year old. A better tactic would be to look it up yourself and share what you learned.
Obligatory CGP Grey video about daddy long legs.
The turtle is also the fastest land animal, if you drop it from an airplane.
He could have used another bluff, “As I am still alive, I cannot say how I will die.”
Or maybe the kids get their defensiveness from you?
Seriously though, your response would indicate that you DO have a big attachment to correcting others and being proven right! (In my opinion!)
You might consider challenging yourself as I mentioned up thread. I think you could really learn a lot about yourself from the experience!
When the whole village thinks you’re becoming unbearable it’s time to accept that they have a point. NOT look for ways to mitigate what that implies, or to double down on why you’re still actually right, after all. Or engage in what ifs!
Everybody you care about is trying to tell you you’re bordering on overbearing. Arguing for why that’s the ‘right’ way to be on occasion, is just proving their point.
Accept what they are telling you is true, and act on it. Resist all urges to qualify, equivocate, explain, conjecture. Decide if you want to be that guy or not. Act towards your goal and leave yourself no wiggle room.
Good Luck!
To quote another Mythbusters quote, “'When in doubt, C-4.”
This is a good point. By acknowledging that you could possibly be misinformed or misremembering, you’re allowing them to admit that they, too, could be misinformed or misremembering without losing face or feeling inferior.
I don’t have a problem with the first one. It’s not an accusation. It is a correction, though. Some people get pissy about that. I had a teacher who didn’t want to be corrected in public - but she’d just told the entire class the wrong thing. And they all studied it the way she put on the overhead projector (on two different days, btw). And either three or four in a class of ten failed. My sister and I, who pointed out the error, and a friend who skipped 30 days of class so never saw it were three of ones who passed. I think one other girl did. No points or leniency from the teacher for copying down and studying it the way she taught it (number/denominator switched on the overhead, so it wasn’t even like was a big in-depth wrongness; it was copying error).
I just don’t get this mindset, even though I know it exists. It’s embarrassing to be wrong, sure. It’s even more embarrassing when you find out you’ve been repeating the wrong thing for years. Next you’ll tell me they don’t like a “reply-all” on chain emails. To be fair, I did just reply to the person individually once or twice, because reply-all could be embarrassing, but reply-all came because I was tired of getting them. So I knew I that might embarrass the sender, and I did it anyway. I admit it. But I think an email should have more thought than off-the-cuff conversational speech.
Most helpful response so far. The first couple of paragraphs describe me exactly.
I do not think you are a jerk. But I think you’ve gotten some good advice here, about how different people have different goals in social conversation. I, personally, think sitting around and comparing facts and sources is a good time. It took a long time for me to learn that a lot of other people who are not me find the greatest value in the conversational exchange itself.
Even when you said this:
*Let me ask this: If the situation were slightly reversed, and I had made the assertion that daddy long legs were not poisonous, someone disagreed with me, and I then pulled out my phone and proved my point… it seems to me that no one would consider that I was a jerk in that case. *
Actually, yes, depending on context, a lot of people might consider you a jerk in that case, because you harped on a point and wouldn’t let it drop instead of letting the conversation move on naturally. I would not be one of those people (I once had a five year argument with someone about copperhead snakes), and I think a lot of us on the SDMB like to have friends who enjoy doing some on-the-spot research about daddy long legs … BUT the world is full of other people, such as people in your family and coworkers and random acquaintances who place more value on being able to let things go and gracefully move on to something else.
Specifically let’s look at some other parenting-specific issues … because unlike coworkers, it would be fairly dramatic if you decided to stop socializing with your stepsons.
It really gave me pause when you described your younger stepson’s reaction to being questioned, after the report. Part of it is definitely that he’s 12. The other part could very well be that he was already apprehensive that you were going to be actively all up in his business about a school project that already happened … and you confirmed this anxiety with your behavior. I’m not surprised he was exasperated and defensive. It sounds like the main thing you are encouraging is for him to be wary of you, instead of encouraging good research habits. I’d be worried that you are doing more to make him hate research, rather than being excited by it.
With the fire pit conversation (and the point here is more about future conversations that are similar to the fire pit situation) here are some other paths you might have taken:
– as already suggested, let the kids try to out-research each other on Opiliones facts. HOWEVER, I will note that at 12 and 18, they will totally see through you if you try to fake them out into doing research. You have to really sit back and let this happen more organically.
– steer the conversation in a different direction, like “hey everyone, what is the biggest spider you personally have ever encountered?” Tall tales welcome. It was the size of my HEAD and it ATE a PUPPY.
– let it fall into a “to be continued” area, by saying something like “That episode of Mythbusters sounds interesting, let’s watch that together sometime.” and then MOVE ON to a new topic.
And none of this even got into the poisonous versus venomous argument, which can get really ugly, so, not a jerk.
