Untrue things you were taught at school

I was mainly taught that I was a bit thick. It's taken me a long time to start to realise that maybe I'm not.

That if you swallow chewing gum it wraps around your heart and kills you

admittedly i didn't learn that in a lesson ?

"Bullies are all cowards who are more scared of you than you are of them" is a particular favourite of mine.

That the seeds from peppers are poisonous - although I suspect this was to stop some of the little sh*ts I went to school with from eating them/heaping them onto someone else's pizza...

I

I was taught numbers 1 & 3!

And still thought they were true? Should I be ?

ETA: I don't actually use a separate pan for eggs, but I wouldn't put anything else in the pan at the same time as eggs. Probably because I wouldn't ever have the need to, but hopefully you get the point!

Being a good catholic girl and going to a convent grammar school, in the obligatory RE lessons in upper 6th, the head of RE told us there was no point in using a condom as the AIDS virus was so small it could fit through the pores in the rubber.

A brave member of class challenged her on it and produced evidence to back it up - it didn't go down well.

Pluto is a planet ?

Oh yeah, that's a corker. For me, it's right up there with 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Bollocks does it, at best it teaches you how to deal with the next round of shitty things happening to you. At worst it leaves you scarred and vulnerable.

Not that I'm bitter about anything <wry grin>.

CV, I am reliably informed (by a Hitched expert in toxic things) that number 1 is nonsense.

Number 3, according to my husband, is also rot- the sea might reflect the sky a bit but the main reason it's blue is so do with different sorts of light (blue light is relected- or possibly refracted, I forget- more easily than other light- this is also the reason that the sky looks blue, apparently).

I hope I'm right- I'd find it much more worrying if my husband were telling me nonsense than my teachers ?

I thought #1 was something to do with aluminium pans. Not that I remembered anything about it until I read this thread. Why IS the sea blue?

I'm sure that Stephen Fry (on QI) said the sea is blue because water itself is ever so sliiiiightly blue, so when you have a massive volume of it, it looks bluer.

Kind of like folding coloured cellophane over, I guess?

Like poor Pooch and the spreadable cows ?

Our English teacher told us that Charles Dickens wrote The Mill on the Floss and that ee cummings was a woman. I also spent an entire double poetry period arguing with her when she tried to tell us that Rupert Brook's Peace was an extended metaphor for death ? Cretin.

In primary-level RE, someone asked why Adam and Eve didn't come across any dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden or elsewhere, and received the reply that 'Dinosaurs didn't actually exist in real life' whatever that means!

In high school science we were offered a £5 by a cocky teacher if we could give an example of something that 'never changes' as he claimed that everything did change. I suggested 'the fact that everything changes, never changes' and was sent out of the room!

I remember very randomly arguing with a teacher at primary school that there's something potentially dangerous about bleaching your hair (esp to the root or something) when pregnant and he called me a fool ?.

I told him Irene from H&A had to go brunette while pregnant as advised by the docs and he told me he'd never heard such nonsense and it was only a soap, how roooode and of course they make everything up - probably just to mislead cretins like me ?

There used to be/still is some sort of guidance on this though isn't there?

??? blimey, that's terrible.

Oh God, I've thought of something else- our English teacher told us that he had once, as an experiment, told a class that they had permission to do anything at all they wanted with no repercussions, then left the room. When he returned, he found that they had:

- all lit up fags; and

- rehung the pictures upside down.

He said that this was evidence that they had been infantalised by the education system- they were only able to think of childish pranks and none of them had attempted anything genuinely shocking or bad. When we pointed out that it might actually be evidence that they were governed by a. their own moral sense and b. the law, more than they were by some teacher at school, he had a hissy fit and stormed out of the classroom. What a total dickhead ?

Huh! I was taught that swallowing gum would take 7 years to go through the body.. ?

We thought so too - this was 1995!

Imagine what they were telling the impressionable 1st and 2yrs in PSA classes.

Mind you, that's us catholics for us. My parents were turned down as adoptive parents by a catholic adoption agency because they admitted to using contraception when questioned on what they would do if they had more children and replied it wouldn't happen.

The sea thing isn't totalyuntrue as the sea is bluer when the sky is a brilliant blue but it's not a reflection.

However, the sea is blue due to the absorption ad reflection of light by the water itself and various particles suspsended in it. Blue light is more easily refacted back from the surface as it has the shortest wavelenght

I was told that if you cut yourself and sucked the blood, it would go back into your veins.

And that my parents were always right.

God, I can't think of anything that was untrue that a teacher told us. Our PE teacher used to say that if we swallowed chewing gum and choked on it during lessons she'd have to stab us in the throat with a pair of scissors so we could breathe... is that true?

The most frightening untruth from my school days though, was the stories about Mars Bar Parties, Golden Showers and Mary-Lou's (or whatever) perpetuated by my fellow pupils. I was terrified that once I got to 18 or so and started shagging, it was inevitable I'd have to do some of these heinous acts. Mucho needless worrying for many years. I have yet to even meet anyone who knows anyone who has had a Mars Bar Party. Phew.

That the World Wide Web/super internet highway was something that would never take off.

Oooooh, another RE one from the chaplain at my all girls Anglican high school. He preached a sermon about not having sex before marriage, and the best reason he could come up with was: "Men don't want second-hand goods." ?

Chewing gum wraps around the intestines. Fact. Everyone knows that!

Not so much a taught thing as an at school and teacher thing... when we were about 14 we were told by a male teacher that he was our nominated and trained child protection person, and any issues at home we were to go to him. Bear in mind, to be fair, that I was usually the clever dick awkward one... however, I quite genuinely suggested that it would be good to have two trained teachers - one male and one female, given that the majority of abusers were men (as we were being told) and that abuse often led to distrust, so the personal characteristics of who you could turn to were quite important. He got really shirty and sent me out, insisting that anyone abused would be so keen to get help that they would approach male or female anyway. Hmmmmmm. Twat.

See, if he reversed it to 'a lot of men have a thing about breaking in a virgin' he might have been giving the truth - try that with the parents at your girls Anglican high! ?

Another one here who was never taught to type (too academic apparently) as you'd only need it if you were to become a secretary (which none of us would, obviously). Computers (yes it was that long ago, 1982 I think) would never really take off, so we wouldn't need to be able to use one. In fact only the pre-exam year girls had access to the few the school did have, because they were 'only recreational' ?

Everyone in my year learnt to type, on typewriters - it was lumped into an activity circus with cooking home ec and needlework textiles.

We were taught that evolution is a myth. well, not taught as such, but my A-level chem teacher was a very enthusiastic christian who didn't believe in evolution, and we had some cracking debates in his classes. When we were fed up with chemistry he could always be distracted by the evolution argument.

We used to have a class called Citizenship way back in the day, which from memory mostly consisted of learning about the European Union and such things. It was when the East Germans were fleeing in huge numbers and she told us there was no way, ever, that the Berlin Wall would ever come down....it did, that same evening ? She did some serious backtracking in lesson the next day to a bunch of precocious teenagers all saying 'We told you so!'

There were others but that one stands out.

The sky appears blue because light from the sun is refracted (bent) by the atmosphere. Blue light is bent most - i.e. towards us down on earth, and red least. However at sunset/sunrise the red light is suddenly angled towards us , the blue light down away from us,and so the sky appears redder.

BGB: Pluto is a planet - I have decreed it so.

Not taught at school but my health freak mother told me that on shredded wheat the label says 'no added salt and sugar' to mean that you were forbidden from adding it. I believed her for years too ?

Excellent ?

But I'm enjoying the idea of youw anting to add salt to your shredded wheat ?

Yep and me!