Have you ever had a teacher tell you something wrong?

I always find it amusing when teachers or professors ask opinion questions and proceed to tell you you’re wrong. Your reasoning may be wrong, your premise may be wrong, but it’s you’re opinion – they may disagree with it but when stated as your opinion it can’t be wrong.

Back to your question, the one time I realized it and it stuck with me, I spoke up and was thrown out of class for it. I was let back in the next week, but the professor never responded to any question or raised hand of mine again.

In my world civilization class in college, I had a weird teacher who gave us wrong info all the time. I didn’t know anything about it so I never corrected him but some of the other students would correct him and he’d be so embarressed that he’d turn red. He would stutter and not know what to say. It was pretty sad and we used to laugh at him which made it worse. It was very funny

When my teachers are wrong at my school, a lot of students jump to show them they’re wrong. I wish I would speak up about some things, but I’m too shy. I always regret that I didn’t though. I’ve never had an obnoxious teacher tell me I was wrong though.

One of my most vivid memories is of a kindergarten teacher telling me, after looking at one of my drawings, that I had drawn the person “wrong,” legs and arms don’t come out of the head. Had she been absent that day, I might be have gone on to become another Picasso.

I have always loved travel and geography. I went to college to earn an Associates Degree to become a travel agent. My instructor for world geography was very clueless. She was a travel agent for the local hockey team at the time, and I believe the college was just in desperate need for someone to teach the class.

We were discussing the worlds largest reefs. She mentioned the reef off the coast of Belize. She told the class that it was called The Great Barrier Reef. I told her that was the reef off the coast of Australia. She corrected me by telling the class that all reefs are called The Great Barrier Reef. I really wanted my college tuition back at that moment.

I had a teacher tell me I wasn’t ever going to make it in the real world at a good job. I now have a career purchasing top level money items for the whole US at my company.

“Look at me now b$&@h!” jk

We were on a field trip to the zoo when I was in middle school. One of the zoo volunteers was holding an echidna so we could all have a close look. The teacher described the echidna as being a marsupial, which it isn’t. I politely raised my hand and said, “You mean monotreme, right? Marsupials have pouches, but echidnas lay eggs.” The teacher became very annoyed with me and insisted it was a marsupial. I knew I was right but didn’t say anything else. As the class was moving away, the zoo volunteer said to me, “Monotreme was right, you know.” I wanted to say, “Why didn’t you speak up earlier, woman?!” I watched a lot of nature documentaries as a kid.

Another time, in grade school, we were going over our spelling words for the week when I raised my hand to ask the teacher about the word extraordinary. I wanted to know why the word didn’t mean “more ordinary than usual” instead of “out of the ordinary.” I said that if something was extra ordinary it should be really boring, not special. The teacher and the entire class just stared at me. The teacher didn’t even try to answer, just went back to the lesson. That stupid word bothered me until high school when I had to learn Latin roots for an anatomy class. Now I realize my teacher probably didn’t know the etymology of the word extraordinary. It would have been nice if she’d just admitted that and maybe helped me find a way to look it up instead of just ignoring the question.

I remember it was a math question when I was in 3rd grade. I was at an after school place headed by another teacher. I asked her if my math problem was right, and she said no. she said I was off by 1 number. So I did it again, I scribbled out my answer and redid it. She said it was wrong. So, I scribbled it out again (no eraser). I kept getting the same answer, and she kept getting her answer. By the third time, she was very pissed that I kept doing it wrong over and over again and I was pissed because she kept telling me it was wrong after I checked over my math numerous times. So, by now the page was scribbled with pencil marks making little tears in the page from the pencil tip that had been pressed down so hard on it that there were dents on the next few pages. So, I just gave up with asking her. The next day I went to school and I read aloud my answer. Guess what? It was wrong! Just what I needed. To this day, I’m not mad that the teacher from after school care was wrong and said I was wrong, but rather at the frustration that I had to go through. Well, I guess I’m still a little mad at the teacher, but now I’m just pissed that 2 people ended up yelling at me for an answer that I knew was right.

On the other hand… I had an English Lit prof who told me he loved my writing and encouraged me to go to New York and pursue it. I did, and it changed my life !!! Like in all professions, there’s good ‘uns and not-so-good ‘uns, and how fortunate we are to have good teachers along the way.

In retrospect, yes! Oh to be able to go back in time to the precise moment when the smug, arrogant, pretentious look was gloriously wiped from his face….well he had it coming, if only.

