It’s a well-known novel in Canada - it was on our Grade 11 English curriculum when I went to school, for example.
Yep. About the same in Ontario when I went to school.
No, but your OP did not tell us that is how it was.
Incidentally, are you sure the quotation is not from a speech made by the character Atticus Finch? If so, the error is no more than a typo.
Writes it in the sense of composes it, yes, but that does not mean that they physically type out the fair copy for duplication. The prof might very well just have told the minion “Oh, and put in this quotation from TKAM” (points at highlighted section in book).
OK. But Wiki tells me that TKAM was not published until 1960. It will have taken several more years for it to become common on U.S. high school syllabi, and almost certainly longer for Canada. Do we know how long ago this professor went to high school?
I apologize for all the mistakes I have made: for past mistakes, mistakes I’m making right now, and all the mistakes I will be making in the future.
[bow]
[exit]
It might well have been. Regrettably, the presentation actually reads “Abicus Finch, Author, To Kill A Mockingbird.”
He is about 40-45 years old, and so would have gone to school at more or less the same time as I did. And indeed, TKAM was on the syllabus when I attended school. It’s the go-to novel for that age group.
I just wanted to provide people to opportunity to tell funny stories, but if you want to seriously investigate this claim, really, there’s no excuse. The error was egregious. He did the PowerPoint himself, he’s young enough to be aware of the novel and educated enough to know he should check on such things, and the presentation is rife with errors, typos, and things that are just flat out incoherent, so frankly it’s indicative of either his remarkable (for his position)( lack of brainpower or his cavalier attitude towards his work.
Let’s get back to funny stories about hilarious errors made by college profs.
It’s extremely well known in the UK too. Harper Lee won a Pulitzer for the damn thing. That sort of thing is basic general knowledge for the educated, IMO.
What subject does the prof teach?
Nobody expects a professor to know everything. But we expect them to know the subject of the course they are teaching.
I don’t expect every professor to know about everything, they’re supposed to set the example. When your professor makes spelling and grammar errors, it is detrimental the students’ faith in him or her.
And geez, even if you’re not a professor, if you’re going to quote something from a book, at least get the character’s name right! That goes for anyone.
Well, that is the thing really. It is not at all apparent from RickJay’s OP that TKAM is the subject, or even a large part of the subject of the course that is being taught. If that is in fact the case then this is something a lot worse than than the “dumb” and funny mistake that RickJay presented it as. It is evidence of serious professional incompetence or dereliction, and, to me, no laughing matter at all. (And I doubt that the cause of problem is dumbness: it seems much more likely to be arrogance or extreme laziness.) If this guy is teaching a course on TKAM, and he does not know or care who wrote it, he is cheating his students and deserves to be fired. Even if the immediate responsibility for introducing the error belongs to a typist (perhaps working from dictation or notes) the professor has still been very negligent in letting the error slip through, and I do not think it is funny.
However, since RickJay apparently introduced this as something humorous (and he reaffirms that that was his intention in post #25), I inferred that the reference to TKAM was in the nature of an aside or an epigraph, a semi-serious sidelight on course material that was really concerned with something quite different: race relations, or American history, or psychology, or even possibly chemistry or mechanical engineering, or, indeed, almost anything apart from 20th century American literature. Professors sometimes do put asides like that into syllabus material to try to lighten the mood a bit, and I can see how certain sorts of errors in material like that might sometimes be taken as humorously “dumb.” If, for instance, a middle aged professor tries to seem “with it” by making a reference to contemporary pop culture, but gets something that is very well known to his students quite wrong, that might well be funny. However, I do not really see not knowing the author of TKAM as falling into that sort of category. To me it just seems like an everyday, boring sort of error, like someone getting a Jeopardy question wrong, but YMMV I guess. I agree with Agent Foxtrot that it is bad form, lazy and disrespectful to the students, to get something like that wrong on a course handout, but I don’t see it as funny or as particularly “dumb.”
But, to repeat, if this is indeed for a course largely about TKAM, or about 20th century American literature, or literature at all really, then, if the error is entirely the professor’s fault, the error is not dumb or funny, it is scandalous; if the error was introduced by a typist, it is just sad that the prof was too lazy to check the typists work (and did not instruct them clearly enough).
I had a freshman-level Sociology professor who was a pretty big dope. After class one day, a student asked him what was the specific name of the Supreme Court case that we’d been discussing that day. He fumbled a bit, then rallied and responded confidently: “Brown vs. the Supreme Court.”
Ok, he really should know the name of the case, but, whatever, I’d be willing to give him a pass; we all have forgetful days and curious gaps in our knowledge. But “versus the Supreme Court”? That suggests he has basically no idea how the Court (or any court) functions, despite being a professor of sociology.
This same professor also tried to impress us on the first day of class by telling this story, in the first person. If I’d known at the time that he was lying I just would have dropped the course…
This is pretty much how I see it. The OP made it clear that the subject didn’t just happen to come up. It wasn’t a chemistry class where some student raised his hand and asked the professor a question about To Kill a Mockingbird. It appeared on a handout that the professor had prepared before the class started. This was something he came up with with full foreknowledge of what he was saying. So not only was he ignorant, he was apparently overconfident enough that he didn’t bother checking to see if he was ignorant.
And in my opinion, that makes him even stupider than somebody who just doesn’t know the facts. A person who doesn’t know something is at least aware of his ignorance. A person who’s sure he knows something that he doesn’t isn’t even aware of his own ignorance. The former can attempt to fix the problem; the latter isn’t aware the problem exists.