I spent a summer as a lowly temp doing the word processing for a 10th grade chemistry textbook. I caught two errors. One was a real groaner (sadly I can’t recall), the other was a confusion between static and dynamic equilibriums. It’s pretty sad when temps are your QA department.
The Vatican. Beavers were declared officially to be fish.
I had my own seventh grade me-vs-everyone-including-the-teacher moment… in English rather than geography. We were learning the difference between fact and opinion. (Well, we were being taught the difference… I can’t speak for the rest of the class but I’d known the difference for years.) We were given a bunch of statements and had to mark each one as either “fact” or “opinion”. Then we went through the list, the teacher would read each statement, and the students would chant their answer. This was really simple stuff, so there was unanimity on every single one. The statements were things like:
Teacher: “Two plus two equals four.”
Class: “Fact.”
Teacher: “Strawberry ice cream is delicious.”
Class: “Opinion.”
And then there was this:
Teacher: “I think the weather today is beautiful.”
Class (except for JtR): “Opinion.”
JtR: “Fact.”
Got into a huge argument with everyone, including as I said the teacher. I tried very patiently explaining (well, okay, I probably wasn’t all that patient) that while “The weather today is beautiful” is indeed an opinion, “I think the weather today is beautiful” expresses a concrete, factual idea which is either true or false: either I do, think today’s weather is beautiful, or I don’t. There can be no difference of opinion there. They didn’t get it. For all I know, they still don’t. Pissed me off.
You guys know I’m correct, right?
You are correct. In my opinion.
You were right, they were wrong.
You are correct.
That reminds me of the argument I had with my seventh-grade English teacher. We were learning about concrete vs abstract nouns. She insisted that “air” is abstract. I disagreed.
And you were correct. What, did she think that “abstract” or “concrete” had to do with substantiality of physical objects?
The conclusion we can draw, I think, is that teaching the seventh grade is not a popular occupation among those who know their stuff.
(too late to edit… I apologize to any seventh-grade teachers who read the above.)
I thought Stephen Baldwin was the smallest…
I got suspended in 10th grade for correcting my English Teacher. It kind of went something like this:
“You can’t start a sentence with and”
“Not true, many authors have done it.”
I grab a book from my backpack and quickly found the sentence I was looking for.
“And here’s an example by Famous Author.”
“I don’t care, you can’t.”
“But you can…”
And out came the banstick. Stupid teacher. 
Well, it hardly makes sense for the Amazon to be in South America. Those lady soldiers are named after it, after all, and it’s a lot more plausible that the ancient Greeks knew about India than about South America…
I would talk some crap about seventh-grade teachers here, but (a) I’m too glad to see that not everyone has adopted the “grade seven” way of talking and (b) I have a little story to tell:
In the seventh grade, I misbehaved badly enough to be sent to in-school suspension, which my middle school called “SIR,” for “self-improvement room.” Well, apparently a Buddhist named it that, because the only way you would improve yourself in SIR would be through meditation and the silent contemplation of the oneness of the universe: there was no talking, no reading, no homework-doing, nothing. Freaking om, already.
The room, nonsensically, was arranged with a long row of double study carrels running across the long axis of the room. The teacher’s desk was on one of the long walls of the room. This means that she could see everybody on her side and no one on the other side. Guess which side I was on? For extra credit, guess how many other people were on that side? Now grade your own work: The side she couldn’t see. Zero. Did you do well? I thought you would.
So, there’s the scene. A nearly perfectly quiet room filled with 11 or so ill-behaved middle schoolers and one humorless teacher who is stuck with supervising the dregs of the school for 180 days a year. And then, someone scoots their chair, as you would to get up or just to get comfortable. You know, like you might do if you had been sitting like a lump on a log for several hours.
And she accuses me of blowing a whistle. Despite the fact that no whistle was blown. Despite the fact that I can prove, quite definitively, that I have no whistle to blow.
Now, here’s where I explain why this qualifies as not talking crap about seventh-grade teachers: As it happens, this same teacher was my eighth-grade homeroom teacher. And one day, as we’re filing out of homeroom to go to first period, she stops me and says words to the effect of, “I’m sorry about accusing of doing that thing in SIR last year. I know you well enough to know now that you didn’t do it and wouldn’t have done it.”
So the thing of it is for me, even seventh grade teachers are educable.
Wait, wasn’t she an Eighth Grade teacher by then? I don’t think you’ve proved your point… 
When someone has an air about them, it is. Right?
Good point, but actually, no, we were eighth-grade students, but we were just in homeroom with her. The classes she taught were all still seventh-grade classes. I think she was just finally returning to a normal level of stress while recovering from her year-long SIR experience.
I agree that it is probably fake. I have done some teaching, and I can’t imagine a teacher writing that a student must agree, even when they are wrong.
However, many, many teachers do overtly or covertly discourage students from contradicting them.
The problem is two-fold:
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Students often do not contradict in an appropriate way. Instead of saying, “That is a lie,” or “That is wrong,” students should be encouraged to say things like “I’m not sure if that is right” or something like that. We teach facts, but just as important, we teach behaviour. As a student, I also often corrected teachers. My earliest recollection, was telling my 4th grade teacher the student who I just stabbed with my pencil would not die of lead poisoning. I found as I progressed through school, teachers got more and more proficient, and more and more amenable to debate. (and I got more and more diplomatic about my contradictions…)
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Teachers reaction to student corrections, are in direct proportion to how comfortable a teacher feels with the material he is teaching and his overall feeling of competence.
When I taught, I welcomed debate. I sometimes made mistakes. I tried to admit them as I realized I was wrong. On occasion, I even researched the answer, and admitted my mistake the next time I saw the students. But I am something of a debater (at least my wife would say so), so I am sure, there were times I was wrong, but that the student was unable to express herself well enough to convince me, or at least convince me to research further.
However, a teacher that is forced to teach a curriculum that they are unfamiliar with, or even overwhelmed with; a teacher who can’t teach outside their specialty; or a teacher who can’t teach at all, can’t afford the luxury of debate. Quickly, the students of today, in many schools, would devour him.
The fault for this lies not with the teachers (in most cases), it lies with the school boards, and ultimately the tax payers. I am not saying that just throwing more money at the current system would solve the problem. We probably (but not definitely) need more money. But we also need an overhaul of the system, to allow teachers to teach to their specialty and ability, and to foster classroom climates where their is room for debate. The immediate most pressing concern is class size.
naz
edit: added: (and I got more…)
Don’t be so sure 
And were fish declared to be amphibians?
Seconded; who was that anti-semitic, sexist, propagandizing bastard, anyway?