This. In my head, I feel like I’m doing them a favor by correcting their error before they repeat it (less important with the spider thing than the Leonardo thing… I feel like I would have been doing him a grave disservice to allow him to keep thinking he died that way). I would certainly welcome someone’s correction.
But no one ever seems to see it that way.
Ha! The “Bug” in your example has eight limbs. Ergo, not a bug at all. I snort with derision in your specific direction.
(Did I handle this correctly?)
It actually depends on how serious the error is. Not everything needs to be corrected all the time.
A good example is speech. We all know that one person who feels it is their job to correct other people’s grammar or word choice, even when the stakes are close to zero. If I say “tact” and the correct word is “tack”, you will annoy me if you seem less concerned about hearing me and more concerned about dinging me on using the wrong word. It is pedantry, because you know perfectly well what I meant, and the whole point of communication is to be understood. Not score points for perfection.
For the da Vinci example you gave, I think you were right to tell your stepson that it’s better to say “I don’t know” than to make something up. But why didn’t you just ask him to look up the answer right then and there? Quizzing him later about it seems like you were testing him for reasons that had more to do with needling him further for being ignorant, which contradicts what you said about it being okay to say “I don’t know”.
I think I might be married to the OP, because this used to be a nearly every day occurrence in our household, to the point where my 10 year old son now does this to his younger sister.
Here is what I would say: I would echo elbow’s comment that you probably don’t sound as neutral as you think you sound. Also, I agree that you shouldn’t just let blatant ignorance go unchecked, especially in your household, but at the same time are you doing this about everything or just these few things? Because if you do this most of the time when someone mis-speaks or isn’t as precise as you’d like them to be, then that might be part of your problem.
For example, my husband is extremely precise in his language. It is very important to him that people understand him. He is precise to the point where, if you repeat something back to him paraphrased in a way that helps you consume the information he’s relayed, if it isn’t more or less exactly what he said, he will correct you. And, because he wants to feel understood, he then proceeds to repeat himself and argue with you to the point where if it’s a grey area or relatively minor, sometimes you’re better of just repeating back to him verbatim what he said. He does that to me (his wife) and my children. Doing something like that can make someone feel incredibly stupid to the point where it used to cause fights - luckily he’s gotten to the point where he can hear himself doing it and either stops himself or asks later, “Did I go overboard?”
All that said, I don’t think it’s appropriate for your wife to have corrected you in front of the kids. They’re older, so it’s not like she’s undermining you significantly, but at the same time, unless you’ve started a huge fight about it, it seems like she’d be better off to talk to you about it later.
Now, that’s a pretty extraordinary claim. I think the burden of proof is on you for that one.
You are a Jerk. You married a woman with teenaged kids.
Thanks. Hopefully it helps. As I said, it’s something I’ve been conscious of in myself.
I would like to add something I didn’t think of before, but that other people have brought up. Namely, why the 12-year-old felt it was better to make up an answer than admit to not knowing. This may be perfectly understandable–after all, in the context of a school assignment, saying “I don’t know” never seems like a good idea. But I think it’s good practice, generally, for people to learn that if you genuinely don’t know the answer, saying so is perfectly acceptable.
Here’s where you as a role model can play a part. The opportunity is there to teach your stepson that he can say “I don’t know.” Not because “making something up makes you look even stupider”–sorry, but I don’t think that’s helpful at all–but because everybody has areas where they don’t know something, and it’s not the end of the world to admit that.
Where one goes from there, like most things, depends on how important the issue is. One might just say, “I don’t know. That’s a good question,” and leave it at that, if it’s some minor bit of trivia. One might say, “I don’t know, we should look that up,” if it’s something really important, whose answer might have serious implications. In an academic situation, if it’s something you really should have learned already, then it might even be time for, “I don’t know. Obviously I wasn’t as prepared for this assignment as I thought.” But even that is probably better framed as, “Here’s an area where I should do better next time,” rather than, “Dammit, I screwed up the assignment, how stupid can I be?”
But certainly what you don’t want is for the kids to internalize the idea that admitting that they don’t know something is so awful, that making up a lie would be preferable. I’m not saying you’re doing that now, but it’s something to watch out for. It’s okay to say “I don’t know.” That’s how all learning starts.
Strange that you would assume they were teenagers when I married her.
You have incorrectly assumed that bug is a synonym for insect, when in fact it is a synonym for “creepy crawly thing with too many legs”. I know, I looked it up on my cell phone.
Don’t worry, I’ll check back tomorrow to see if you remember the difference.
((:p))
WRT being a jerk, perception is reality. The problem is that you don’t have to convince yourself that you weren’t being a jerk, your family perceives you as one. So maybe your delivery should be modified. You can still be corrective in a positive way.