Oh, and I make it a point of pride to admit my ignorance or to apologize at basically every opportunity, because I value honesty over self-aggrandizement.
Everyone hates a liar, even a subliminal one who makes it seem like you’re stupid (like my principal).
I just moved my brother to Kansas where there was plenty of lightning, and I was reminded of the urban myth that there is one second for every mile of distance between you and the flash.
“So, you think that sound travels at 3600 miles an hour?” What is the color of the sky in your world?
I hate unthinking memes.
One day, the teacher was explaining phosphorescence and there was an error in his diagram. The diagram had horizontal lines (representing energy levels) and arrows which represented changes in energy; most arrows had only one point (as should be) but one had two. He explained about half the arrows before asking “any questions?”
I asked “excuse me, but shouldn’t the fourth arrow have a single point, the one up?” My classmates nodded, as pretty much every single one had seen it too.
He stared at me.
Stared at the diagram.
Stared at me.
Stared at the other students.
Stared at the diagram.
Asked “which arrow?”
“The one with two points, the fourth one.”
“Which fourth one?”
… I don’t want to bore you to tears, but the conversation lasted more than fifteen minutes before he finally said “oh, I don’t know. I’ll check it with the book.” The book from which he’d photocopied it onto the transparency. Right.
What stunned me and told me I definitely did not want to pick me as my graduate advisor is that, yes, the class was a 4xx course and it was about his field of study! It was the equivalent of an organic chemist not remembering the atomic weight of C.
Where are you getting that she was educated in Asia?
Didn’t say she was. Sorry, it was just kind of obvious from where I am in the world that her story was set in the US: if she were in Asia, she probably would have had to make a public apology to the teacher and when she got home her parents would have thrashed her within an inch of her life. Kids shouldn’t be arrogant, the thinking goes, and especially not girls.
Just thought I’d throw that out so y’all could feel better about your own school experiences.
So it’s the opposite of me:
“You’re going to believe someone you hardly know because he has a marker and a white board? How many time shares are you going to buy? I’m not omniscient, especially while having to talk and explain while writing. If I can’t do this subject on the fly, that only reinforces your need to study! I teach the dumb class, and I make mistakes! Speak up if you see something wrong! Grow out of your elementary school submission!”
Doesn’t it go so far as not being allowed to ask basic questions when you’re genuinely confused without doing it quietly, in private, after class, layered with apologies? At least that’s what I heard it was like in some parts of China (where my teacher who grew up there came from).
That probably varies with the teacher and school. In the same school and year I had teachers who treated any question as “a challenge to their authority” and others who loved questions. My parents considered that it was more important for us to learn to respect authority than to learn the actual gradable subjects (or rather, that if we weren’t learning the subject it absolutely had to be because we weren’t lazy and not because of a lack of explanations - all teachers are good at teaching, all teachers are correct, all teachers have the students’ best interests at heart at all times), many other parents didn’t (they were still more likely to side with the teacher, though). That was in Spain, starting during Franco’s dictatorship and going through the years of “the transition (to democracy).”
My parents never questioned a punishment from a teacher. They didn’t even ask “what did you do?”, as a matter of fact they didn’t want to hear it. But they were in a diminishing minority, their style had been much more common in prior generations. You still run into parents with that attitude when the child is the first one in the family to reach his current educational level, but in this case I attribute to the parents being afraid to admit that they feel over their heads; my mother was a teacher…
Last quarter, my chemistry final had a typo on it. After trying to work out the reaction a few times, I told Dr. G that something was wrong with it, and he didn’t believe me. (I’m one of the smarter people in the class, and he likes watching me struggle, because sometimes I miss the forest for the trees.) Then, when another one of his A students brought the same thing to his attention, he realized something might actually be amiss. So he double-checked. Yup - he had made a subscript error when writing out the test. After changing the 2 to a 3, I was able to figure it out quickly. Only two of us saw that there was an error. Everyone else just gave up.
(Please note, I’m really not trying to sound brilliant or anything. This is basically high school level chemistry being taught at a technical college where we’re all getting 2-year AS degrees.)
