Ms. Christensen?! Is that you?
(the English teacher I spoke of in the OP)
School wasn’t so bad for me, but I’ve worked in a couple of places that were somthing else.
I few years back, I worked in marketing for a small internet company that I’m still not convinced wasn’t just a front company set up to swindle venture capital investors. When I first interviewed, the beta release of their big software package was due next month. When I was laid off a year later, it was still due next month. When I checked their website about six months later, it was still due next month. We never produced a single product.
Anyway, on to the dumb stuff. The original company name had some embarrassing connotations in English, so they decided to change it before the big product launch. When they finally chose one, I mentioned that we should have a legal check done to make sure nobody else had registered the name before we started ordering new signs and stationery. Their response? “Huh? Oh, yeah, don’t worry about that, I’m sure it’s ok.” I told them that I could call up the copyright lawyer at my old company (brand consulting), ask him to run a quick check and have the results back before the end of the week. I was told “that’s not your job, we’re the ones in charge and we’re handling it. You think we don’t know how to run our own company? You’ve got some nerve.”
Six months later, we were all called in for a company meeting to listen to a hired consultant explain that we were going to have to change the name of the company again because sure enough, there was already somebody (in the same industry) using it. About three hours into the presentation, I suggested getting around the problem by simply changing our industry: we sell T-shirts for $30,000 each, and give every customer a network management software package as a free promotional giveaway. The consultant was amused. Management was not.
Well, IMO, there are only certain (VERY certain) circles in which “moneran” is “relatively common,” bucko. 
My English teacher from last year explained (in reference to the Illiad) that what the story meant when it said that women were the spoils of war is that the women spoiled the men’s fun at war by wanting them to come home as soon as possible. :rolleyes:
I had a High School teacher who made us look up ungulate when she meant undulate and even better erotic when she meant exotic.
Boy was she surprised when we stood up and gave our answers! 
I work for a county government. A few years ago, we had a 2-page form that we used. It consisted of 2 sheets of paper. Management thoughtfully decided to make the form 1 sheet, by printing it on both sides of 1 sheet of paper. So far, so good. But, then, instead of using up the ample supply of 2-page forms we had in stock, our supervisor told us that we had to THROW THEM AWAY, AND START USING THE NEW 1-SHEET FORMS, SO THAT WE COULD “IMMEDIATELY BEGIN TO SAVE PAPER!” I was speechless…
The mention of This Is Spinal Tap reminds me of the little fiasco about a decade ago when Fairfax County (VA) ordered a thirty-foot granite table for the government center… :smack:
My fifth grade teacher told us that when we see the clouds moving across the sky, we’re actually seeing the rotation of the planet, which is very slow.
At least there’s no danger of it being crushed…by a dwarf.
A phys. ed. teacher told us in health class that the reason you can get stomach cancer (among many other types of cancer) from smoking is that every time you inhale, some air goes into your stomach. This is also, he said, why your abdomen expands when you inhale deeply.
It took me a looooooong time to figure out exactly why, and on how many levels, that was wrong.
School:
I had an English teacher that went to great length explaining the the symbolism of a particular scene from some Japanese short story we’d read. Unfortunately she apparently knew nothing about Japan or Eastern symbolism… so she was basically trying to interpret a story about a funeral into a wedding.
Also had a Biology teacher who was apparently hot shit at an oncology research lab at a local university and so, could not comprehend the mere suggestion that she had made a mistake OR that one of us lowly high school students had managed to catch it. Unfortunately she frequently made math errors (genetics, punnet squares, etc) or asked different questions than she thought she asked. You could see it in her eyes when she finally realized she was mistaken… at which point she’d just begin elevating the discussion beyond the current subject until the student was out of his or her league. We’d usually waste at least one class a week going back and forth with her because she’d made some simple mistake and just ran away into something about Drosophila rather than say “whoa, my bad.”
Current Work:
I’m going to have to vote for the swing shifts being a wack idea. Ours are Days 0645-1900, Swings 1130-2300, and Mids 1900-0700. Nine day weeks, too… so it’s 7 days of Swings, 2 days off, 7 days of Mids, 2 days off, 7 days of Days, 2 days off, the 4 days of Days and 4 days off. Rinse. Repeat. Operationally, Mids is pretty much the only shift where you’re awake at the same time most businesses (like, say, banks) are open. Which can be problematic if you’re trying to do some financial restructuring or have a problem with your bank account.
The managers keep a number of statistics and post nifty graphs with best fit curves and trend analysis on a public corkboard. Which would be fine, except that individual section coordinators try to set up our pipeline to match the ideal case as set by the managers. For example, they’re making all of us take a major test and qualification board in the next two weeks because it will look better statistically if we take the test this week (and half fail) and take the board next week (and half fail) than if we took it a week later when we were actually ready and all passed the first time. Or requiring one set of qualifications prior to a second set of qualifications, even though the first set isn’t a prerequisite of the second set… and then rushing to finish the second set, which causes them to really rush through the first set, with the first set’s stated purpose being to prepare us for a third set of qualifications… So the first set, which they require before the second set (which doesn’t really require the 1st set), is meant to prepare us for the 3rd set, but they rush through the 1st set so we can get us to the 2nd set, leaving us underprepared for the 3rd set… when it finally comes. Read it again if you have to.
