Challenging social rules

[pegkerr]

This was a comment I made at sartorias's journal at a discussion about social rules, and I thought I'd re-post it here.

I vividly remember two instances when I was growing up when on separate occasions two teachers told me something I knew was DEAD WRONG.

One was in kindergarten, when another child was drawing a (rather inept) picture of a turkey. She painstakingly drew a circle on the turkey's tummy, and told the teacher, "That's the turkey's belly button."

Now even I, at the tender age of five, knew that turkeys didn't have belly buttons. But I was genuinely startled by the teacher's response. "Linda," she sniffed, "it isn't nice to talk about belly buttons."

I knew, even then, that there was nothing wrong with any part of the body. Even belly buttons.

The other time happened in eighth grade. I was stopped by a teacher in the hall. "Margaret," he told me loftily (he could never grasp the fact that I went by Peg, not Margaret), "ladies don't whistle." (Edited to add: Oh yeah, and I just remembered: he actually quoted to me, "Whistling girls and crowing hens/Always come to some bad ends.")

Again, I was so startled by the immediate and sure knowledge that he was wrong that I didn't make the obvious answer until he had passed.

I was a lady.

And I damn well could whistle anytime I liked.

Tell me about a time a teacher or a parent or someone else in authority told you something that you knew immediately was wrong.

Comments

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

When I was in kindergarten, we had to color in pictures of various things--all I can remember was that one of them was a tulip, but I'm sure it was something innane like firetrucks and balls and the like. I colored the tulip in black. My teacher marked it wrong. I brought in the flower catalog we'd been looking at the night before the assignment which had black tulips as proof that I was right, and the teacher still marked it wrong. She said "It's not that your color was wrong, it's just that it wasn't the color it was *supposed* to be." (I think maybe it was supposed to be red?)

And from that point on I knew, nice as she was in general, that teachers could be wrong. (The following year I had the worst teacher in my whole school career who used to have the principal come and paddle one of the little boys (who I suspect was probably ADD, not just 'bad' like she said he was) in the hallway outside our classroom frequently. That whole year, I lived in terror of doing something 'bad' and getting paddled.)