Oh heck yes. I get incorrectly corrected from time to time and sometimes, if it’s a friend or relative, I’m so embarrassed for the person that I don’t really insist on being right. I try to bring the matter up a few days later, privately, and say “Oh, you know what, that bothered me so much I looked it up here and the answer is, after all, what I’d thought when we talked,” or something like that.
But the worst cases of all are when the person correcting me incorrectly has power over me. Ugh.
I’ll never forget an incident that happened to me in middle school. It was a science test, multiple choice. We got our tests back and the teacher had marked only one of my answers wrong – an almost perfect score. I looked at the answer I’d given (I forget the actual question itself) and was surprised – I was sure I was right after all!
The teacher then proceeded to read out the answers aloud while we went over the tests. When she got to the one she’d marked wrong on my sheet, she said “the correct answer is a.”
I checked again. I’d written a as my answer and been marked wrong.
So, like any kid, I raised my hand. “Uh, I got that one right but you marked it wrong,” I said. She asked to see the paper, looked thoughtful, then delivered her verdict:
“The tail on your handwritten a is too high. It could be a d. I can’t be sure which it is.”
Now, never mind the logic of deciding that the child must be wrong if there’s any doubt. I had a much better argument, which I then used, without any squeamishness about embarrassing her in front of the class.
“Miss X, the possible answers to this question are a, b, and c. There is no d. Therefore I think it’s unlikely I was trying to write a d no matter how bad my handwriting is.”
As you can tell, I’m still a little mad about it.
I did get credit, though.
Sailboat