As did I. There were even little drawings of him standing there in his hat watching the ships disappear.
I don’t know if it was specifically taught, but in elementary school I did come away with the distinct impression that the Pilgrims wrote the Dec of Independence and Constitution.
I also remember reading a book about dinosaurs in 2nd grade. It was about how they died in the great flood. In a public classroom. 
Concerning the Hitler part: There is a good chance if Hitler conquered all of Europe and was given a chance he would have turned next on other groups. I would think Muslims and then Eastern Asians. I understand the Hindi Indians may have been ok because they were Aryans but he may have forced them to convert? All speculation, but it does seem likely there would have been a new group to fuel his hatred when the Jews were gone.
Generalize much?
It’s not a generalization, its a fact. 
Or have you ever ran into a religious site that didn’t lie or decieve on the topic of evolution? I sure haven’t, and I been around in these debates a long, long time. (ok, only 10 years or so)
This isn’t a myth unless you were taught this was the ONLY way whites got African slaves during the TransAtlantic slave trade. You generally get slaves five ways: as captured POWs, during slave raids on (generally) coastal communities, by people paying penance for indebtedness/criminal behavior, by people bred as slaves – and in modern times, by either selling or abducting young women and sexually available girls and boys as prosititutes for the sex trade. Slave raids are a pretty well documented phenomenon in every culture that practiced slavery.
Spectre of Pithecanthropus. To the best of my knowledge, author Alex Haley maintained that the Mandinkas captured in the slave raid in 1767 Gambia that stole Kunta Kinte were abducted by whites sailing aboard the ship, the Lord Ligonier.
Because he wasn’t going to dive in for just a ha’penny? 
I was taught that if I did it enough I’d go blind. So far, so good…
Seriously - the myth of the Brontosaurus. I was really interested in dinosaurs when I was a young boy (what young boy isn’t?), and I even remember breakfast cereals with plastic dinosaurs inside. I thought I knew most of them, and it was absolutely humiliating to be corrected by a youngster, and to find that there was no such thing a Brontosaurus.
Not so much a myth as just an aside: I had an incredibly incompetent high school history teacher- the kind you’ve all had in some subject or other probably who basically just read the book aloud and mispronounced half the words (you should have heard her strain on Liliuokalani and Kamehemeha [sp]). I wrote a history of Turkey for her that I forgot was due until a few minutes before class and then made up from whole cloth (stating that its greatest leader was King Sulta, thus all it’s rulers from then on were called Sultans) and other such “facts” and got an A.
Anyway, my favorite of her comments was while “teaching” the robber baron era.
“Rich people used to have really big balls back then and had special ornate rooms in their house to hold them in.”
I haven’t read the book, but I did see the miniseries recently and I’ve statyed in a Holiday Inn Express. In the miniseries he was captured by Africans and sold to whites. (White traders rarely went very far inland because there were African diseases they had little or no immunity to and it was dangerous and time consuming.)
One thing I was taught in school is that “America shouldn’t feel guilty about slaves because the ones they brought over were slaves in Africa already”. While there’s some “squint and look sideways” support for this, it’s also true that the American market is why so many Africans were enslaved in their own country. (We were also taught that we rescued them from cannibalism, a comment so stupid I’ll let it be it’s own commentary.)
I’m amazed at how little time is given in high school history classes to the native cultures that were here for thousands of years and in some cases living in towns (and in central America metropolises) that were centuries old with highly advanced agriculture. They’re usually dispatched in the first week of class. It’s also amazing how little time is given to the mechanics of the slave trade (or even the fact that only- I can’t remember the statistics, but about 15% as memory serves [I stand willing and ready to be corrected] of the slaves were brought to the United States).
I also remember being taught that Columbus watched ships disappear gradually over the edge of the horizon and thus concluded the world was round.
The myths I remember most and the ones which put me off history for years concerned the way the American Revolutionary War was taught. From first through 6th grade (ages 5 to about 11), each year I was told how e-e-evil the English were for imposing unreasonable taxes on the poor, oppressed American colonists and was given the impression that everyone in the colonies whole-heartedly supported the overthrow of their British overlords. The problem was, I was English, as were my parents the rest of my family. I knew we couldn’t be that bad, therefore, in about 6th grade, I decided history was bunk. I also learned it was no fun being the English kid in a small town during America’s Bicentennial! :eek:
Since then, in one of the universe’s little jokes, I’ve loved two men and been very good friends with another all of whom were history buffs. I’ve even seen and enjoyed 1776 with two of them, both on video and on stage. The colonists did have some very valid points and I consider the founding of the USA to be a good thing overall, but it was hardly as one-sided as I was taught!
CJ
There are physical limits regarding how fast you can make logic chips switch states. You’ll never see a computer faster than about 40 MHz. Silicon just can’t work that fast.
(yes, that’s MHz, not GHz - this was when 1 MHz 8 bit processors were screaming fast little miracles of technology)
I was taught the same sort of thing, only with the upper limit being just south of 4 GHz.
I was taught that a line is never drawn up. A particular teacher asked me to come to the blackboard and draw a square (I don’t even remember the reason why). One line down, across, up and then he freaked out before I could even finish my square.
He started yelling at me saying that I did it all wrong. Everyone knows that lines are only drawn from top to bottom, NEVER bottom to top.
Good news for you, your young friend is mistaken.
While the proper and official name for the Bronto is Apatosaurus the Brontosaurus name is an excepted alternate name for the beastie.
The story as you probably know goes back to the great dinosaur hunters. In 1877, Othniel Charles Marsh published notes on his discovery of the Apatosaurus, and then in 1879 described another, more complete dinosaur — the Brontosaurus. In 1903, it was discovered that the apatosaur was in fact a juvenile brontosaur, and the name Apatosaurus, having been published first, was deemed to have priority as the official name; Brontosaurus was relegated to being a synonym.
From the great master Cecil himself. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_011.html
So while the original Bronto was given the wrong head and possibly feet. You can use Brontosaurus as a synonym for Apatosaurus
Sampiro. I’ll take your word for it. I’ve never seen ROOTS on TV, although I’ve read the novel several times and the source material indicates the slavers were white. But the Gambia is an extremely narrow (30 miles, sometimes as little as 13 miles) and long country (300 miles from the Atlantic), the Gambia River is a major waterway and everyone in the country lives along it. Juffureh village is less than two kilometers from the river itself. There’s little need to go very far inland or risk or disease if your intent is to conduct slave raids in Gambia, and no real need to involve the local slave market, either. Map.
Barring some other fact, this is more like a “myth taught by television.”
:smack: Shame on me for not first going back to drink at the Holy Font. :smack:
It is especially embarassing, because I now remember reading this some time ago.
However, in my own (limited) defense, I decided to Google “Brontosaurus” before posting and found this at the top of the list.
Thanks,
plynck
Hm … in light of this, perhaps the myth that I was taught was that the peppered moth story is wrong! I am surprised to hear the religious/anti-evolution link, those kinds of arguments (ie anti-evolution for religious purposes) don’t usually get much play around here. I guess it goes to show my naivite.
Thanks for the wiki link, it is scarily complete. I can’t wait to clear a few hours from my schedule to read it. And forward it around to a few people …
GrahamWellington, using “nigger” for the sheer hell of it is not allowed on the SDMB. Don’t do this again.
As a young tyke in the Seattle area I was taught that Mt. Rainier was permanently dormant and would never erupt again. I remember telling this to my mother as she drove me home from school, and her responding “Hmmm… I don’t think that’s quite right.”
That is, in fact, wrong. Blood is red whether or not it’s oxygenated.
Snigger.