To my great annoyance, one of the EFL textbooks I teach from contained an article about translation problems in advertising that repeated the Nova, Pepsi, and Gerber urban legends. I felt obligated to explain to my students that none of these stories were true, although unfortunately this may not have been the best thing to do as far as English language instruction goes. They were having a difficult enough time understanding the article without being told it was all wrong anyway.
Ha! I made some dangerous enemies correcting teachers in grade school through highschool. I learned eventually that a teacher’s ego was often greater than his desire to fight ignorance, but by then my nickname had become Correcto. This rhymed vaguely with my last name and was initiated by my 7th grade science teacher. You believe that? A teacher urging his students to taunt and ridicule another student.
I’m not a parent, but a relative of mine said that his grandkids had to do a model of a mission. I didn’t get to see the model, just heard about it, so I don’t know how it portrayed the interaction between NA’s and Europeans.
You use algebra whenever you buy groceries. “If sturmhauke has $10 to buy milk, and the prices are $4.59 per gallon, $2.89 per half gallon, and $1.79 per quart, what is the maximum amount of milk he can buy?” It’s nothing more than a bunch of rules for applying arithmetic to real problems.
It is official. I am a maths idiot (well ok just idiot).
At least I know why my groceries cost so much now!
Pricegal’s first grade teacher told her that Martin Luther was Santa Claus.
Goodness. Why accuse the teacher of lying?
I certainly acknowledge that there is often a competence problem that perpetuates itself. And when that is combined with ego problems, the result is disasterous for children who challenge the teacher. But I doubt seriously that many teachers deliberately lie to their students.
<snip>
The teacher wasn’t teaching the old way of thinking because it was “easier” to teach. She explained that she was teaching it because she knew that the state was going to be testing on the old model and not the new. Maybe she wanted her students to be able to pass the test. Maybe she was required by the state to teach that model. Maybe she was as disgusted with what the state was doing as you were. At least she had the intellectual integrity to let you know that the old model was wrong and how to do the math for the correct version.
Of course teachers should be open to correction when they are mistaken. There is no excuse for not being willing to look at contradictory information. Teachers should encourage students to catch them in mistakes. That doesn’t mean that the teacher has to accept every argument to the contrary. (The teacher should have allowed the student to present evidence to the class about the other presidents before Washington and then he or she should have explained how these titles were different from “President of the United States” and then let the class discuss whether the others should be considered.
I suspect that the student who was temporarily “expelled” wasn’t ousted because he disagreed with the teacher. After all, he continued to disagree and was allowed to return. Maybe it was the way in which he disagreed. Most likely, the disagreement had become disruptive and rude. A better teacher could have handled it differently. I doubt that the student was perfectly innocent. And certainly the teacher shouldn’t have demanded that he retract his statement.
Pussycow, my problems with Jane Pittman were just the opposite. I was the teacher who was aware that the movie was not a documentary and that the book was a work of fiction. My students were quite certain that she was a real person because the title of the book was The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. They knew what an autobiography was and therefore it couldn’t be fiction. It was very difficult to convince them that they were mistaken. I think I finally got a copy of the book to show them.
I support both competency testing for teachers and high standards for student conduct.
Now. You retract that statement about teachers lying or I’ll…I’ll…I’ll just have to suck it up, I guess.
Meanwhile, they had a lockdown at my old school last week (the first week of school). Man with a gun in the building. I assume he was out of the building before they locked it. God, I love retirement…
Wait’ll you hear that the actual line of the song is, “Go see Cal.”
Then you’ll really be disappointed.
Oh! Tell me about it!!
I only learned the truth about that one last month!!
I guess my beef is not with teachers, it’s with the books. The books are supposed to be written by experts and are supposed to be accurate (propoganda not withstanding). The teachers *should[/] know, but if they were taught misinformation, then of course they’re not gonna get it right either.
No kidding! Me, too! By any chance, did you grow up in Berkeley?
Dammit! Lib beat me to it!
[Devil’s advocate]
And yet, most of us are here because we believe what Cecil says, hook, line, and sinker. Or does he not count as “authority”?
[/DA]
No, when Cecil says something that sounds like it might be totally or partially wrong, I’ll check that out, too. But he’s right so often that I don’t feel too bad about just accepting most of what he says on faith. And if one of my kids had a teacher that was right 99% of the time, I guess they’d pretty much trust that teacher, too. After all, you can’t be a cynic all the time; you wouldn’t have enough time left over to drink coffee 
.
Words of wisdom. :: ssssssip :: Aaaaah.
Sometimes we students are successful in educating our teachers.
Back in grade 9 science class we were doing a unit on astronomy. We had this activity sheet that showed the life cycle of the sun. It had entirely skipped the red giant phase of stellar life, showing just the sun as a black dwarf. I pointed this out to the teacher and she asked me if I had some cites. The next day I brought in a couple of my astronomy books, she looked at them and concluded that I was indeed correct and that the sheets are in error. In the next lesson, she stated that the sun would turn into a red giant and engulf the earth and that she had no idea how they missed that on the activity sheets.
We got along pretty well and I knew she had a real interest in science, so I suspect that’s why she was so good about it.
Oh, and at least in my in highschool, we were taught the “proper” model of the atom. The teacher actually started off by saying “many times in school you are taught things that aren’t quite correct…here is one of those cases…” 
I just borrowed this from a friend yesterday. Ever read A differetn Kind of Teacher by John Taylor Gatto, or any other books essays of his? It makes a point of how the purpose of public schools isn’t to educate us, but to dumb us down and make the masses easier to control.
Oh, I always thought it was “Pussycow” too! DangerDad, who can sing many Cal Worthington lyrics, finally cleared it up for me. 
Wait, lemme guess…you kept badgering that teacher about what constitutes scientific discovery and what doesn’t? 
I agree we may go over the top, but I think the idea is that we trust him because when we check he’s generally right, he seems to retract or explain when disargeed with, and don’t follow him blindly – he explains how he found something, and if you want to you can check it out for yourself.