Musta been some lag, since she posted an hour before you… 
I have heard that pronunciation used humorously in a similar context (IIRC W.C. Fields, for example). http://www.m-w.com/ gives that as an alternate pronunciation, but oddly for the police/emergency siren.
How about the word “rail”? http://www.m-w.com/ gives the pronunciation as “rA(&)l” where the “&” or “uh” is apparently optional. Maybe you were both right.
I’ve only had a few excellent teachers. The rest were competent and did their jobs. There were one or two wacko nuns, but also a couple of really nice ones. Of course, when I was a kid, you behaved OR ELSE! And we also had to walk to school 5 miles uphill both ways in 10 feet of snow.
In 5th grade, my teacher was a Miss F., a young woman whom I liked. I was standing in front of the class with a few other kids during a spelling bee or something. I began to have an asthma attack, coughing hard and turning very red in the face. I had my inhaler with me, so I used it and just had to wait a minute for relief. I wasn’t in danger, but I was in distress. Then I realized she was LAUGHING! In the midst of her laughter she said “You look so funny with your face turning red!” Bitch.
Hmmn. I guess I should’ve villified her more. Ignoring the discouraging things she said many, many times, my reasoning was that if an assignment was supposed to be two pages and I handed in four or five, the three other smart kids would hand in two pages, the mediocre students would hand in a page and a half, a good portion would turn in nothing, and a greater portion would turn in half a page. I think if this were converted to integers, the kids who didn’t hand in anything would easily cover my excess pages.
It sounds like everyone here was at the top of their classes, so I’m guessing that I’m not the only one here who got the hang of pertinence and repitition a few years earlier than the rest of the school. I wanted to learn how to express myself through prose NOW, damnit. I didn’t give a damn who could draw a better picture of the Ogopogo monster (I could, it turns out. But I didn’t enjoy it).
Yeah, the 200+ story was vengeful. I knew it at the time, too. Can you imagine the misery of reading a novel written in a week by a grade eight student? Well, maybe, if you read a lot of L. Ron Hubbard.
an hour? how the hell did that happen? i wonder if i have suddenly developed epilepsy… hey, 2 minutes just passed! it must be true! 
Aw, shucks.
Looking back over the thread, the various “ball” stories reminded me of tales my roommate used to tell about her Human Biology professor. The poor guy was always making remarks that caused his students to laugh until they cried.
Two prime examples:
“As you can see, I am an erect man” (while lecturing on the evolution of the species).
“Now I have a pair of blue balls” (while using a visual aid to demonstrate molecular combinations).
My roommate swore that he couldn’t be doing it on purpose, as he would get embarrassed and turn red when the class started to laugh. It probably didn’t help that all his students were young women (single sex school), and he was a stereotypical dorky science professor type.
We have a winner!
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=31354
(just in case no one has posted it yet.)
-Ben
Hello, Golden Earring’s Twilight Zone.
Well, not the stupidest thing ever, but definetly not without humor. We were on a corporate retreat and had to go to various seminars. Our agenda allowed for one of them to be done by noon or so. The section didn’t finish until 4pm.
So, where’s the humor? The seminar was on time management!
Oh, well, if you wanna talk about drunk teachers. During the big, end of school Spring concert, my junior year, the orchestra director (and basically the music teacher, excluding the choir director) arrived absolutely stone drunk, basically incapable of speech.
Now, the orchestra was pretty lame–about 20 flutes (of which I was one), a sax and a violin, more or less. Despite this mix, for some reason we were playing some re-orchestrated version of a Vivaldi violin concerto–you know, the one most people know. And most of the orchestra was either lazy or incompetent. So the director is standing up in front, smiling and waving away at random, and we begin to play. Half a page down, we lose the violin. Not long after, we lose the sax. Flutes begin dropping out one by one. Because they’re not bothering to put any effort into reading, and they’re counting on the director to keep them on track, and he’s off in his own little world. In the end, it was me and one other flute, quarter note, rest, quarter note, rest, just background stuff, but nothing else was playing. The director doesn’t notice. No one makes even an attempt to get back on track. And then, the flutes had 16 measures of silence. The director stands there smiling and waving. The audience is dead silent. Silence for several minutes, while Mr. X continues his arm waving. Finally, he notices something is wrong, and says, “let’s take it from measure X” and off we go. We muddled through this time, and practically ran offstage when we were done. The other flute, a good musician but a bit over sensitive, burst into tears and declared herself utterly humiliated. (Actually, even at the time I knew it was no big deal, because no one ever expected the orchestra to be very good–the concerts were really all about the various choral groups, which absolutely rocked–well, as much as a choral group can rock, anyway).
