Incorrectly corrected

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

What timing!

Last night I was complaining about the injustice visited upon me in third grade. We were playing that game where you are given a big word and asked to find all the little words inside it.

I came up with “neon,” and was pretty impressed because nobody else had gotten it.

Until my teacher told me that it WASN’T A WORD!

(Remarkably, there wasn’t a dictionary around. Of course. We were at one of those pioneer village things, and the little schoolhouse we were in didn’t have a dictionary. Authenticity, you know.)

The scars still haven’t healed.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one still traumatized by the idiocy of a primary school teacher.

… neon … grumble … Oh, Mr Mills, if you could see me now!

22

Way back when, maybe Grade 3, our teacher read from the sadly obsolete textbook (I think it was from when she was a third-grader) that there were eight planets, and was unwilling to admit Pluto.

Maybe she was right after all. :frowning:

23

. . or really wrong, like like off by three or four (I think I saw something in this month’s Atlantic to that effect, i.e. 12 planets).

24

AH! A thread for bitterness about schooldays. Just my thing :slight_smile:

There are quite a few. I won’t go into the details of the argument with my primary one teacher when my four year old self insisted (correctly) that the third letter of the alphabet was pronounced see rather than kih. But i was right!

Not to mention the time i got told off for challenging our Minister when he said that there was no excuse for not knowing about Christ. Well what *about * the Native Americans from before America was discovered?

What really bugged me was being 13 and asked to design a system for lighting a patio at night. It was part of a physics test and i was dismayed that my (i thought) perfectly reasonably designed system based on turning on the lights when it got dark was given only a begrudgingly average grade. Apparently these systems were somehow better if they included a timer rather than a light sensor and that’s why i got marked down. My arguement that it got dark at different times throughout the year and that the folks with the timers would be constantly adjusting them cut no ice it seems. Grr.

25

What would be the proper Welsh pronunciation of “GorillaMan,” I wonder…?

26

Ha! This has bugged me for years. They were just disagreements with my best friend in sixth grade, but they’ve stuck with me all these years:

Argument 1: I insisted that meat is muscle tissue - that a slice of round steak, for instance, is a slice of a cow’s leg muscle. Jill insisted that meat is not muscle, and that muscle referred to that hard gristly bit you sometimes see at the edge. I countered that that was tendon, and that all tissue in a body had a purpose, so if she thought meat was not muscle, what was meat’s purpose? She said it had no purpose, it was just meat and was just there to be eaten. !!!

Argument 2: Jill insisted that those little striped, rapidly hovering insects you sometimes see are “baby bees”. I said they were some sort of fly, and that any bee you see flying is as full-grown as it’s ever going to be. I said that the only “baby bees” were larvae inside the combs in the hive. Her proof of her argument was that her dad called them baby bees and who was I to question her dad?

Where was The Straight Dope back in 1967?

27

I have a few of my own.
In second grade, we were told that the English language had X many words which started with a Q and weren’t followed by a U. A prize was offered for the first people to find those words. Well, after my teacher’s quota of Q words was filled, I came in with Q-Tip. She insisted it wasn’t a word. She didn’t even try to say it was two words. In her world, Q-Tips did not exist. So, I brought a box to class. She insisted that they were “cotton swabs” and that I was still wrong. :mad:

In 5th grade, my history teacher and I had an argument over the location of the largest(tallest?) pyramid in the world. I said Mexico. She said Egypt. I told her that I had read it in a book. She never told me that the book was wrong. Oh no. She told me that I was a little liar and that no book would ever print such a fact. I brought the book to school. She took it from me and refused to look at it. She stated that books from home were not allowed in class. I could have lived with the possibility that the book was wrong. But to have her insist that the fact wasn’t printed in a book I owned and had read many times - that just pissed me off.

The following year, the same history teacher and I had yet another argument about the shortest distance between two points. The same book stated that it was in fact a curve. I’m sure there’s some mathematical reasoning behind it. I don’t really care what the reasoning is. All I know is that I read it in a book. She called me a little liar again (can we say BITCH?). Of course, this time I didn’t even have the book to attempt to prove my point. The bitch never gave me my book back. I had to buy one off the internet a few years ago to replace it.