My social studies teacher in 5th grade, once started making fun of a photo in our text book. It had a picture of a tree frog, with a caption that said something like “(some specieis) tree frog in it’s native home of (some place)”. I don’t know why there was a photo of a tree frog in our social studies book. The teacher was like “Tree frog? Who ever heard of a frog that lives in a tree?” I told him that not only were tree frogs real, my cousin had one as a pet. He refused to believe either me or the text book that there was such a thing as tree frogs, because “frogs have to stay wet”, and there’s no water in trees.
My senior year in high school I was in a calculus class. One day another kid had a question about the homework that had been assigned the previous day and was supposed to have been done before this day’s class. The teacher began working the problem on the board, and at some point was required to take the derivative of an expression. I noted that the problem could be simplified somewhat if the constant was left out of the expression. He argued no, I argued yes, and then he asked if I had done the homework. I had to admit that no, I had not, at which point he spent a couple of minutes berating me in front of the class for my lack of effort. In my embarrassment, I dropped the issue, and he did the problem his way. It was not until the next day - in private, NOT in front of the class as his tirade was - that he admitted that I was in fact correct.
I had an English teacher grade me down on a piece of descriptive writing because I used the word “behemoth” to refer to a large suitcase I had been dragging around all day. She had never heard the word (!), and rather than look it up, she just marked it wrong.
Not in all dialects, but it can. Merriam-Webster lists three pronunciations (for American English): essentially, Febbawary, Febyuary, and February. The last is a spelling pronunciation, etymologically correct and correct through usage but certainly no better than the others. A kindergarten teacher might be forgiven for trying to impose a single standard and not confusing five-year-olds with the messy reality of language variation. (In my elementary school, we were forced to say “Feb-roo-ary,” even though the local pronunciation was “Feb-yoo-ary.”)
Everyone I know says it as “Feb-yoo-airry”.
In high school physics class, the teacher told us that a radio used the same amount of electricity no matter what the volume was. Rather than challenge him on it, my friend and I sat at our desks sketching out a giant boombox that could be used to generate electricity for New York City.
I was in 5th grade and we were doing some section on countries. I picked England, and included a flag of England with my report.
My teacher marked me off, saying I’d gotten the flag wrong. I told my mother (born and raised in England) who came in and showed the teacher the encyclopedia where I was right and she was wrong.
Miss B was quite gracious and admitted right out front she was mistaken and fixed my grade.
Where are you from, then? I’ll admit that when I am talking a bit fast, I say feb-yooary sometimes, but it is definitely wrong.
Something I have taught my older son - if you think the teacher is wrong, wait and check. Then go to the teacher in private to show why and where. There is little value in pointing out errors in a public forum where the natural defense is to attack, and you can be “right” later in a private meeting, allowing the person of authority to maintain their control.
Then again, I chose my undergraduate school partly based on the response of a professor to a challenge. I sat down in the class to observe. The prof walked in and started with this: “Jim and I had an argument about (something). He was right, I was wrong.” He then handed the student a 6 pack of Heineken. The perfect response.
The example that comes to mind is one where the teacher’s intent was correct but their execution of it got mucked up…well, by me.
Freshman year, High School Wood Shop (does that even still exist? we rotated through wood shop, sheet metal, welding/smithing and plastics shop - standard public high school in Northern California…).
Anyway, this teacher is trying to make the point that we MUST measure things carefully - smart, no? Unfortunately, crotchedy stereotype that he was, he says something like “and since you pimply-faced losers will blow it otherwise, you better measure stuff twice - none of you can get the widths of pieces of wood like this correct” gesturing to a couple of squares of wood propped on the little chalk shelf at the base of the blackboard.
I, from the back of the room, a good 20+ feet away, squint one eye and say “okay - the left one is 3 3/4” and the other is 4 1/2" The teacher kinda snorts and, laughing at me, grabs a tape measure and says some sorta Okay Mr. Smart Guy type of thing…
I was right on both. 
He basically made waffley, grumbly, blustery noises for a sec and then reasserted the basic point - measure stuff to be sure. And yeah, he was right, but he totally undercut his own credibility…
From m-w.com:
It is not wrong, it is simply not your dialect. Words shift over time; if you say **bird **instead of brid, **an apron **instead of a napron, and various other things, you’re not allowed to complain when people don’t pronounce the first r in February.
