When I was in the second grade, my teacher made the statement to the class “All fish lay eggs.” As a guppy owner, I raised my hand and told her, “My guppies are fish and they have babies live.”
She slammed her palms on my desk, looked me right in the eyes and repeated in a loud, authoritative voice, “All fish lay eggs!”
I went home very upset, and my parents wrote a very nasty letter to the school. This started a long cycle of what some would refer to as insubordination, from which I surprisingly only got served detention from once. Unfortunately for them, elementary school punishment usually involved staying inside for recess. The fact that we had an Apple II with The Oregon Trail on it at my disposal during these periods only egged me on.
His name was Hallba (I think I spelled that right), University of South Carolina, Sumter campus. This was back in the '80s when I was in college so I have no idea if he is still with them or not.
I’m not sure how even a professor can get away with stunts like that; you think at some point he would have pissed off one too many people.
And no one publically complained about the Holocaust denial crap? :eek:
The only thing I can remember is trying to tell (without sucess) one of my professors that Fr. Dmitri Gallitzin was from Russia, not Prussia. She was a local history professor, and we were talking about Gallitzin, PA.
That’s a little too conspiracy for my blood. I think it’s probably true at least in spirit. It sounds like Aruvqan had that experience personally, and I’ve had friends relate similar stories to me before.
I got into that exact same argument once and, when no one in the class including the teacher wouldn’t listen to me, I flunked the test on purpose because I wouldn’t change my mind. One big problem was that the textbook supported the teacher but that doesn’t make it true.
Along the textbook line of discussion, I remembered reading one of Feynman’s books about his experiences with picking textbooks for the State of California. Here is a link to the story. It is pretty horrifying (but not unexpected, really) to learn how the process worked at least back in the 60s. I would imagine it isn’t all that different today.
I used to do science outreach classes at Junior High schools and High Schools, and I was continually appalled at the incredibly poor science and physics knowledge of even high school science and physics teachers. It was clear to me that they were coasting along on their learn-by-rote textbooks for years, or decades, and it took no actual thought or serious intelligence to run the class.
Oh, and I got in trouble in 2nd grade for correcting the teacher when she said Mercury was the smallest planet. I did not make that mistake again for a long time.
In High School my son had a ‘Science Teacher’ who gave the class a problem along the lines of; “If your were in Boston and went straight up in a helicopter, how long would it take for the earth to revolve below you so that you arrived in Europe?”
The teacher seemed to think that once you got off the ground you would somehow stand still with the earth spinning madly below you. Upon further questioning it also became apparent she thought the earth spun from east to west.
Arguing got him nowhere with the teacher.
(Note; I believe the earth would precede you by a small amount, especially if you go high enough and don’t add horizontal velocity. But that is not what the teacher was thinking of.)
Teachers are addicted to the power of being The One Who Knows, like some parents probably feel when their kids are 2-3 and asking basic questions about reality. If they are ever corrected, or proved wrong, they feel that power dwindling away so they need to re-affirm it to themselves by arbitrarily using their power to dole out punishment. I’m pretty sure the word “insubordination” was invented solely for this purpose.
I was once given “5 minutes” (off of recess) for telling a teacher that they’re called “radio stations,” not “radio channels.” I wasn’t being a snot about it, I was just proud that I knew something for once. The message I was supposed to get was “it’s impolite to correct people,” but the message I really got was “grown ups don’t like to get corrected by kids.”
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this took place in New York. New York’s at about 40 degrees North. At that latutude, the parallel has a circumference of about 16,000 miles. As this revolves during the course of one day, any given point on the parallel moves at about 666 miles per hour (ooh, devilish).
Whatever you do, don’t jump. Millions of people each year die horrible deaths being splattered into walls that way.
