Did you ever correct a teacher in class?

In my senior year of honors English, I used the word "mustachioed" in a written assignment and my teacher marked it incorrect. I argued that it is in fact a word, look it up. She never acknowledged she was wrong, but gave me the points back. Years later the desperate old thing hit on a classmate's husband at some event.

Numerous times.

In kindergarten: the tomato is a fruit, peanuts are not a nut, pandas are not bears, black and white are not colors (OK, the last is open to debate, but I was 5.

Elementary school: any mention of Germany prior to the unification of German states in 1871, Edison *invented* the light bulb, spices were used to hide rotten meat, people died at an early age, ceilings were low because people were short, Dachau was a death camp for Jews, etc.

In University I wrote a paper about a well known living writer. He was actually someone I knew. The teacher gave me a so-so grade and disagreed with my interpretations of the author's work. I had the writer come to class and tell off teacher.

Who was the writer?

I learned the hard way: you don't correct a nun at a Catholic grade school. Ouch!

Lots

Great story and examples R2.

I pronounced “economics” with a hard “e” and was corrected that it should be a soft “e”.

I issued some responsive correction that different pronunciations are permitted. And then a screaming fight broke out. I was dismissed from class.

My history teacher found out and went after the economics teacher in the faculty room. She pulled out the dictionary. And then it got real.

Numerous times in 8th grade French class which was taught by a German man. By then I'd lived in Quebec, Algeria and France. After being sent to the bitch assistant principal's office murltiple times, I got into it with her too. I think I said " this is fucking Canada (albeit Mississauga) and the best you could do for a French teacher was a German? "

From a list of incorrectnesses:

[quote]Dachau was a death camp for Jews

Indeed. My uncle died there. He was not Jewish.

[quote]I issued some responsive correction that different pronunciations are permitted.

I loathe, hate, and despise you alternate pronunciation and spelling cunts. There is no reason for your existence, past, present, or future.

I was not a pronunciation troll, R10. My economics teacher was.

Not in front of everyone not on paper.

She said “dystopia” was not a freaking word

This was back in the 1980s

Oh, sorry, r11. Please forward.

R9, as did my German Protestant grandfather.

R1 in high school I had an English final essay and used the author herself as a primary source, contacted through email and she was happy to answer my questions. The A grade was inevitable, while I'm usually a B student (or C when procrastinating).

I was that precocious kid who would correct a teacher. I stopped because I got penalized for it. I'm glad to have learned young that adults mostly care about looking good and saving face. It served me well later on.

My parents had been to Barbados so I knew how to pronounce it. My seventh grade teacher was reading us a book about someone from there and kept pronouncing it BAR-bu-dose. I politely corrected her. Wrong move. Wrong move. She was an ex-nun, which are even worse than regular nuns. From then on, I was on her shit list and she made me pay for my "insolence" in a million little ways.

[quote]I learned the hard way: you don't correct a nun at a Catholic grade school. Ouch!

Me, too.

NUN: You may touch these hosts because they are not consecrated. Once they are consecrated, they become the Body of Christ and you are not allowed to touch them.

ME: How could I possibly touch them more than with my tongue?

WHACK!

One of my English professors couldn't pronounce Synecdoche to save her life. I never corrected her, but it pained my ears every time she'd pronounce it, "Sinna-dough-chay". I only knew the correct pronunciation because of the Charlie Kaufman film.

Are you all this guy?

R2, possibly has no friends and still wonders why

Did in 4th grade. The teacher said, "Enough out of you Little Sereco". Whatever the fuck that means. I shut up for the remainder of the year.

In grade school the teacher was reciting Yeats' poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and the line "An evening full of the linnets' wings". My little hand shot up and I told her that linnet is not pronounced "lye-net". She did not take it well.

In kindergarten during story time I raised my hand and claimed Jacques Derrida said the origin of structure cannot be a pure genesis, but must already be articulated preternatually, a complex "diachronic" process.

I did. Last year. I was right. He was embarrassed. He acknowledged it in front of the class. I had fallen in love with him at first sight. I had to do something.

I was trying out for a spelling bee and my word was "acknowledg(e)ment." I spelled it with the e between the g and the m. I was told I was wrong and I had to leave the classroom. I went to my locker and got my textbook and saw that it was spelled with an e. I knocked on the door, showed the teacher, and he let me back in. Quite graciously too.

Turns out that it can be spelled either way but that no e is chiefly American and Canadian, but with the e is acceptable. I ended up finishing second in final. (Damn you "delicatessen"!)

r14 They did imprison Jews in Dachau, though. I read a book about Dachau in 2016 or 2017, and one point the author made is that Jews were treated the worst. I don't remember the book or the author, unfortunately.

hell no

see attached

Mill was a notably precocious child. He describes his education in his autobiography. At the age of three he was taught Greek. By the age of eight, he had read Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, and the whole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, Diogenes Laërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history in English and had been taught arithmetic, physics and astronomy.

