Wow. I never would have guessed. Thanks! 
Quick, start a pit thead! You know it will be an interesting read, at the least.
You had Ms. LeTorneau, right? 
Worse, I was told that we must say “one and twenty-five hundredths,” which is really terrible if your number is 3.3218952314.
“Three and three billion, two hundred and eighteen million, nine hundred and fifty-two thousand, three hundred fourteen ten billionths.” Or something like that.
That’s how I was taught, too. Also, $3500 is not thirty-five hundred, but three thousand five hundred.
Can we even begin to scratch the surface of lies told in History class? For once example (there were many), I didn’t know about the violent crackdowns on laborer strikes by the government until well out of high school. I was taught that the government and the unions worked out agreements, but never anything about any of the violence involved.
Hawai’i.
My sixth grade math teacher taught me that it was wrong to say “and” in a number. As in “one-hundred and fifty”. We were told to say “one-hundred fifty”. I couldn’t stand this woman.
I had a substitute teacher in the ninth grade who told us that Africans had come across the Atlantic Ocean before Columbus and had colonized Puerto Rico. Thus, explaining the African ancestry of most Puerto Ricans.
Which doesn’t make “nouns are people, places or things” a lie. It just makes it a simplification. And a darn useful one, actually. What’s more useful when first introducing the concept of parts of speech, the good old simple “nouns are people places or things, verbs are actions they take, adjectives and words that describe them…”, which covers a fair percentage of the cases in ways that make sense and are easy and logical; or something extraordinarily precise?
In second grade my teacher had the solar system posted up on the wall with (as my smarty pants little self pointed out to her) Neptune and Uranus reversed. My parents still get a kick out of that one.
I think it was a babysitter rather than a teacher who told me this, but it drove me crazy as a little kid: tunnels can’t have turns in them. I could see that the Lincoln Tunnel turned at the end! WTF?
I don’t think it takes much effort to give a more accurate understanding of parts of speech in terms of syntactic roles. Like I said, something like “A noun is a word which can serve as the subject of a sentence”, though itself a simplification, is much, much better, while still relatively easy to teach. And it avoids the problem of fostering the lie that a word’s part of speech has something to do with what it refers to, that it is determined in some semantic fashion. I mean, what is the purpose of knowing what part of speech various words are? Is it just to be a matter of rote categorization, like being able to correlate battles with their dates and states with their capitals, or should students actually understand the concept (of lexical/syntactic categories) and be able to fruitfully apply it to analysis of language? But, then, I think one problem here is that not many people in general properly understand the concept, English teachers included.
But, yeah. It’s so well-spread a bit of ignorance that I suppose it can’t count as a “lie” in the same was as the many isolated instances of teacher ignorance in this thread. So, alright, I shall retreat to my lair, try to remember something new to report, and then return with a “lie” that’ll knock all your socks off.
“A-levels are the hardest exams you’ll ever sit and your degree will be a piece of cake after them.”
Somebody should have told my computability and intractability lecturer :eek:
I can’t. Among the things that led me to believe history was bunk before I was 12 years old is being taught that the American colonies unanimously supported revolution and that the reason for the American Revolution was taxation without representation. Believe it or not, it wasn’t until I watched 1776 that it was brought home to me just how close the vote was. Oh yes, I was also taught that the founding fathers were univerally beloved figures. Thirty years later, I am working on correcting my ignorance.
I distinctly remember being told that the capital of Alaska was going to be changed from Juneau to Willow. For years I thought that was only inevitable and people that didn’t know it were just ignorant.
Women have one more (or is it one less?) rib than men because they were made from Adam’s rib. (2nd and 4th grade teachers.)
Slaves were treated like members of the family. Slaveowners didn’t beat them because they were expensive: “that’d be like shooting a hole in your tractor or prize racehorse.” (This was when ROOTS was the big event on TV; issues of rape, selling slaves away from their families, and those pictures where former slaves had scarred backs [evidently from self mutilation or fraternity hazing] weren’t brought up- neither was Rosa Parks or the Civil Rights era- this being the late 1970s, every teacher in the school had started out in the segregated school era and most were in Mgy at the time of MLK and Rosa P.).