Once when I was in high school I was competing in College Bowl. The question was “How many eyes does a flounder have?” I hit the bell first and answered “Two!” The judges (aka the teachers) said “No, flounders only have one eye.” Thus I lost the point for our team, and we lost the overall match by one point.

The next day, when it was too late to affect the outcome, I was finally able to convince the teachers that flounders do indeed have two eyes. However, in adult flounders one eye migrates to the opposite side so both eyes are on the same side of the body. However, the other team went on to the next level, even though the error was in judging and not made by the contestants.

And no, I don’t hold grudges. ~

I had an World Lit prof who one day told us that Edgar Allen Poe was British. Well Edgar Allen Poe is hardly obscure enough for me not to know something about him and among the things I do know about him is that he was American. A Bostonian to be precise. His story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” is even based on actual events that went down it the nearby state of New Jersey.

I had known since the first day the the prof was particularly bad. Nails on a chalk board bad. But after that I never trusted another “fact” he told us. If he didn’t know really basic facts in his field of expertise I wasn’t about to trust anything he said on the matter, big or small.

my teacher told me: “New York is the capital of USA” late 80’s early 90’s at my school in spain.

if you mean things i said or did that was wrong, every day.

Did you happen to tell her that Jesus IS God?

I had to sit through years of professors yakking on about evolution and leftist propaganda. Knowing that they were set in their ways, I found it easiest to just let them ramble and try to do well on tests. I would strike back in my papers.

@Nullo So good you answered twice!

@ucme
I did? I suppose I just did.

I was in the school library one day. A student who is mentally challenged was being helped on a paper by a teacher, and when he asked how to spell “shoveled,” she told him it was spelled “S-H-E-V-E-L-E-D.” Numerous times. I didn’t even do anything about it, and I sort of felt bad.:S

@Nullo Went as quickly as it appeared.

I went to catholic grade school. Virtually everything they taught about religion was wrong, even in the catholic sense.

They then went on to justify the Crusades but never mentioned the Inquisition.

Well this is an open-ended question so any answer is right. Maybe she misinterpreted what you drew such that she thought you were deliberately drawing Jesus not someone that looked like him, and didn’t think you were being creative or that you were mocking the assignment. Still, rather than berate you she should have turned this interesting interpretation of the assignment into a thoughtful discussion, and then she would have realized her mistake.

He was a relatively young teacher and I thought he was good. He didn’t really berate but I felt like he quit arguing when he felt he was losing to a high school freshman. I never really got a reason why he kicked me out except that he said that we would never agree and it would be better for me to spend my time elsewhere.

We had a subsitute teacher for about 3 months. He taught us how the Electorial College worked, and got it completely wrong. He came back later, and told us that he taught us wrong information, and I swear, its the only thing I remember him teaching us. And it was wrong.

I was in a Contemporary Issues class in highschool, and nearly everything the teacher said was wrong, hyperbolic, or an outright lie. I called her out on it every single time too.

That the 17th century was in the 1700’s.

I can’t seem to think of a specific example, but I’m sure it’s happened. I’ve corrected teachers before, of course, usually in math or something that involved either geography or pronunciation, my strongest strengths. But I’ve never debated with a teacher over whether something was wrong or not.

Actually, a couple days ago, I had a professor tell me something wrong (it had to do with SOV and SVO word order or something, I don’t even remember), but when I corrected him and he corrected me back, I just assumed I had been wrong. But then a minute later, he realized he was wrong and he was like “I apologize, you were absolutely right”.

@fundevogel

I thought Edgar Allen Poe was British my entire life up until last year or so. He just seemed like a British Gothic fiction author. It was surprising to find out that he was from Massachusetts.

@filmfann At least he owned up to it. That’s showing more integrity than most of the teachers mentioned here.

@DominicX I won’t hold it against you. I learned that in highschool the first time I read the Fall of the House of Usher for class. Fittingly enough that’s the story we read for the college Lit class that the prof effed up. It is one of the only times my shoddy Florida education could stand tall next to the quality of education at my college, but just because this prof took it down to that level.

yes. my teacher is an idiot.

I had a science teacher try to tell me that the moon is invisible during the day. I proved her wrong.

@fundevogel Say what? Edgar Allen Poe is American? Erm… Oops.. [/embarrassed]

As for me, I’ve had teachers call me out on the existence of a word or two when I was writing short essays. One teacher I had didn’t know that the word “crevasse” was real. She circled it and put “Don’t you mean ‘crevice’”?. Well, I didn’t. I meant “crevasse” and told her so. I’m not sure whether she saw that she was wrong.