R24 Are you by any chance John Stuart Mill ?

Yes, and never again, I'm not a fan of being verbally berated as an intellectual bully by someone who cannot pronounce trajectory...

Not really corrected but I showed my high school chemistry teacher that she was a terrible teacher. I didn’t want to be in the class and it was my last period so I made a deal with her that whatever I made on the end-of-grade state test would be me grade for the year. I didn’t attend the class again and read the textbook. I ended up getting the highest grade of any student in any of her chemistry classes and she was FURIOUS! Fortunately the guidance counselor made her stand by the agreement because she wanted to renege on our agreement.

I'm with r16.

Very few teachers can deal with a student correcting them, even less so when they're already threatened by the suspicion that said student is a lot brighter than they are. So I learned to keep my mouth shut (although I'm sure I rolled my eyes too often to go unnoticed). I've gotten better about the eye-rolling as I aged.

I suspect many of you are on the spectrum.

I was a history geek and so I usually knew more than the teachers but was savvy enough to not openly correct them. A few of them knew to consult with me too if they weren't sure, but again, I remember being together enough to say "I think" rather than "you fucking idiot, I know"

As for Dachau, it was one of the first concentration camps and was opened prior to WW2. (It is in a suburb of Munich)

While many Jews were indeed sent there and killed there, especially post-Kristallnacht (1938), it was also where German Communists and other other "enemies of the state" were sent.

Homosexuals, of course, being one of those groups.

Conditions were brutal and most deaths were from disease rather than a gunshot.

Later in the war, it was used to house Soviet POWs, many of whom were also killed.

As Germany was losing the war, prisoners, mostly Jews, were brought back from camps further east like Auschwitz--in an attempt to cover up their crimes they thought they could somehow move the inmates to Germany and no one would figure it out--all rationality and logic was gone from the SS and other German leadership by that point (late 44 into 45) and so they often moved Jews at the expense of Wehrmacht soldiers. Which is why so many Jews were there at the end of the war. And it's well known in the US because American soldiers liberated the camp.

From Wikipedia:

[quote] During April 1945 as U.S. troops drove deeper into Bavaria, the commander of KZ Dachau suggested to Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler that the camp be turned over to the Allies. Himmler, in signed correspondence, prohibited such a move, adding that "No prisoners shall be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive."

[quote] On 24 April 1945, just days before the U.S. troops arrived at the camp, the commandant and a strong guard forced between 6,000 and 7,000 surviving inmates – on a death march from Dachau south to Eurasburg, then eastwards towards the Tegernsee; liberated two days after Hitler's death by a Nisei-ethnicity U.S. Army artillery battalion. Any prisoners who could not keep up on the six-day march were shot. Many others died of exhaustion, hunger and exposure. Months later a mass grave containing 1,071 prisoners was found along the route.[

In sixth grade I wrote a letter that declared that our teacher "was neither good nor bad. Simply mediocre. And we demand better!"

I passed it around the class for everyone to sign, so I could give it the principal.

To this day, I can still hear our teacher's voice: "What is that being passed around? Please give it to me."

I got my meeting with the principal.

Also, yet again I am amazed by the spectrumites ability to remember events from elementary school as if they happened yesterday.

R35 I have a video memory. I can recall what people wore in grade school.

I teach HS. If I make a mistake-my students better tell me- they just have to be nice about it. My job is to fix their mistakes and not be a jerk about it I don’t make mistakes that often, but I am human.. Sometimes my students answer a question in a way I hadn’t thought of and that impresses me and I tell them.

It’s not that you correct a teacher, it’s how you do it.

No. Life goes on. And I'm assuming this is K-12 right?

During my junior year in HS I had the misfortunate of having the WORST Spanish teacher. Everyone hated him. He was legendarily mean. And his lore proved true. He was dismissive, rude, and horrible to students who were struggling.

However, I was considered the best non-Latin Spanish student in our very large school. And I had a penchant for standing up for the little guy. With a mid 90s sarcastic (and perhaps a bit bitchy) tone. He would CONSTANTLY make conjugation errors! Spelling errors! Vocab errors. It was amazing, frankly.

At first, I let them slide. But after his constant rudeness, I couldn't stand it anymore. After every error, I'd raise my hand. And simply correct him - but in that tone I mentioned above. His face would turn red. The class would fall silent. I'd just smile.

This happened over and over. The silence of the class soon turned to laughter. As if they couldn't wait for me to correct him! It was amazing. He hated me, but I was getting a near 100% in his class. He could do nothing to stop me. And because I never crossed any actual lines - I merely corrected a mistake - he couldn't punish me.

He, and I am not kidding, set up a conference with myself, my mother, and the principal. He said their was a war in class and I was the rebellion leader (I kid you not). I just laughed and said there was no war. Just incompetence.