I’ve never seen the man since.
Yes, it’s listed as “indeterminate”. But if you read the page, you’ll see it’s only listed that way because, technically, it’s never been disproven. Neither Curtis or anyone else who would know has stepped forward to say that any of the various rumors are false. That could mean that one of them is true. It could also mean no one wants to dignify the rumors with an answer. My money’s on the latter.
Ah! So this is one of the rare cases of art that needed more sax and violins 
Third grade, I’d moved to a new city and was way ahead of the rest of the class. I raised my hand to answer most of the questions. One day the teacher told me to quit volunteering, I needed to give the other kids a chance to answer. Great. After that, I’d get called on only if nobody else in the classroom knew the answer, and then I’d look stupid if I didn’t know it either.
Senior year of high school. My English teacher offered 5 extra credit points if you could find an error on one of her tests (because she was perfect, of course). On a six-week exam, I scored an 89, and found two errors. I got credit for one, but she refused to give me credit for the second.
She had “Identify the following as briefly as possible” and a list of terms. I’d pointed out that lacked ending punctuation. She claimed it wasn’t a sentence. I diagramed it for her, pointed out it fit the definition of a sentence and required ending punctuation. She refused. I tried over the next several days (during breaks in class, I wasn’t being disruptive) to get her to explain exactly why that wasn’t a sentence. “It just isn’t a sentence” was the best I got out of her. I finally dropped it after being threatened with being sent to the principal’s office. Looking back, I should have gone.
Of course, my high school biology teacher killed the vice-principal and tried to blow up the school, but that was several years after I graduated.
They hurt you at home and they hit you in school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fuckin’ crazy you can’t follow their rules
—John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”
No. The likelihood of flipping six heads in six tosses is 1 in 64; the possibility of getting three of each in any order (as the post states) is quite a bit higher, since there are many different possible combinations of three heads and three tails in six throws. There’s a 1 in 4 chance of going HHHTTT, a 1 in 64 chance of going THTHTH, etc.
And no, Jesus was not visited by three kings. He was visited by wise men, and the Bible doesn’t even say there were three of them:
Matthew 2:1-2
Later it says that Jesus was given gifts of gold, frankincense, and myyrh, so in Christmas pageants you get three kids each carrying one of the gifts.
Tonight’s gems:
cats don’t have language.
the cell is not a machine
radio waves travel at the speed of light
Constantine established Christianity as the state religion in 310.
My social psych teacher thought that the kids at columbine had all those guns and their parents didn’t know. She also thought Patty Hearst’s sentence was commuted by Clinton. I’m bringing my Ab Psych book next class to show her how wrong she is.
Same thing happened to me in 7th grade science class. The teacher worked directly out of the book so I just answered all the questions for the chapter the day that we started it and spent the rest of the time putting make up on the guy next to me in exchange for answers and tutoring. Yes, I know that was wrong, but he managed to pass the class.
Then there was the biology teacher that told us to put our fetal pigs “in bondage” before dissecting them and couldn’t figure out why we were laughing when she demonstrated the position for us. Though I had a rather nice conversation with my buddy about sub/dom relationships while dissecting.
Kitty
Well, okay… cats DON’T have language. Radio waves travel pretty damned close to the speed of light, if not quite at it; I’d say the difference would be hard for you to measure with a stopwatch. In a vacuum, radio waves would travel at the speed of light; in air, they’re slowed down only a tiny bit. (You didn’t think they travelled at the speed of sound, did you?) And she didn’t miss Constantine’s edicts by much.