I will never understand how a teacher can so quickly dismiss that
A. They might be wrong
or that
B. The book might actually be wrong but what a stellar time to teach the benefits of research.
I would also like to point out that for the last 13 years, I have had a very hard time remembering the abbreviations for the states because this same “teacher” taught us that each state abbreviation consisted of the first and last letters of the state name. :confused:

28

In the 5th grade, when I was in Canada (I had lived in Australia before and I live in Australia now) we were playing that game in class where you’re put in groups, then the teacher gives you a letter and you have to write down the name of a food, colour, animal, place etc. and if you come up with something no other group does then you get a point for it. So we got the letter D, and I made my team write down “dugong” for the animal and felt pretty smart since nobody else would have thought of that but the unanimous exclamation from the class after reading it out was “THAT’S A POKEMON, YOU IDIOT!” :smack:

Dugongs are not Pokemon*. I tried arguing but the teacher had never heard of them either and the sorry little dictionary in the classroom was written for 5th graders and didn’t contain an entry for dugongs. So we lost the point and my team hated me forever, and the rest of the class thought I was an idiot and yelled “dugong, dugong!” at me for weeks afterwards**.

  • There is a Pokemon called Dewgong. Which, of course, is based on the dugong. Idiots.
    ** I think maybe the area we lived in was a chemical dumping grounds or something, because every single person at the school (I am not exaggerating) seemed to be retarded trailer trash. Every one. I’ve been to 8 schools and I have never seen another so full of imbeciles or so contemptuous of intelligence.
29

My friend insisted the plural of penis was peni and she wouldn’t believe me that it was penises or penes. She said the dictionary and Cecil were wrong! She still doesn’t believe me and I’m still mad about that.

Then this year my French teacher says that English comes entirley from German and not at all from Latin. Grrrrr.

30

I’m not sure if this exactly counts, but, I was playing Trivial Pursuit with a friend. His brother was in the room watching TV.

The question to my frined was “What was Superman’s Kryptonian name?”. Now being the avid comics fan i was, I knew it instantly. However, my friend was racking his brain. His brother started shouting, “I know, I know”

Anyway, after a few minutes, he said, “Jor-El”.

His brother chimes in with, “Yep, that’s right.”

I informed him itwas Kal-El, that Jor-el was his father. He insisted he was right. I showed him the card and he still insisted he was right. His brother insisted he was right. I finally gave in.

The next time he was over my house, i showed him a a copy of a comic that showed I was right.

and in the complain about your ex dept.

One morning my ex and i were talking about what to have for dinner. I said I could make turkey burgers out of the ground turkey in the freezer. She insisted we didn’t have any and what I thought was ground turkey was breakfast sausage. Now I had bought it, so I was pretty sure I knew what it was. She insisted it wasn’t.

So i got up, opened the freezer, took it out and showed it to her.

She wouldn’t even look. She started yelling at me about it.

So I put it back in the fridge and didn’t bother with it.

31

Mine was a science teacher that was certain the book he had was correct in saying comets were “giant fireballs” and counted it against me when I told him, in front of the class, that they were in fact ice and dust. Not at all hot.
He and I never really got along after that. :wally

32

I’m still mad at my middle school math teacher who stated that 999/3000 was an irrational number and removed me points for picking the “wrong” answer (because it’s 0.333 so it looks like an irrational. Yes, she had a degree in mathematics). And of course, my parents, to whom I complained, would never believe that I was right and the math teacher wrong, which iritated me even more.

33

I think that’s true on a globe.

34

In the 8th grade, my class had a test where we had to determine which of the given phrases were sentences and which were sentence fragments. One of the sentences was “One day, it was sunny.” I said it was a (somewhat awkward) complete sentence, and I got marked wrong. Unlike previous instances where I knew I had the right answer and the teacher was wrong, this time I actually spoke up about it. I don’t think I convinced the teacher, but by the end of it I had convinced the rest of the class, so it was at least a minor victory. :slight_smile: I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I seem to remember the teacher giving me credit for the problem just to shut me up.

35

If I had a nickel for every time someone made up some imaginary Latin plural . . . well, it would at least reduce my desire to stab people for it.

