I remember in High School, my Sophmore English Teacher misquoted Shakespeare. “Alas Poor Yorick, I knew him well.”
I raised my hand and Offered “I think you’ll find that line is ‘Alas Poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio.’”
I immediately got a barrage of “I’m the teacher, and how dare you, etc.”
I knew I was right, but I meekly Offered nothing more. I hope she looked it up after class, it was never mentioned again, but it did sour my view of her competency.
For what it’s worth, I corrected my teachers on a number of occasions all through school. The one that stands out in my mind, for some reason, goes all the way back to sixth grade.
I came in one morning, and the previous evening the teacher (Mr… um… thinking… oh yeah, Lester) had apparently spent some time redecorating, because there was a new display on the front bulletin board. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I do remember that the headline, across the top of the board, made in big letters obviously laboriously hand-cut out of construction paper, was “The <Something> Effect,” referring to some science principle we were about to begin studying. Except, of course, that he had spelled it “affect.”
For the first half hour, I remember not paying attention in class, simply staring at that display and trying to determine if he meant what he had done, and that he was using the noun “affect(ation)” in a weird way, or if in fact it was an error as it seemed to be.
Finally I decided to ask. During a period when we were supposed to be reading quietly, I raised my hand and asked Mr. Lester to come over. In a whisper, I referred to the display and suggested that “affect” should be “effect.” He frowned at me, so I opened my desk – I remember this part clearly – and pulled out my personal Webster’s Collegiate. While he looked over my shoulder, I looked up the two words and verified the definitions as I remembered them. He didn’t really say anything (other than a muttered “okay, thanks,” before walking away), but the next day it was fixed. Nothing was ever said about it again.
I suspect it went as well as it did because I kept it quiet and didn’t call anyone else’s attention to it. Had I asked more loudly, or God forbid in front of everybody, it might have gotten ugly. I already wasn’t especially popular with most of the teachers at that school; my parents had had a couple of run-ins with the principal regarding policies of treatment for advanced students, and I myself was kind of a smart-alecky know-it-all. (What do they say about early formation of personalities?) Publicly correcting a teacher would have been a significant Career Limiting Move, I think.
So yeah, based on my experience, I agree that the approach of finding him after class, alone, and saying in a nonthreatening manner, “That Big Bang thing was a joke, right?” and then generally proceeding with the assumption that he was formulating a witticism that was too arcane for the class to grasp, is probably the best bet.
Ah ha.
I use ‘I think you’ll find’ to mean ‘you are definitely wrong.’ Used in front of a class, this could easily be construed as challenging / hostile.
It’s not a big point, so should be sorted out discreetly.
You might even get credit for knowing the right answer.
Just one minor nitpick: What Daoloth’s teacher was presenting was not the panspermia hypothesis. According to panspermia, the life was already alive when it arrived here, but the idea we’re discussing here is just that the raw materials and impetus came from space, but that the origin of life itself was here. The first part is hardly contested by anyone: At least some of the raw materials almost certainly did come from space, albeit probably on many small impacts, not one big one. The energy sources I’ve usually heard for the reactions are sunlight and lightning, but I suppose it’s plausible that an impact could serve the same purpose.
As an aside, most good teachers actually like it when students correct them: I had an English teacher, for instance, who would give bonus points when we corrected his grammar (didn’t happen often, though). The risk here is that this biology teacher isn’t a good teacher, and won’t appreciate the correction. Decide for yourself if it’s worth it.
Thi is heading towards IMHO, but, anyway. While standing up there in front of 50 people it is very easy to mis-speak, which students often don’t realize. Remebering 50-90 minutes of information and keeping it arranged in the right order in your head is, believe it or not, harder than staying awake for that length of time. Likely yer teacher just, as has been suggested, has a brain fart.
On the other hand, if this really was a mistake, I again would suggest diplomacy in sharing it. Especially in high school discipline is important (high school to some degree is day-care for 16 year olds, face it), and it is very hard to keep a room of 30 adolescents from breaking into complete anarchy without complete control. Although you are clearly highly intellegent and above all this mere cattle-like obedience and rigor, keep in mind what the effect even temporarily undermining the teacher’s authority will have on the less evolved members of your class. Enabling the teacher to note at the start of the next class "after last time I realised that I had mis-spoken. . . " will be fine. If you insist on doing the job publicly yourself it will be trouble and also demonstrate that your ego is as over-developed and needing attention as the teacher who would refuse to be corrected. Always remember when asking a question of a teacher in class to first ask youself if it is actually something you are confused about, whether having it answered would do more damage than good to the other kids (and perhaps you should ask it at their office hours instead-- is it something that is very complicated, or is it something that you are interested in but not vital to the course and will suck up class time in debate that only you and the teacher care about?), and whether you are asking a question simply to make sure that you look awake and terrible clever to everyone else around.
I know all too well how easy it is for a teacher to misspeak, as I do it often myself, albeit in minor ways. Although I usually catch myself immediately, I appreciate polite corrections when I do not; the last thing I want to do is impart false information.
That having been said, this teacher’s error doesn’t sound to me like a slip of the tongue. He was, after all shifting from one discipline to another, and there is no similar layman’s term for the theory he was describing. It also seems hard to believe that he could be so strangely misinformed about his own subject. Has he demonstrated gross incompetence before? Is he not actually a science teacher?
One other possibility has occurred to me. Is it possible he said something like, “We’ll call this the 'Big Bang Theory.” or “I call this the 'Big Bang Theory.” If so, he may have been using an unfortunately chosen shorthand term to help students distinguish the various theories.
Whatever the case, the best course of action would be to approach him after class and say, “I’m a little confused. The other day you mentioned the big bang theory. I’ve heard of the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, but I’ve never heard it applied to biology. Are they two different theories?”
Does there remain a General Question here?
You know what? This isn’t a minor nitpick. It’s important, given that we are arguing that the teacher was assigning the wrong name to this theory. Mea culpa; it isn’t panspermia, but a subset of it which says that amino acids and the like fell to Earth in meteorites. The strong panspermia (for lack of a better term) is that life came to Earth full blown in meteorites.
Even so, I still don’t see any real evidence for this; amino acids form pretty easily, on Earth and in space, so there’s no real support for the idea that the seeds of life here came from out there.
The English teacher I had as a senior refused to believe that “West Side Story” was based on “Romeo & Juliet”!