<p>Tonight at the dinner table our kids got going about the really strange things they have heard teachers say in class. You know those moments when the kids in the class all just look at each other and think “***???”</p>
<p>Our favorite two;</p>
<p>From an eighth grade social studies teacher: “Karl Marx had people killed to maintain his power.”</p>
<p>From a high school home room teacher: “Rosa Parks wouldn’t have been such a big deal if she hadn’t been black.”</p>
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<p>Can’t argue with that.</p>
<p>7th grade on say no to drugs day. “Drugs are bad, I know because I did them. Don’t do them” We found out yrs later. Apparently several kids laughed and made comments about how they didn’t hurt teacher, so how were they bad.</p>
<p>Second grade teacher - The Indians killed off the dinosaurs. That’s why dinosaurs are extinct.</p>
<p>How about … from a third grade teacher counting money … I don’t know how much money I should have. Me: But you have 25 people all contributing $100. Teacher: I know that, but I can’t do math. </p>
<p>Um … 25x100 is hardly math.</p>
<p>My fifth grade teacher used to drive me nuts with her mispronunciations:</p>
<p>Yosemite = “Yose might”
San Jose - “San Josie”</p>
<p>…and many more.</p>
<p>Middle school unit on the Roman Empire and the teacher pronounced “plebeian” as “PLEEB-ian.”</p>
<p>Oh this is a very scary thread…</p>
<p>When my D was in 2nd grade, she came home one day and asked me when the capital of Florida was changed from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Seems she answered T, and the teacher corrected her!</p>
<p>A few weeks later at PTC, I noticed in the room that not only did she have J’ville marked on the map as the capital, but in another part of the room were written some weather related words, one of which was “icey”.</p>
<p>The first time I was ever really frustrated with a teacher in that way was when I was in 6th grade and we were learning about ancient Egypt. No matter how hard I tried, I could not manage to make the teacher grasp the difference between translation and transcription, and understand that writing out an English sentence using phonetic hieroglyphics – which was something we were doing as a class – would not make that sentence comprehensible to an ancient Egyptian, because the sentence would still be in English, even though written out in hieroglyphics. She just didn’t get it. The thought that I might be smarter than a teacher had never occurred to me before, and I found it quite disturbing.</p>
<p>Not in school, but I shared a hospital room with a woman that was a college English teacher. I had just graduated high school.</p>
<p>She was trying to do the New York Times crossword puzzle, and was stumped by this one:
Antecedent to E. The word was ONE LETTER. She was grateful when I supplied ‘D’.</p>
<p>Preschool teacher…Ponies grow up to be horses.</p>
<p>The 8th grade science teacher gave the class a demonstration using two identical pieces of aluminum foil and a bowl of water. One was compressed into a ball and dropped into water - it sank. The other was shaped into a boat and floated. The teacher told the students that the ball sank due to the higher density…</p>
<p>Same teacher when discussing the analysis of experimental data. “I ignore observations that look like they don’t belong.”</p>
<p>Once had a notice come home reporting ‘lice have been cited’ …</p>
<p>The Tallahassee anecdote reminded me of another one. My fourth grade son was participating in a project where each student had to write down a few facts about a country. Then all the students’ little lists (for a variety of countries) were displayed on a decorated board in the hall.</p>
<p>My son asked his teacher the religion of the country he was making a list for. I don’t know why she didn’t have him look it up. She gave him the information, and he wrote it on his card.</p>
<p>Well, what she told him was dead wrong. The country was Bangladesh, and she told him the predominant religion is “Hindu.”</p>
<p>Evidently she didn’t know that Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan, one of the countries that was split off from India in 1947 because of its very high concentration of Muslims (to make a long story short).</p>
<p>Plenty of people are not aware of that…perhaps understandably. But if that teacher wasn’t positive about the facts, she should have looked them up herself!!</p>
<p>I was living in Pennsylvania from grades 4 to 7, then in Arizona in grade 8. I told our “arizona history and government” teacher that Pennsylvania was officially referred to as “the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania”. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about.</p>
<p>My S was in 7th grade in the “gifted & talented” social studies class. The teacher assigned the kids to make a project solely by hand of pre-contact (before Europeans) North America. She awarded an “A” to a girl who turned in a project with a plastic horse. S pointed out that horses were brought by Europeans and asked how she was able to make a plastic horse. The teacher forced him to weave something like the Native Americans might have been able to make pre-contact & gave him a barely passing grade. It was a very trying year.</p>
<p>D in 2nd grade had a teacher who gave a bonus math assignment that took my S (who was doing 6th grade math at the time) over an hour to complete & D & her 2nd grade classmates had no idea how to complete. I asked the teacher how long the assignment was supposed to take the 2nd graders who were assigned to do it & she returned a totally blank look. She said she was trying to “challenge” and “stretch” the kids in our class. (Honestly, I don’t think she had any clue how to do the problem herself.)</p>
<p>S had Honors Physics in a year when they couldn’t find a physics teacher and had a math teacher teach the class. She told the students that it would take a bullet fired straight UP into the air the same amount of time to hit the ground as a bullet fired straight sideways. It took the class quite a while to convince her she was wrong.</p>
<p>D had a new teacher who was supposedly certified to teach Spanish, but when she didn’t know the correct word in Spanish she would just stick the English equivalent into the middle of the sentence. She pronounced Senor as See-nor. She was fired and replaced with a teacher who didn’t believe in homework (in a language class) and allowed the students to paint on the walls. Their final exam “project” was to re-create their Facebook page in Spanish (there’s a button on Facebook that will do that for you). He was fired a week before the final, and the department head apologized to the class and promised their grades on the departmen-wide final would be scaled.</p>
<p>Have you ever seen teachers on “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader”? Some do fine…but some are really embarrassing. One thought the moon was a planet! LOL</p>
<p>And…one spelled arc as arch. One had no idea which word was an adverb in a given sentence. </p>
<p>My son once had a teacher who said that Calif had a population of 500 million people. LOL More than the US!</p>
<p>I had a college sociology professor pronounce “bourgeoisie” like bur-JOY-zee.</p>