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We have all heard them highschool or college teachers of 100 or 200 level history classes who pass along what amount to urban legend / internet history / or random guessing as fact.
So lets hear some of them. What is the most outrageous "facts" you have heard from a teacher.
My favorite came from a commuity college history teacher who gave it to us as stone cold fact that the Persian Army that invaded Greece was 1,000,000 soldiers strong.
This fit with his general style though. He always gave as fact the largest most outrageous number one could find for anything.
Timothy Hanna
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A university teacher saying that Archimedes used mirrors to set Roman ships afire.
Jona Lendering
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Quote:A university teacher saying that Archimedes used mirrors to set Roman ships afire.
I also heard that.. but on an old BBC programme the other week. The experiment looked impressive anyway :?
Kat x
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Quote:A university teacher saying that Archimedes used mirrors to set Roman ships afire.
This had been written in my GDR schoolbook even. Further some political motivated ideas I don't recall correctly, apart the statement on Spartacus to be the first socialist ;-) ) ...
[size=85:2j3qgc52]- Carsten -[/size]
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At university (archaeology) an unnamed professor showed a picture of pallisad stake or sudes (sometimes called pilum muralis) and said that this was the furca to which the Roman soldier attached his kit on the march. :lol:
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I can't recall any major historical gaffes by my teachers, but there was this one at my primary school that insisted a lake was a body of earth surrounded by water and that an island was a body of water surrounded by land.
She would not back down untill a meeting was held between parents and teachers.
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The Romans never made it past Hadrians wall.... :lol:
Visne partem mei capere? Comminus agamus! * Me semper rogo, Quid faceret Iulius Caesar? * Confidence is a good thing! Overconfidence is too much of a good thing.
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Quote:I can't recall any major historical gaffes by my teachers, but there was this one at my primary school that insisted a lake was a body of earth surrounded by water and that an island was a body of water surrounded by land.
She would not back down untill a meeting was held between parents and teachers.
hock:
How daft! :lol:
Kat x
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I'm not sure I ever had a history teacher tell me any awfully wrong thing, though I distinctly recall a literature professor in an introductory lecture quoting Beowulf
"beorn in burgum"
and explaining that meant a castle. My biggest issue with my history teachers was the things they thought it was important to know and theings they didn't. I (like most boys, I guess) thought that history came in descending order of importance: military, science/technology, everyday life, exploration, weird anecdotes, strange animals, naughty bits, politics, religion. I still don't think it's important to know the 'difference' between colonialism, imperialism, and expansionism. They did.
And then there was the trainee who walked into our eighth-grade upper-level physics, taught by a bearded whirlwind who could set up experiments that could hold a class in rapt attention and destroy floortiles, eat away tabletops and leae puddles of molten pig iron in the long jump sandbox. He started with a theoretical 'assume a rock that weighs ten kilos' (bad move - kilos are a unit of mass, not weight, as we pointed out to him) and ended with a gravity pull of one hundred Newton ("actually, more like 98 at the gravitational constant") and an inertial force of 100 Newton ("it flies!") before our regular teacher too pity on his misery. He was actually pretty goods, but dead nervous, and making him tech his first ever lesson to us resentful smartarses (we had to come to school at 07.10 every Thursday for the privilege of having more physics) was just cruel.
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Couple more that come to mind.
The Parthians used huge sheets of silk to reflect sunlight into the eyes of Roman soldiers to blind them as battle started.
Persepolis was burned during a drunken party by Alexander (like anyone would be able to know this for certain).
The Persian Empire had Roman like roads and a beaurocracy so well organized that each person who used it carried a seal that told way-stations along the road exactly how much and what quality of fare and service they were to received at the governments expense.
Oh and this road network allowed the Persian king to know everything that went on within his Empire within days of it happening.
Timothy Hanna
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Arrrgghhhh , I' m blind..... silk, SILK!! Protect your eyes, comrads ... they use their secret weapon!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:
(sorry, I couldn't resist :oops: )
[size=85:2j3qgc52]- Carsten -[/size]
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Oh and he also told us that the Persians were more architecturally talented than the Romans and built more, bigger, and better.
I quickly got the feeling that he was a Mid East lover. Especially when he gushed while talking about the Ottoman Empire.
Timothy Hanna
