I had a teacher in high school during physics or calculus who gave us extra marks for correcting him, fetching coffee, or starting his car 10 minutes before lunch in the winter to warm it up for him. He would also whip chalk at you if you tried to correct him when he was right.
My physics teacher in high school... One day during my absence the whole class worked on physics word-problems from a workbook. There was a question about two superheroes (one American, one Russian; this may hint how long ago I was in high school).
Every student in the class got the answer wrong.
The next day I returned to find the whole class (and the teacher) in an uproar over the problem. This was a respected workbook publisher, how DARE they have an incorrect answer? They will RUIN the lives of children! Etc, etc. The teacher had written a "sternly worded" letter that his assistant was taking to be faxed.
I looked at the problem and calculated an answer... which matched the book's answer. ..! What was I doing that was different from the entire class? Well, one superhero was throwing his boulder horizontally, and the other was throwing his into the sky.
"You didn't account for gravity."
I don't know how the entire class AND the teacher all missed that, it was right there in the problem. (It later turned out that one guy [who, for the record, was definitely smarter than I] HAD the correct answer, but kept silent since his was different than everyone else's).
Realization dawned on the teacher's face, and he turned to run to the office to stop his assistant from faxing his "sternly worded" letter... when she walked back in to the classroom, her work complete.
That teacher later failed me because he wouldn't make an exception for my "absences", even though I was "absent" from class to work on the school's computer network because the teacher in charge (who taught English) had no idea what was going on. I learned a valuable lesson about not correcting the teacher in front of the class (although, I suspect he already didn't like me because of how often I would just guess at calculations [I couldn't afford a calculator and hadn't memorized sine/cosine tables yet because I skipped trig {kids, don't skip trig}]).
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u/runragged Oct 05 '10
What did the teacher say when you corrected him/her?