Prior work:
Worked for an In-home/On-site PC tutoring company… I’d come to work and be told gems such as “The server seemed slow, so I deleted all the DLLs, but that didn’t help. Now it’s all screwy. Fix it.” Yeah. And there was a bit of a disconnect between local and higher management, So local management would pitch all these good ideas to local computer stores to get referral business, only to be told by higher management to change it in some way that would most destroy the whole reason it was attractive to both parties to begin with… the local shop crashed and burned after about 4 months. Yay Dot-Com layoff.
My ninth grade English teacher, Ms. Shook (who later became Ms. Greene) once gave us an assignment on creative writing: write a (very) short fiction story and turn it in. This was my first excursion into something I later realized I really enjoy doing, and I thought I did pretty well on it at the time, even getting comments from classmates to the effect of, “wow, you write just like they do in real books!” I was really excited to get a real opinion on it from someone in a position of authority who presumbly knew more about writing than I did.
Days passed, then weeks, until finally someone in the class asked about our papers.
She told us they were all just so awful that she didn’t bother to grade them, or even return them. She had thrown them all away, she said.
I didn’t write again until my late 20s.
Now, I realize there was probably something behind that, she had lost them or something and didn’t want to admit it. But to tell us that we were all, every single one of us, bad writers, was a horrible thing to do. And if I had gotten some constructive feedback at the time instead of a lie, I’d probably have continued writing at that time instead of waiting years.
I have a physics teacher at this point in my life who has the memory of a small rodent, quite frankly. He is the type of teacher that will go off on strange stories about his so-called friends and end up wasting 15 minutes of the lesson. But unfortunately for us, he fails to remember what stories he has told. We have literally heard the same stories about eight times. Each 15 minute stories. Do you know what that is like to hear the same damn story for 15 minutes, the same word for word? I mean, the guy must rehearse the damn things.
Even worse he managed to repeat a story twice in the same lesson without even realising.
Yup, I am soooo gonna fail.
In high school I was taking a World Literature class and we were reading a book (don’t remember the title) that was originally written in Spanish. There was a scene where the main character put on his “morning clothes”, as in clothes you wear between sunrise and noon. The teacher made a big deal about the morning/mourning symbolism, and the fact that the character was full of grief because of something that had happened, etc. One of the students who was fluent in Spanish pointed out that morning and mourning are not homonyms in Spanish. The teacher replied “It doesn’t matter!” He was utterly convinced that the author had intentionally put in some symbolism that could only be seen by translating the book into another language. Idiot.
I had a professor at Washington State, back in about 1985, professor Goff. The man taught something resembling the History of Science (I forget the exact class title) for the honors program. Well, what he was, was history teacher who wanted to be a math teacher. So when we studied, say, Einstein’s theory of relativity, he would chalk all the equations up on the board really fast as he explained how it worked. Then when test time came around - you know the kind you write in a blue book - we had to “explain Einstein’s theory of relativity, and show your work.” Well hell, I couldn’t do the math. I couldn’t even BEGIN to do the math. I failed the history test because I couldn’t do the math. So then I went to talk to him, and he suggested rather awkwardly that I ought to take ‘remedial math for women’. After all, hadn’t I read the class description in the flyer? It did say “Ability to do algebra required.”
I dropped his class. I actually walked out in the middle of a test when I looked at the questions, burst into tears, and couldn’t deal with it anymore (first class I ever dropped, but not the last). I took the damned ‘remedial math’ class, which was actually ‘how to hate men’ - excuse me, ‘feminist theory in America’ - alternated with ‘how to write your problems on graph paper so numbers don’t get lost’. And for the rest of my time at WSU, every time we ran into each other on campus, he ALWAYS would say “Ah, miss Armstrong, how’s the…ah, how’s the math?”
I had an Irish History lecturer who used to do the same thing. He’d mention a place name and then he’d say something like “I remember the time I got really drunk there with a bishop” and then tell us the whole story. He had quite a collection of these drinking stories - he must have been on boozing terms with every member of the Catholic clergy in Ireland!!!
Remedial Math for Women? This is an actual course? Am I being wooshed? I’m confused.
English lesson.
In a projected slide on the screen: “… stadia found in ruins of …”
Teacher: Oops, it seems there’s a spelling error there.
Me: It’s the plural of Stadium.
Teacher: Oh. Is it?
:dubious:
No no. That’s what HE called it. It wasn’t the “official” title of the class, that I can recall. Though the subtitle was something similar. Maybe it’s what the professors called it among themselves. But yes, that’s what it was - it was a math class for women who, perhaps because they were taught math as I was, by male teachers who only knew one way to do a problem, and therefore didn’t know any alternative ways to explain it. I did learn things in that class - the value of writing problems neatly (thus the graph paper) and that there are many ways to do math, and if you can’t understand it when explained one way, find somebody to explain it a different way. Alas, the feminist theory stuff made me leave class once a week angry at every man alive. I got over that when I realised that the young men I went to school with were NOT the “oppressors”, they were just students like me. I have no idea why I couldn’t get the math without the ‘how to hate men’.
The real irony of the ‘history of science’ class is that I understood the history. It was just that I couldn’t understand Einstein’s math. And some of the folks in class who had taken calculus were struggling with it too. Man, I had no chance. I didn’t need “remedial math for women”, I needed a professor with a clue about how to teach his actual subject. He didn’t teach the math either, you know, he just jotted it onto the board and expected us to understand it, while he rambled off into anti-Catholic jokes and off-color humor. How he got to be a professor in the honors program is still beyond me.
Isn’t stadia the Latin plural of stadium? Why would an English teacher be expected to know that?
Or am I wrong and is stadia the English plural too?