That’s my grammar pet peeve, I guess.

Okay, English is a Germanic language, which doesn’t mean that it’s descended from German - they’re both descended ultimately from the same root, but German is English’s cousin, not its ancestor.

And while a lot of English vocabulary came from Latin (either via French or through later borrowing of mostly fairly learned words), the grammar is entirely Germanic in origin. We’ve borrowed words, and French even gave English some new suffixes and slight alterations to its phonology, but really, it’s perfectly accurate to say that English is purely Germanic. A lot of languages borrow a lot of their basic vocabulary; that’s not really remarkable at all.

36

Two incidents that come to mind, in one of which I was technically wrong, but not as wrong as he thought.

First, in grade 7, our social studies teacher asked us for examples of republics. I answered China, which he scoffed at and told me I was wrong. I, of course, answered that because I knew the official name of the country was “The People’s Republic of China”, and didn’t yet understand propaganda. This still bothers me.

Second, in university, I wrote a mediocre paper, which included a complex but gramatically correct sentence. In fact, I’m sure I still have it on my computer somewhere… "While it is difficult to assess the historical accuracy of Tacitus’ account for the obvious reason of having no unbiased, completely verifiably true account of the time, it is still possible and necessary to decide what is likely to be true. " Not a shining academic moment, I’ll admit.

Still, my TA was not a native English speaker, and in fact his English was quite poor. He crossed out the ‘no’ before ‘unbiased’ to ‘an’ and changed something else later on in the sentence, changing the meaning completely. At the end he wrote: “Pay attention to your prose.” The next week, he proceeded to write something very basic which was gramatically incorrect on the board as part of the instructions for a test. This too still makes me mad.

37

In 6th grade at Catholic elementary school, I watched my homeroom teacher, who was also our principal, who was also a drunk, print what he thought was the word “length” on the board in caps: L-E-N-G-H-T.

I raised my hand. “Isn’t that supposed to be L-E-N-G-T-H?” I asked.

He squinted at the board, then frowned at me mightily. “No,” he blustered, his face red and his wattles shaking, “That’s correct. L-E-N-G-H-T.” I declined to agree, so he brought in the school math teacher, a later-to-be-incarcerated paedophile (though sober), to make a big show of checking the spelling – in truth, to make a big show of embarrassing me. Both squinted at the board and frowned mightily at me. Then they agreed that the correct spelling was indeed L-E-N-G-H-T.

Knowing I was beaten, I eventually just shook my head and stared at my desk.

To this day, I will sometimes type or write “ht” in my first draft, especially if I’m thinking: “Don’t do it his way. Don’t.”

38

Years ago I worked for an insurance services firm. We did premium quote rating, policy preimum rating, and policy mark-up and typing for property and casualty insurance companies who either did not have a rating and typing department, or who had overflow work. They outsourced it to us.

So, one day our typist was typing a policy I had marked up. It was a renewal and the company’s typist had typed “Sugarland, Texas”. So of course I corrected it. When the typist got to that part she stopped and asked if that was correct. I affirmed that the city did indeed have a two-word name. Well, she didn’t believe me so she looked it up in the key rate book (a book that was used in the olden days to rate property policy premiums in Texas- it listed every single city and town in the state, incorporated and unincorporated). Huh, imagine that, it was listed as “Sugar Land”. Well, according to her, the key rate book was wrong. Next she got out my boss’s Atlas. Would you believe it? The Atlas was wrong, too, according to her! Everybody in the world spelled it “Sugar Land” except her, but by golly, she was right and she was on a mission to prove it. Next she got the “T” volume of my boss’s encyclopedia. By God, THEY had it spelled wrong, too! So what did she do next? She called the Suglar Land city offices! Guess what! *They didn’t know how to spell their own city’s name! * She finally typed “Sugar Land” after my boss told her she’d get **fired ** if she didn’t!

39

HAHA it’s NUKULAR you idiots, the “S” is silent.

/Family Guy

40

Once I was playing Trivial Pursuit with this asshole, and the question he got was “Who invaded Spain in the 8th Century?” He said it was the Moors, which was WRONG. He kept insisting he was right, but it was right there on the card: the Moops. HA.

Stupid Bubble Boy.