Needless to say, I was transferred out of that class the following week.

I once told a teacher that I knew I was smarter than him. I regret having been so rude as to have said that to him, but it was the truth.

After a long, angry tirade about God knows what, I asked my kindergarten teacher "who hurt you?" It was all down hill from there.

I remember it clearly - a class in high school in which we'd learn the BASIC programming language. I'd been using BASIC for some time before that class. And one day when Brother Ralph Darmento was droning on I raised my hand and said "Did you know you can compose an entire BASIC program without ever hitting the ENTER key until the end. It was then he asked me to show him.

I did something similar to R34. I was in trouble for something in third grade, and I wrote a letter that I hated my teacher and wasn't coming to school the next week. The teacher caught me writing when I was supposed to be reading, and she told me to throw away what I was writing.

I crumpled it up, and that was when I was caught. Because we were supposed to fold paper (!!!!) before throwing it away, as that took up less space than crumpled paper. On the basis of crumpled paper, she told me to bring it over to her, and she read it and scolded me.

And I caught strep throat over the weekend and missed all of the next week of class and was freaking the fuck out that I'd be in BIG trouble.

Nothing else was ever said.

In college I had a prof who told the class to “just scan” certain chapters of our textbook, with the intent that we go over the material quickly and superficially. After the third time he used the phrase in that way I finally put up my hand and asked him if he didn’t mean “skim” instead of “scan.”

He still didn’t understand the (huge) difference between the two verbs.

It was in the second grade, I kid you not. My teacher was fairly easy going and seemed to be open to receiving input. This opened the door my questioning her at various times or offering helpful suggestions. The end of the quarter, my report card contained a note from the teacher suggesting that I learn who is the teacher and who is the student.

R2, Dachau was not a "Death Camp." The death camps were set up in German-occupied eastern Europe. Dacha was the first concentration camp. Deaths occurred there, but not on the level of the extermination camps in Poland, whose primary purpose was mass murder and where the victims were overwhelmingly Jewish. At Dachau, the inmates were communists, socialists, trade unionists, other assorted political opponents of the Nazis, and those deemed socially abhorrent (homosexuals). It was only towards the end of the war that Dachau began mass killings.

R46, everything on the listed is wrong. Germany as a country did *not* exist prior to 1871, Edison did *not* invent the light bulb, , spices were *not*used to hide rotten meat, etc.

I reminded her that Andorra is also an Iberian country.

My apologies, R47 (R2). But even though German unification came about in 1871, prior to that contemporaries from at least the sixteenth century onward referred to "Germany." So your teacher was correct.

Dachau worked prisoners to death, increasingly as the war continued. OK, they weren't gassed.

ASSHOLE ALERT!

R49m actually Germania was the preferred term until 1806.

I've seen "Germany" in the archives from private correspondence and diplomatic dispatches from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, R2. Would be nice to meet you. we'd get along.

[quote]As Germany was losing the war, prisoners, mostly Jews, were brought back from camps further east like Auschwitz

The correct word is "farther" because you are referring to an actual physical distance.

[quote]He, and I am not kidding, set up a conference with myself, my mother, and the principal. He said their was a war in class

ME, my mother, etc,; "there" not "their."

Yes! Skipped a grade in elem school because of it -- teacher was a drunk who couldn't spell, and during a parent day there were lots of mistakes all around the room. She drove a Corvette. Smoked on campus. Like that.

I always corrected my teachers, when they were wrong about something factual. Especially, if it was something that it was important. Luckily, most of my teachers were wonderful and loved me, as did the principal. One teacher, of an AP class, took exception to me correcting him and had me accompany him to the principal's office. I pointed out that I corrected him because he was completely wrong on facts that could affect our scores on the AP exam. I showed the principal how I was right and the teacher was wrong. The teacher just kept going on about how it was disrespectful. I countered that it was disrespectful, to us, to be taught incorrect facts that could cause us to fail the AP exam. Finally, the principal told him that if he didn't want to be corrected he should make sure he is correct, and that respect is earned not given based upon a person's position. And ,that I was right that it was more important for the students to be taught correct facts, than it was for the teacher to be respected. Shortly after that confrontation, the teacher took a sabbatical, and we got a retired teacher with a Ph.D. in History for the rest of the year. I never needed to correct the Ph.D.

Will someone please post the clip from the movie “Heavenly Creatures” with the correcting teacher scene. Its called “teachers pet” on YouTube. It’s why this thread was started. Its a hilarious scene. These posts have been great. Thank you.

R56, if any of them corrected you on your comma overuse, they were right.

R58 You, are obviously comma phobic. I did not over use commas in my post. I put the commas exactly where they are required. The overemphasis, on avoiding commas, is one of the things teachers need to held accountable about.

[quote]The overemphasis, on avoiding commas, is one of the things teachers need to held accountable about.

You're, a, moron.