The bit about the cell’s just flat wrong, though.
Two things:
7th grade PE coach. We’re doing running drills, and the last one is running backwards. So my turn comes up and I’m running and I trip and fall. I put my arms out to catch me and WHAM! Both wrists suddenly hurt like my hands’ve been cut off. So I get up, finish the relay and sit down on the floor. After about a minute and a half, my wrists have gotten pretty swollen and I can’t move them at all. So before we practicing the sport we were doing, I stand up and walk over to our gym teacher. “I can’t move either of my wrists.” I say as I hold them up for his inspection. By now, both are swollen to high heaven and I know he saw me fall while running. His reply: “Walk it off.” I just kinda stood there with my mouth open and said “But it really, REALLY hurts, and I can’t move either wrist at all!” His reply: “It’ll stop hurting soon. Just go back and try the drill we’re doing.” So I go back to the line…first drill: Volleyball setting. And guess what you set volleyballs with (or at least the way the coaches showed us). Thats right, your wrists. Sp I just say screw it and go ask the girls PE coach if I can go to the office. She lets me go without question. It was later revealed that I have two broken arms…not wrists, arms. Arr, that pissed me off so much though. “Walk it off…”
7th grade english/history teacher. She announces that we’re having an essay test over the discovery of the Columbia river and all the events surrounding it. So I study for it, not that I really needed to, cause I knew all the info. When test time rolled around, I finished in about the period’s length. The next day, she hands the papers back… and I have a B+ (I’m a straight A student). Written at the top of the paper is, Too many details. Ironically, it was written just above the directions. Explain in detail the early history of the Columbia River, and the events surrounding it’s discovery.
I’d written a flawless paper, and she’d marked me down for having too much detail, even though it was only a page and a half. The average test length was 1 page. I appealed this, but she wouldn’t give me an A on the test, only an A- for ‘effort’. She was the worst teacher I have ever had. Period. No one else comes close.
i had a maths teacher who after many failed atempts to kick me out of my maths class to goto the bottom maths class finnaly ot her chance to kick me out after i failed one test after much arguments etc with parent and prinicipal i was allows from then on she would pick on me with all the hardest questions and riducule me when i got one wrong. i was constantly called stupid etc
but one that stuck was that i would never be able to do a job that would require maths. i meet her the other day and she got fired from my schoool she asked what i do no
i am a realist
those people that sit behind desk all day figuring out probabillitys for insurance companys and lottery compancy making in my first year more than she ever made in her last year of teaching
john
I remember another thing that b**** did. Near the end of the year, we had a comprehensive essay to write about the history of the Pacific Northwest. So the entire class took it. Average length of the essays were about 3-4 pages. (That was a lot for 2 classes worth of work for 7th graders) So we come in the day after the tests and she announces that she’s a group of our tests (mine included) and that we would have to re-take them. We mumbled and groaned at this, but figured might as well to get the A…so we take the test again and turn it in. Two days later she finds the tests she lost, corrects both tests that we took and gives us the lower score of the two. I was so glad to be out of her class at the end of the year…
In college I took a course called “Humans and Primates: Evolution and Variation.” The professor was just awful, the worst I’ve ever had, but my favorite memory of her is the statement she made while discussing the origins of primates.
"Primates could not have evolved from insectivores, because there were no insectivores when the dinosaurs were around, because there were no plants when the dinosaurs were around."
The response throughout the class was a sort of stunned silence, followed by everyone looking around, clearly thinking “Am I the only one who heard that?” Immediately after class, practically everyone in attendance that day gathered in the hallway to discuss this refreshingly original take on paleontology, and we came to three conclusions:
- She had in fact said just that.
- There was no way we could possibly accept anything she said, on any topic, as factual and reliable.
- The people who needed to know this stuff for graduate school were in real trouble. (Made much worse because, instead of supplying us with a good textbook so we could teach ourselves what she could not, she had had us buy one written by a friend of hers.)