For me, it was age nine or ten.
Sorry, how 'bout when I was in 9th grade and my english teacher played Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” so we could hear examples of irony? Now THAT’s ironic.
Typically, it would be age 10 for grade 5 and age 11 for grade 6. I can’t speak for Sunspace’s experience, but in my day (1960s and 1970s) sometimes kids failed a grade and had to repeat it (making them a year older than their classmates); or they could accelerate a grade, making them a year younger than their classmates. But the great majority of us were 10 in grade 5 and 11 in grade 6.
It should since since 1975 the brontosaurus has been removed for the Apatosaurus which was found earlier and was the same as the Bronto. However for a long time it was the biggest. There have been several found since that are larger.
http://www.gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs/largest-dinosaur-ever.html
And like everything else, it’s different in Québec. (I forget exactly how, but I do know that “When I was in grade ten,” conveys no useful information to my SO, 'cuz they do things differently there.)
For me, the bitterest lie was that Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake.” (Probably because I lost a mark on a test for contradicting this bald-faced lie, with cited sources. Slanderous bastards.)
When I was in primary school, we had to write a “what I did on my holidays” piece, and I mentioned that I’d seen a massive, long ship out at sea, and thought it was a tanker until my Dad told me that it was more likely to be an ore carrier, carrying iron ore.
Corrected by teacher-with-red-pen to “oar carrier” … :rolleyes:
True, but I did grade one and grade two in the same year. So I was 9 in grade five and 10 in grade six.
It wasn’t until years later that I realised what an influence always being younger and smaller than the others in my class had on me. It wasn’t a good influence, either.
Every teacher I had for years insisted that Antarctica was the largest continent. They’d point at the map and say, “What is the largest continent?” The “correct” response was Antarctica.
I don’t know if that was what they really thought or if it was because, on all those flat classroom maps, Antarctica looks freaking huge and they just didn’t want to explain the distortion inherent in maps.
In my 6th grade science class we had a disease unit. We learned that there were two types of dieaseses: viral and bacterial. We broke into partners to do reports on specific diseases. My partner and I picked Malaria, which or teacher assured us was bacterial…
I think I gained negative knowledge from that project.
Oh, I went to a Church of Christ affiliated high school which meant there was a bit of fudging on certain topics- namely evolution. I had a chemistry teacher who, in order to toe the line, said through gritted teeth that dinosaur fossils are here to “trick us.”
I could see she didn’t relish saying it but I couldn’t blame her. The directors were uber-conservative church elders who wouldn’t have any trouble firing her for stepping out.
“The District respects the professionalism of its teaching staff and is working with the union to reach an equitable solution to our impass over COLA.”
“These are the best years of your life. When you get older, you’ll look back in fondness at your years in school.”
Even then, I knew it was a lie.
High school: “Blue balls is just something guys make up to get girls to finish the job.”
Really, lady, you’re teaching high school… you don’t think some of your students would know better?
Oh, and I went to Catholic school for 13 years, and the above was pretty much the worst lie I was told.
High school “health” class and its two day long module on sex.
“A fetish is sexual attraction to shoes”
Apparently the teacher had a raging foot fetish, and that question was on the test, but even then, I knew there was no limit to what a fetish could be for.
I was told by my first grade teacher that all pilgrims (and therefore, all “Real Americans”) had blond hair and blue eyes.
I was told by my 10th grade science teacher that black babies are born white, and their skin color changes when they are exposed to light, after being out of the womb for a few hours.
There are others, but those are the two worst.
This may not have been so much a “lie” as a situation of “we don’t yet know what the fuck we are talking about”. Back when I was in Jr. High – probably around 1982 or so – somebody came in to the classes to do a presentation on AIDS.
According to Wikipedia, it looks like the name “AIDS” was coined right around then, so I guess the study and understanding of the disease was still in its early years.
However, in this “presentation”, they told us that AIDS was caused by (or had something to do with) the use of an illegal drug called “poppers”, and the reason that it was mostly spreading in the homosexual community was that these were the most common users of this (I presume recreational) drug.
I was told it was wrong to say “point” in the middle of a number.
For example: 1.25 may not be said, “One point two five”
We must say “One decimal point two five”.
If we said “point” instead of “decimal point”, the teacher corrected us.
That there would never an internal combustion engine with an odd number of cylinders except one. Mr. Lefevre, how could you ? 
Well, of course.
It’s impolite to “Point”.
I had a journalism teacher in high school that tried to explain to me that using Microsoft Office was often how real newspapers designed pages. I had worked with computers a good bit, and while I was not sure of it, I heard of a program called Xpress by some company called Quark. Apparently, now that I’m in college and trying to get hired by a newspaper, I notice that all the places are looking for people with experience with Quark. Apparently, my mother mentioned this to the teacher, and she said she (she being the teacher) is still telling students the same, but would look into the situation a little more…
Brendon Small