Hi, chillywilly! Welcome to the Dope! Dialects are neither right nor wrong. Everyone has a dialect. When you are from Upstate New York and you move to the South, you sound a little unusual to Southerners. That doesn’t make you wrong. Regional differences are part of the fun.
Sometimes a teacher will mispronounce a word when it’s not part of a dialect and not be aware of it. For some reason I pronounced “children” as “trill-dren” when I first started teaching. I don’t know where I had picked that up, but I was a very good student in English and was horrified when I realized what I was doing. (Yep. A student politely mentioned it to me in class one day. I don’t think that I ever used it again. I was grateful that she called it to my attention without completely ridiculing me.)
Mercury must be a common subject of misconceptions. When I was in the 4th or 5th grade somebody broke a thermometer during some kind of science experiment. While the teacher was cleaning it up, I for some reason I felt compelled to inform her that mercury was poisonous and could make you crazy (my Dad had told me this so that I wouldn’t play around with a thermometer we had at home). The teacher told me that that was just a myth and mercury was perfectly safe, because “otherwise why would they put it in thermometers?”.
When I was in Grade 12 (senior year to Americans) in high school, I had an English teacher, newly arrived from the United States, who would mark us wrong for spelling words using British spelling (“colour,” “centre,” “theatre,” “cheque,” and so on). She was convinced that the only correct spelling was the American spelling, and did her best to convince us of that. But enough complaints came from students and parents (and eventually,the local school board) that she was forced to conform to local Canadian spelling. Still, being told that “you’re spelling it wrong” when we had been taught that way and when no past teacher had a problem with a sentence like, “John went a red colour when the cheque, that he wrote to the theatre for his tickets, bounced,” was, to us high schoolers, unnerving. We were glad when the teacher was proved wrong and correct grades were restored, but as I recall, we lost a lot of respect for her after that.
I’m going to leave out all of the misinformation that I got from having attended a fundamentalist Christian school, because while it may be misinformation, the teachers were actually citing our textbooks and “authorities” when they would tell us things about the age of the planet, or whatever.
I had this, too. Central America was supposedly a separate continent. I could see this from a history or social studies teacher, but this was in a geography class. North America supposedly was comprised only of three nations-- Canada, USA, Mexico-- with island nations simply not belonging to any continent, and Central America being the continent between North and South America. The Arctic was also a continent. Which meant, yes, on the test we had to list nine entities. Oddly enough, the same teacher was pretty accurate on the Europe-Asia/Eurasia problem.
A science teacher and I went at it in 6th grade over his contention that, by definition, planets and stars were the exact same thing. He also spread that more common bit of misinformation, that the phases of the moon were caused by the earth’s shadow.
So you BLAME her for teaching you how the spell the way she was taught? Is it POSSIBLE, maybe :dubious: that she didn’t know about different spellings, because, you know, she’d NEVER been taught those spellings?
My freshman English teacher who claimed that when Romeo and Juliet was written, in the Middle Ages, that it was entirely normal for all classes of woman to get by the time they were 14. Also that Juliet would’ve certainl been illiterate because women (even royalty, noblewomen, and nuns) were forbidden to learn how to read or write.
All the boys’ PE teachers seemed to be under the impression that refraining from masturbation would improve athletic performance. One of whom taught health and kept insisting that “Spiritual health” (defined as the "ability to belive in some force) was essential to our wellbeing. I got into several arguments with him when he kept insisting that it wasn’t teaching religion because “everyone believes” in a higher power of some sort. :rolleyes:
I even went over his head to our principal (who was rather annoyed) when I answered a question on a test (the defination of spiritual health) as thnking your imaginary friends were real and he marked me wrong. He really didn’t like me. Oh, and he also taught us that in China babies born with Downs Syndrome “never make it out of the delivery room” and brought in a “guest speaker” who claimed that aborted babies were often “born alive” and the doctor would proceed to drown them.
In between my 5th grade and the 6th grade, my 6th grade teacher took her vacation in England including a trip across the English Channel in the hovercraft. So of course she wanted to share her vacation photos with us and when she came to a picture taken out of one of the windows of the hovercraft showing spray from the waves. She claimed this was because the hovercraft bounces over the channel. She was quite dismayed over my exclamation that she was totally wrong. She countered with “I was the one on the hovercraft, I think I would know more then you about how it works.” I started for the “A” volume of the encyclopedia but she threatened to send me to the Principal’s office and I backed down.
Any time I think of that incident, I’m always sorry I did. I think it affected all of my schooling since. Even with all the excellent teachers that followed.
Many many years and a couple of moves later I ended up back in the same town and happened to work with one of my classmates from that year. My classmate still remembered the incident and just how pissed off that teacher was.
It was an uneven playing field. She could (and did) mark us down because of how she was taught, but she would not listen when we protested that we were spelling things the way we were taught. It took the school board getting involved before she changed her mind.
Above all, though, if she had never been taught that the non-American English-speaking world used different spellings than were in use in the US, then I’d suggest that she wasn’t a very-well-educated English teacher. If she had ever read English literature, I’d expect her to know the different spellings. As it was, I doubted that she ever had ever read anything except American literature written in English.
No. I expect that teachers who are originally from the US, especially English teachers, would know that non-Americans would use different spellings for English words. That doesn`t seem unreasonable. After all, English teachers are supposed to have read Dickens, Orwell, Browning, Wordsworth, Bronte, et al. Are you suggesting that they read the works of these English authors in versions edited and re-spelled for Americans?
Note that I said nothing about American students reading English literature with British spellings. You brought that up.
I reckon you are thinking that that the spray was actually coming from the driving turbines and the escaping inflation air from the skirt. That is true but only with a mirror smooth surface. (see this video) but remember that the skirt will indeed “bounce” and “skim” over the waves (the English channel is not known for being mirror smooth) and so spray is also kicked up in that way. And as anyone who has been on a hovercraft, the ride is anything but smooth and the air cushion does indeed “bounce” over the waves.
My 3rd-grade teacher had a large Mercator-projection map of the world on one wall. Believe it or not, she informed us that Greenland was much bigger than Australia and that everyone except her was silly to call Australia a continent and Greenland an island – that should be reversed. :smack:
(At age 8, I’d never studied cartography but I’d seen a globe and understood the Mercator distortion intuitively. I’m afraid I lost some respect for “authority” after hearing her opinion of Greenland’s relative size.)
I had a similar accident happen in high school, and as the teacher was cleaning it up, one student, in her little miss priss voice told him the same thing – that mercury would make you crazy. He just said that didn’t matter in his case – “how would anybody tell the difference?” Got a big laugh from the rest of the class. He seemed to enjoy making us laugh.
She also had a very misinformed view of what distinguishes a continent from an island (not that geographers are always consistent or logical about the distinction, but size is not the deciding factor).
I had a high school Social Studies teacher who started his rant that day by telling us we were headed for a ‘cashless society’ (about that, he may have been right; this was ca. 1977), and then launched into a diatribe about how that was a sign that Satan was overtaking the world. :dubious:
Around here, a lot of people still deal in cash; a lot of my tenants don’t even have bank accounts, and rents get paid mostly in cash or by money order. But I do understand that in larger areas, a lot of folks don’t even carry cash with them. I just don’t know what any of this had to do with Satan. . .especially since this particular teacher had never spoken to us of religion before.
Number of the beast. For those who Christians who read Revelations as an unfulfilled prophecy people will have a number on their wrist or forehead and will use that for transactions instead of paper or coin currency.
