<p>Being wrong is OK, being wrong and sarcastic is not OK. </p>
<p>Has a teacher ever said anything memorably stupid to your kid?</p>
<p>Example, middle school science teacher:</p>
<p>“Can anyone suggest an essential nutrient in the human diet?”</p>
<p>Student: “How about salt?” [more technically, sodium and chloride, but fair enough suggestion]</p>
<p>Teacher: “Oh, SALT. You think SALT is essential, hee hee. Listen everybody next she’ll be saying PEPPER is essential too, hah hah”.</p>
<p>How about, “This is the worse class I’ve ever had the misfortune to teach”. From a high school teacher to her senior AP English class when she did not like a heated class debate going on between two groups with vastly differing opinions. She confirmed she did say this “to motivate” at a parent conference when I asked. yikes. Be the adult!</p>
<p>Oh, this is fun!</p>
<p>How about:</p>
<p>“God SAVE ME from these gifted kids!” – Middle School teacher, who wasn’t kidding around, in San Diego County</p>
<p>How about</p>
<p>DS to middle school homeroom teacher: I want to read Les Miseables.</p>
<p>Teacher: Why do that when you can see the play?</p>
<p>When I was in 9th grade, I got a half point off a history test because I abbreviated “U.S.” instead of spelling out “United States.” When I showed the teacher that he had used the abbreviation “U.S.” in the question, he replied, “Do as I say, not as I do.”</p>
<p>Bat rastard.</p>
<p>Teacher in expensive, elite private school:</p>
<p>“The sky is blue because it’s reflected off the water. Right?”</p>
<p>(She was a music teacher, but STILL. I was a mouthy teenager and replied, “That explains the green and brown skies over Kansas.”)</p>
<p>Teacher to 5th grade D, who has a LD and extended time in her IEP: (said in front of several other students)</p>
<p>“Well, this isn’t fair. I’ll accept it <em>this</em> time. We’re going to do something about this.”</p>
<p>ARGGG. Still makes my blood boil. Yeah, we might have been able to do something about it if she didn’t have tenure…</p>
<p>First day of freshman year geography.</p>
<p>Teacher: “… and you can see from the map that the time in London is 5 hours later than it is here (in California).”</p>
<p>D raises hand: “Um… I think that’s 8 hours later.”</p>
<p>Teacher: “No, it’s 5 hours.”</p>
<p>D: “I was in London this summer. It’s 8 hours.”</p>
<p>Teacher pauses, then: “No, that’s PHONE time!”</p>
<p>D’s best friend was also in that class, so we have independent corroboration that this exchange actually took place. We’re all still wondering what phone time is.</p>
<p>My fifth grade teacher used to drive me crazy with her mispronuciation of Spanish place names. She’d say San Josey for San Jose and the like. I didn’t claim to be fluent in Spanish, but I had just moved from California and knew how to pronounce them reasonably correctly. I couldn’t take it any more and finally had to open my mouth and set her straight when she pronounced Yosemite National Park as “Yose-Might.” </p>
<p>She did not appreciate my help and told me I was wrong.</p>
<p>Phone time??? Unreal.</p>
<p>D1 still rants about the time she got into an argument with a classmate about candles so they asked the science teacher. Does a candle burn the wax or the wick? Teacher said, the wick burns, the wax just slows it down. Huh? So, you could get some kind of slow burning wick and not need the hydrocarbon based main ingredient? Does the word wick not have a meaning as a verb? Do you know anything about science? Sigh.</p>
<p>My 6th grade math teacher had us twice a day…once for math, and once for “advisory”…a period at the end of the day kind of like homeroom, where we could start on homework and the like.</p>
<p>Well. Kids would often talk and disrupt the class, and as a result he would keep the whole class after.</p>
<p>My mom got ticked after a few weeks (yes, weeks) of my being delayed for 10 minutes after my sister got out, so she wrote a note to the teacher kindly explaining that I was not the problem, and as such could not be punished.</p>
<p>The next day, the teacher took the opportunity to yell at me in front of the entire class, stating clearly that I was obviously just taking my time to get out of the car (why do I see you when I open my windows 10 minutes later, or almost hit you with my door as I’m leaving? Neither of which were true, by the way) and thus making him look bad. Basically, calling me a liar in front of the class and reducing me to tears. It still makes me angry.</p>
<p>9th grade, I was in the school Spring musical. It was mandatory for us to pay $50 to be in the show, but we had the option of selling tickets to cover the cost. When I turned in my contract to be in the show (some liability stuff and understanding we had to keep a certain GPA to stay in the show), I accidentally checked off the box that I did not want to sell tickets to cover the cost. My parents then decided that yes, we did want to sell the tickets. </p>
<p>So we did. A few weeks later, the band director (who handled most of the money stuff associated with the musical) calls me into her office and asks me why I haven’t paid. When I explained the situation to her and showed her the tickets I had sold, she went off on a tangent to me, calling me a problem child and–again–reducing me to tears. (I don’t do well when authority figures yell or get upset with me…much better than I used to though, but this was quite some time ago). A friend of mine was with me at the time, and was able to comfort me. Apparently, I was not the only child the woman had problems with…she told a very sweet, beloved student that she “did not deserve to be on stage”.</p>
<p>When I got home that day and my mom found out what had happened, she proceeded to call the school and tell the administration exactly what had happened. Next day at rehearsal, the teacher apologized to me profusely (though, it seemed to me, only because she had to). I didn’t interact with her after that if I could avoid it.</p>
<p>My 10th grade health teacher (also the football coach) told our class that 1) anorexia is caused by a vitamin deficiency, and 2) Hitler died of syphilis.</p>
<p>My U.S. History teacher told my class of juniors that “Einstein invented the atomic bomb”</p>
<p>Further, when a student asked who wrote Gone With the Wind, he looked up and said “What’s that?”</p>
<p>I had a history teacher in middle school who was pretty much obsessive about being neat and she made us use rulers to redraw the lines and borders in our LINED notebooks.
And on top of that she couldn’t pronounce “Pacific.” She called it the “Specific” Ocean.</p>
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<p>Ridiculous. Any idiot knows that Einstein was the bomb.</p>
<p>S had a teacher who several times sent home a list of spelling words… with misspellings.</p>
<p>Worse, the list had been typed in Word; she could have run spellcheck.</p>
<p>7th grade supply list from English teacher with a request for-“Scissors”</p>
<p>Spelled it as - Sizzors.</p>
<p>Lost my mind in Walgreens when I read the list.</p>
<p>My son asked his 4th grade teacher about positive and negative numbers, she sent him to the 6th grade classroom to ask the 6th grade teacher to explain it to him.</p>
<p>Sami, when my son was in first grade, he LOVED the concept of negative numbers. The first grade teacher would not allow him to talk about them in class because it was confusing to the other kids. (This of course made him LOVE negative numbers even more.)
But he was still not allowed to discuss with anyone in school. So glad those days are behind.</p>
<p>After the AP Calc. exam was over S1’s and classmates were sent to Alg.1 classrooms to help tutor those students for upcomig state end of course exams. </p>
<p>There was a review packet with sample probs. When one of the students asked the teacher to show how to solve a prob. on the board, the teacher could not do it. S1 had to show the teacher how to solve the prob.</p>