“Teachers are professionals- we don’t ever have a student we hate”. (Having parents who were teachers and having been a teacher myself I can now officially say ‘Bullshit’- unless you’re a total saint or have only total saints as students that ain’t true.)
Atheists want to make it illegal for us to say prayer or discuss the Bible. Atheists also tried to destroy Noah’s ark up on Mt. Ararat back at the beginning of the 20th century. (This was in a private school where atheists had no leg to stand on in affecting the religious curriculum, and the bit about Mt. Ararat I later learned was from a “documentary” called In Search of Noah’s Ark.)
The sun revolves around the Earth. (This was from a coach who filled in as science teacher for a while and in fairness to the school they corrected it as soon as they learned about it.)
Not really a flat-out lie, but the entire time I was in school, public or private, I think evolution took up about 5 minutes and was of course a “theory” with the word treated like “It’s a theory gay mafia hoods whacked JFK”. The irony is that the science teacher who addressed this, an extremely intelligent woman who’d have probably been a much better college prof than high school teacher, not only believed in evolution but had written her master’s thesis on it, but after several years of teaching the subject she was sick and tired of the hooplah it always caused.
If Sunday School counts, we were told that atheists wanted to close down all the churches and were in lawsuits to do so. It’s amazing how much of a martyr complex 90% of the population can get.
And of course the great one: “Homosexuals are men who want to be women, dress in women’s clothing, and like to abduct little boys to suck their ding-dongs.” Even my mother, I regret to say, repeated this one. It’s one reason that when I was a teenager with a major love-hate for shower time in gym class
["Dead kittens, Mr. Rogers, nuns, that rabbit I saw in the road on the way to school today whose brains were all over the highway… Grandmother’s tits… goddamn you could break a board on Joseph’s ass… AUNT LUCY PISSING IN THE ROAD THAT PUPPY WHO DIED OF THE FLESH VIRUS THE SMELL OF A DEAD ANIMAL JOSEPH’S CHISELED ABS MOTHER FUCKING TERESA AND MR ROGERS BREAK-THE-GLASS AND HALL OUT THE TIME YOU SAW GRANDMOTHER’S COOCHIE THE WAY THE GREASE CAN SMELLS WHEN ITS TOO OLD CHITLINS DEAD DOGS YOU CAN SMELL IN THE WOODS [SIZE=3]BUT CAN’T FIND AND OH SHIT NOW HE AND RON THE UBER-TWINK TRICKSTER GOD ARE WRESTLING NAKED----[/SIZE] Julie Andrews… no she’s kind of hot really… THINK ABOUT CATTLE WARTS AND DEAD PUPPIES AND CORN COATED SHITS OUTSIDE ON A HOT DAY
but it never occurred that I was homosexual because I didn’t want to put on dresses or molest little boys either one. (True, Joe and Ron were 15 or 16, but so was I.)
And the absolute worst:
This is the most carefree happiest time of your life so you better enjoy it.
That the American Revolution was won because the British were too stupid to shoot at the Americans when we hid in bushes. There was even some movie the teacher showed us where the American army ducked from bush to bush shooting British soldiers as they marched somewhere never reacting or trying to get out of the line of fire. I was pretty young then (perhaps 11?) and I still thought that wasn’t believable. When I asked I was assured that the British just couldn’t adapt to our brilliant hide in the bushes innovation.
Damn I half believed that for years.
Not a lie but more of a glaring omission I never once had a history class make it out of the late 1800’s and never was presented with any controversial ideas about any period of history at any time. Good guys in history fighting bad guys and the good guys always won. It was late high school when it was even suggested the Indians may have gotten a raw deal. Slavery was mentioned as bad but mostly in the context of the good guys (Northerners in this case) had to go beat the bad guys and teach them that slavery was wrong gosh darn it.
I remember a teacher telling us that U.S.S.R. stood for United States of Soviet Russia. But that wasn’t a deliberate lie.
It was even mentioned in Roots, where Kunte Kinte is at first troubled by the light tone of his new baby, and one of the older women pointed out that it does take a little time for babies to darken to their full color.
Yep - it’s a damn fine engine too - smoother acceleration and more power than a 4 cylinder and doesn’t drink gas like a 6.
zoid - who has 100k miles on his '98 S70 and it still looks and runs like new (I may just keep it for another 100k 
)