Like when my third grade teacher said that Cinco de Mayo is the equivalent of the Fourth of July in Mexico. But that's false. Cinco de Mayo commemorates one small victory of the Mexicans over the French. Mexico's Independence Day is September 16, not May 5.
My fourth-grade teacher Mr. Williams was kind of a know-it-all. I remember once at Christmastime he gave us a bunch of Christmas words. One of the words was "manger." He told us that a manger is a barn, and he said that "Away in a Manger" could be called "Away in a Barn." But a manger is not a barn. That's a stable. A manger is a feedbox. The French word manger means "to eat."
It was Mr. Williams who taught me a stupid prescriptive rule, one that I followed for a long time. I wrote an Easter story that started off, "The funnest Easter I can remember," and he told me funnest wasn't a word. I had never heard that. He asked me to look in a dictionary to see if funner was in it. But now I know where that rule came from, and it's pure nonsense. Originally, fun was a noun. But if you say, "That was fun," it's hard to know whether fun is a noun or an adjective. But fun has now become an adjective, as in "That was a fun party." But stupid prescriptivists say you can't say "funner" because fun was a noun, and you can't add -est or -er to a noun. But today, fun is more of an adjective than it is a verb, and almost all (and maybe all!) other single-syllable adjectives take the -er or -est suffixes. If you're going to say funner is wrong, then you technically should say that more fun is also wrong. So take that!
In fifth grade, we used to rotate teachers. Mrs. Cowan was in charge of English stuff. And once she had to write the word business on the board. She wrote it as buisness. We corrected her, but she apparently had never considered the etymology or morphology of the word, and after writing it the right way, she said, "No!" and "corrected" it back to buisness.
I remember learning about the core, mantle, and crust in second grade. Then in fifth grade, the science teacher, Mrs. (or Miss?) Belnap, told us about more layers. There was the crust, the lithosphere, the outer core, and the inner core. I never fully understood what the lithosphere was, especially in relation to the core. But now I know that you can't talk about the core and the lithosphere at the same time. The crust relates to chemical properties (composition), and the lithosphere relates to physical properties.
Then I had Mr. Williams again in sixth grade. Now, he was my favorite elementary school teacher, but sometimes, looking back, I question his ethics. He decided one day that our book that we would read as a class was the first Harry Potter book. But he hadn't read it, and he just played the book on tape, which meant that he didn't have to read it. Then one day he gave us a test on the book. But since he hadn't read it, he couldn't make one, so he Googled one. And he couldn't know how accurate the test was. And this was a terrible test. First of all, it had elements from the first three books, not just the first, so those who hadn't read all of them were at a disadvantage. But not only that, the test was WRONG! One of the questions asked which character had wizard parents. The options were Ron, Harry, Hermione, and maybe someone else. Of course, both Harry and Ron had wizard parents, even though Harry was raised by muggles. But the test said that Ron was the only one with wizard parents. So we challenged Mr. Williams about it. But instead of listening to us, he actually defended the test, even though he didn't know what he was talking about! Someone brought up that Harry's parents attended Hogwarts, and Mr. Williams said, "They were muggles who attended a wizard school." Um, no. That is completely false. It was obvious that he was making things up because he didn't want the quiz to be wrong.
People who are unteachable shouldn't be teachers.
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