Most incorrect thing you were taught?

Jernal wrote: »

Being a huge Space enthusiast these were criminal for me. So much so that my teacher told my parents that I had an obsession with Venus.

At least it wasn't an obsession with Uranus

Some stuff that I remembered while reading this thread:

An English teacher insisted on the book being called Withering Heights - because, you know, there's no such word as Wuthering. I think it was the same teacher who insisted the book was called Far From The Maddening Crowd.

Being told that if you swallowed an apple pip that an apple tree would grow in your stomach and eventually out of your mouth.

That a paragraph had to be at least three sentences long.

Teacher that pronounced "wind" (as in "a strong gust of wind") to rhyme with mind when reading poetry.

We were writing an essay in class and I wanted to talk about somebody with dingy clothes but I wasn't sure how to spell "dingy" so I asked the teacher. I was told there was no such word and to just use the word dirty instead.

A previous poster mentioned this already but I was also taught that birds weren't animals. When listing animals only mammals were accepted.

Not really incorrectly things taught, but a few things that bugged me about school also: we had a choir class in primary school. I couldn't sing for shit so she told me to just mouth the words. I would have thought that the point of school was to teach a subject (ie singing) rather than just allowing those that already knew how to do it to participate.

We were being taught about animals that were cold blooded and warm blooded. Humans, cats, dogs, etc were warm blooded; lizards, frogs, etc were cold blooded. I put up my hand and asked what birds were. My teacher replied sarcastically: "creatures with feathers that fly, har, har", cue a laugh from the class and I was mortified. I thought it was a legitimate question and he never answered it.

I resent the fact that teachers only taught us what interested them. It was only in much later years that I realised that the ciriculums were much broader than we'd been taught, but teacher stuck to one subject on the basis that a question in the exam on that subject was guaranteed to come up. So while we learnt about Bismarck and Garibaldi which bored me, we could have learnt about medievel history which I've grown to learn about and love since leaving school.

Also, being taught things by rote but never actually learning the reasons behind them. So I could solve differential equations but to this day I don't understand at all what their application is about. School was so much about passing an exam than actually imparting interesting knowledge.