To be fair to her though, she did show me that the term “betterness” didn’t exist. I had lifted that out from a song title. Taught me that sometimes songs just can’t be trusted for good English.

My worst problem was questions that have more than one correct answer, and it turns out to be guess what I’m thinking. I had one teacher ask us to name a type of cloud. I said cumulus, and she said no, that’s not it. She was thinking of cirrus, but instead of saying yes, I was correct, she said I was wrong. This same teacher once said Mississippi is hard to spell. “Can you spell that?” I said t – h – a – t and she got very angry at me for being a smart alek. (and you didn’t think I have a sense of humor).

I also used to get in trouble for answering too specifically. I was supposed to tell my favorite color, and when I said lavendar she said you mean purple.

@YARNLADY Your teachers sound like hardasses. I’m glad there was a shift away from such rigid teaching to friendlier methods, but I suppose some people never got the memo.

Many times. And I have corrected them when I have caught it. And as a teacher myself, I appreciate it when my students correct me as we all learn.

Wish I corrected my teachers when that happened, but nooooo some of them dislike you for it because on their standards it’s “disrespectful” mmhmmm

I think this letter, regardless of it’s origin, says it all.

My English teacher in 6th grade told me American English is not real English. Real English would only be spoken in Great Britain.

@mattbrowne Was she British? Or did she just watch “My Fair Lady” too many times?

@mattbrowne That is an interesting thing to tell a class. In what sense was it intended? If your teacher was talking about pronunciations, figures of speech, and all the little nuances that contribute to the communication of a particular social group, then you must ask which part of Great Britain? These vary between localities.
If they were only referring to spelling though, then the point is somewhat valid, in that Americans have their own distorted spelling rules that originated relatively recently (~200 years) for no apparent reason. But then the question is where to draw the line. Was Shakespeare using ‘real English’, or should we go back to the language of Beowulf for which we need a translation into modern English?
Still, I respect any teacher who tries to teach British spelling over American spelling.

@mattbrowne
A typically Continental comment…

@FireMadeFlesh On a spelling test in grade school, I spelled “colour” instead of “color.” My teacher marked it wrong, although he did say that if we were in England I would have been right. I’d seen it spelled that way in books and didn’t realize it wasn’t “correct.”

Well, 6th grade for me was in 1973. At the time most native speakers working as English teachers in Germany came from the UK. Germans who studied to become English teachers usually spent at least a year in the UK. And there were standardized foreign language textbooks by the big German publishing companies. They had consultants from the UK. Everything was restricted to British English. We also had student exchange programs with the UK and France. This completely changed in the mid 80ies. By the time my kids started their English classes in 1999 everything had changed. American English was accepted. There are new textbooks. Kids learn about the spelling and vocabulary differences. There are student exchange programs with US high schools as well. There are American teachers who work in Germany.

Most German companies which operate worldwide standardize their corporate language and usually it’s American English. Two reasons for that:

1) More speakers of American English (UK is just 60 million people)
2) Perception that Brits can handle American English but not vice versa

I’m not sure whether number 2) is really true. In my opinion well-educated Americans have no problem with British English at all.

a teacher told me there was no name for the time that jesus was alive because it was such a short period when compared to all of history. she thought AD meant after death… (it actually means Anno Domini, the day of our lord )

@mattbrowne
The differences are small enough that a bit of specific education suffices to bridge the gap, and even then, the gap isn’t so deep that you risk falling in. Things like WC instead of toilet, crisps instead of chips, etc.

@Ruallreb8ters
Well, Year of our Lord, but yeah :D
I suppose that if you want to get technical, you could throw “the ministry of Jesus” in for the first 33 or so years after 0 (or 4, depending on whose calendar) BC.

@Nullo AD, or CE to use the modern term, picks up right after BC/BCE. There are no years unaccounted for—contrary to what Ruallreb8ters’ teacher thought.

The new terms are less ambiguous. BCE = before common era and CE = common era.

@Ruallreb8ters

I remember thinking it meant “after death” too.

When I was 8.

lol

@Nullo – Yes, the differences are small enough that a bit of specific education suffices to bridge the gap. Therefore my example is about teachers being wrong. American English is as real as any other flavor of English which includes distant places like New Zealand. German teachers have changed their mind and the snobs in the UK which influenced the design of Germany’s English classes in the 1970ies are now retired.

Mind blown!