21h ago

What's the wrongest thing a teacher ever told you?

You're viewing a single thread.

181 comments

I remember a bunch of things in science class in middle school, because I was really into science and it bothered me that they oversimplified everything to the point of being straight up false. Like a definition of "animals" being "something with eyes and a mouth". I mentioned several examples of animals without eyes, like corals, but the teacher just exasperatedly said that they did have small mouths. Ok, but your definition said eyes and a mouth, not or.
I also remember a question in a test about astronomy being "what is the biggest object". I thought about it for a moment and then wrote "the universe"; which I'll maintain to this day, was right. But it was marked wrong. The expected answer was the sun. I talked about it to the teacher, because it wasn't like I pulled the existence of objects bigger than the sun from my personal knowledge only, we'd explicitly talked about bigger stars and galaxies. But the teacher said "It was implied 'biggest object in the solar system' ". Implied how? It definitely wasn't written. I still want my point back.
- The sun? The sun!? I guess your teacher didn't know about Aldebaran, the size of galaxies... Supermassive black holes... Galactic filaments... And yes, the universe itself.
  
  Nah, she'd mentioned some of these things. The logic was just that since the other questions in that test had been about objects in the solar system, I should've known it was implied "biggest in the solar system" although it wasn't written.
- Who was your teacher? Aristotle?
  
  The Greeks thought the sun was the same size as the Peloponnese peninsula.
  
  Which is admittedly fairly big.
  
  ...wait, really? I know back then it was probably anyone's guess, but that sounds like one of those oddly specific things that makes the moon being made of cheese sound like a down-to-earth conclusion.
  
  I checked, and it looks like I oversimplified: Anaxagoras estimated that the moon was the size of the Peloponnesus and the sun was somewhat larger—but how much larger depended on how much further away it was, which he had no means of guessing.
  His estimate of the moon’s size was derived from observations of a solar eclipse, in which the path of totality was about the size of the Peloponnesus—but he probably missed a lot of places that experienced a partial eclipse and didn’t make note of it.
  
  I mean his train of thought deserves credit, just not for factoring in everything. A good Greek philosopher was like the Sherlock Holmes of their day; I recall reading Aristotle saw the Earth's shadow on the moon and how it curved and he was like "ah, so the Earth isn't flat, it's a ball" (though then he'd go on to say stuff like "other cultures are less prone to revolution, so they must be natural slave cultures", which would be more like Half-Life 3's hypothetical version of Sherlock Holmes).

181 comments