Probably 'shopped.
Just gotta add that when my daughter was in the fourth grade she came home with a flash card that told her that the International Dateline was another name for the Prime Meridian. I sent a note to her teacher to correct the error. Two years later, my son was in the fourth grade and came home with the same flash card. This time I paid her a visit.
If I am not mistaken, it was Sam Stone who some time ago discovered his child was being taught that beavers are amphibians.
Could have been done on a computer in Courier font, even in 1994. I graduated in '94, and I think that the Macs we played with in high school had smart quotes, too, when using Microsoft Word. (I’m having trouble finding out which version of Word started using smart quotes.)
Yep, and in that thread I was like “No way!”
Then I actually contacted the school district in question and asked them about it. And they said “Oops, you’re right, we’ll correct that in the next edition of the curriculum.”
That’s the kind of thing that makes me not automatically dismiss stories like that related in my OP above.
The letter is reads as fake from every angle. It’s concocted BS. It’s way too pat a scenario, and the tone of the writing is borderline absurd re demanding the boy “simply accepting my teachings without resistance.” It’s stupid fake.
Having said that there is BS in some textbooks . About 8 years ago I was helping my son with a 7th grade science assignment, and happened to notice the textbook (Prentice Hall) claimed that you could see proof of window glass “flowing” over time by looking at very old windows, and seeing they were thicker at the bottom where glass had flowed due to the pull of gravity. The book was not that old, and I believe this canard was disproven for some time even at that point. It was surprising to see how little proof reading by knowledgeable scientists is done on these books.
Who does review these books that would let egregious errors like this slip through?
I had a middle school English teacher send a note home about my conduct once. My mother (former high school English teacher) got out her red pen and corrected the spelling punctuation, and grammar in the note, wrote one in reply and sent it back. For some reason, that teacher never sent another note home to my mother.
My mom rocked!
…corrected the spelling, punctuation and grammar in the note…
I think Word Perfect also had smart quotes at that time?
I’m pretty sure MacWrite had “smart quotes” in 1984…
The Texas State Board of Education.
…corrected the spelling, punctuation, and grammar in the note…
if you believe in the serial comma, that is (as all right-thinking people do…)
Ha, I once argued with my biology teacher about population growth rates. The population size had decreased - which to me meant the growth rate had to have dropped below the x axis. Never did get her to change her mind on that one.
At the risk of setting myself up for a Pitting:
When I was in college, the Elementary Education majors were generally morons*. I recall spending twenty minutes trying to explain to an El Ed major how and why the sun always rose in the east.
Without success. 
Who knows what they were taught there, or how they were accepted to a major university in the first place?
*I except those Dopers, their relatives, friends and casual acquaintances who do not fit this profile. 
The best textbook mistake I saw was our marketing textbook. To drive home the moral of the story, to wit, that one should do their research before conducting a marketing campaign in another country due to “lost in translation” errors, the textbook included the well-known story of the Chevy Nova’s failure to sell in Latin America.
From the note:
It doesn’t sound natural for a student to tell other students to challenge a curriculum. That wouldn’t be natural jargon for a student. And in this particular situation, it would be a misuse of the word curriculum on the teacher’s part.
Teachers can often be challenged on details. They should make the students feel comfortable in challenging and use that as a basis for encouraging a little research. Friendly wagers (not involving money) can make the class more fun.
I say that it’s possible but not probable that it’s real.
Everyone has had a bad teacher, just like everyone has been in a badly designed building. Not everyone is a genius, and teachers are no exception.
That said, I think the note is fake.
I’ve had more than one college professor tell me this, unsolicited. And, though my mother-in-law whom I love dearly is an elementary school teacher, I have to generally agree. The ones I’ve known seem like they’re almost scared of learning. Not the kind of personality I want teaching my kids.
I remember my 10th grade math teacher, Mrs. Korn, telling everyone in the class that our behaviour was determined by the phases of the moon. As proof she stated that the tides were caused by the Moon, and therefore, since we’re mostly water, the Moon affects us as strongly as the oceans are affected by tides. I contradicted her and said that was ridiculous, that if the Moon affected us that way, we’d wake up with half our bodies swollen and bloated and the other half dessicated like an old stick. Or we’d be dragged down the street by the inescapable pull of the Moon, not psychologically altered.
She turned my desk backwards and pushed it to the back of the blassroom, pointing out the window, and forced me to spend the rest of the year sitting that way, refused to answer any of my questions (or acknowledge my existence) and called my parents to tell them I was “disrupting” the class. And of course she flunked me. She told me in advance she was going to flunk me, but I’ve always been stubborn and anti-authoritarian, so I attended the class religiously and forced her to “run amok” against me, as Thoreau put it:
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me, it being the desperate party.
A typical science textbook is riddled with hundreds of errors. They are sloppily compiled by people with only a folk-science background. Even errors, once corrected and found, are likely to re-appear in future editions due to the writers liking the myth better than the reality.
The typical ElHi teacher’s view of instilling respect for authority is to insist that authority is always right. And many kids are smart enough to know teachers aren’t always right and so this backfires big time. It’s not authority if it’s wrong.
I was always correcting teachers in school, which sometimes got me into trouble. It was a big change in college when I found that many (but not all) profs welcomed corrections. Strangely, when I was a prof myself, I never ran into a student that was as nearly as active as me in finding and pointing out errors. I had expected to run across several. Too many students I think were cowed into accepting whatever the teacher said and not thinking for themselves.
E.g., I would notice that an equation that’s been on the board for 5 minutes had an error. It should be “n-1” instead of “n+1” in the summation. I would ask why no one had noticed it and would get the “We just assumed that you right regardless of it looking off.”