Would I be unreasonable to correct the teacher?

[Horthnangerabbey]

It is a minor thing really but if the teacher had told the class something that you knew was wrong, would you tell her? Or would you just explain to your own child the correct info and keep quiet?

Sorry, have not RTFT but at GCSE level that is a pathetic error by the teacher and in no way minor. That could really affect students' understanding, and marks if they pick up her mistake and run with it. Historical context is very important, not just in terms of social convention or political background but also in terms of literary history. To be making this mistake at GCSE level, I would guess the teacher must be generally incompetent. I would speak to the teacher and if not happy with her response, take it higher.

Where are you getting this from? I was taught 5’2” (admittedly that was when I did a levels about 100 years ago). It stuck in my mind because that’s my height

This is exactly why the myth abounds about him being small! His height was recorded as 5 '2" in old french feet which equates to about 5 foot 7 in modern UK imperial measurement. The average male height at that time was around 5 feet 5 in modern measurements.
Ergo, he was above average height.

I was an A level English teacher. I'm pretty sure my Head of Department would have sacked me if I'd taught the students that Jane Austen was Victorian!

Exactly Monumental, I wonder if those suggesting it a minor error or that complaining would be pedantic just don't know anything about the subject. I would not guess at what a minor or major error would be in some subjects, but I do know that in English this is a fundamental one!

Just adding to this thread to say I love Piggy’s comments! Austen can’t be a Victorian by any stretch of the imagination but some Victorians wished they could be Regency! Lots of Victorian novels hark back to the pre-railway era quite deliberately. I like the allegations of ‘smut’ in Austen! If you read Dickens and think you’ve found an unintentionally rude bit, it’s not necessarily unintentional! I think he and his friends had a kind of bet to see what they could get away with!

It's a toughie, I once corrected a teacher that had told my son that Marmite was a meat product. 🙄
Unfortunately she held it against me and my son until he left school 3 years later.... making me wonder about her mental health

Oh and the Napoleon is short myth was also started by British caricaturists who always depicted him as tiny for propaganda reasons. I didn’t know that about the old French measurements, though.

5 '2" in old french feet

what? WHAT? they used to have feet? what was a French foot? did they have French inches too?

I had this issue with DD2, noticed on a 'come see our class' day that she'd been (wrongly) corrected for using its (possessive) i.e, teacher had put an apostrophe in. Apostrophes are a bugbear of mine, and I couldn't let it lie, but didn't want to point it out in a classroom full of other parents, so I emailed the head asking if she could have a word, which she did. I couldn't have lived with DD not being able to use an apostrophe properly!

LemonysSnicket
Not true.
Gold is very conductive and doesn't corrode which is why it is used on circuit boards when reliability is essential, e.g medical equipment.
Copper is excellent but not as reliable.
The reason copper is used in wiring.... how much would you pay for a house with gold wiring?

Lap dance,
It's true! "French inches" 2.71cms, as opposed to the current imperial inch which is 2.54cms.
So according to "French feet" he would've been 1.68m, between 5ft 5 and 5ft 6

My MIL has old French feet. She's 73 and from Paris.

Just got this from wiki. It sounds completely mad but it's very entertaining

the toise de l'Écritoire, the distance between the fingertips of the outstretched arms of a man (yes, but which man?)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France_before_the_French_Revolution

There are also tables of the various measurements, none of which seem to bear any relation to any other measurements. Thank god for the sensible metric system!

The mediaeval royal units of length were based on the toise and in particular the toise de l'Écritoire, the distance between the fingertips of the outstretched arms of a man which was introduced in 790 AD by Charlemagne.
The toise had 6 pieds (feet) each of 326.6 mm (12.86 in). In 1668 the reference standard was found to have been deformed and it was replaced by the toise du Châtelet which, to accommodate the deformation of the earlier standard, was 11 mm (0.55%) shorter.
In 1747 this toise was replaced by a new toise of near-identical length – the Toise du Pérou, custody of which was given to l'Académie des Sciences au Louvre.
Although the pouce (inch), pied (foot) and toise (fathom) were fairly consistent throughout most of pre-revolutionary France, some areas had local variants of the toise. Other units of measure such as the aune (ell), the perche (perch/rood), the arpent and the lieue (league) had a number of variations, particularly the aune (which was used to measure cloth.
The loi du 19 frimaire an VIII (Law of 10 December 1799) states that one decimal metre is exactly 443.296 French lines, or 3 pieds 11.296 lignes de la "Toise du Pérou".
Thus the French royal foot is exactly 9000/27,706 metres (about 0.3248 m).
In Quebec, the surveys in French units were converted using the relationship 1 pied (of the French variety, the same word being used for English feet as well) = 12.789 English inches.
This makes the Quebec pied very slightly smaller (about 4 parts in one million) than the pied used in France.

amd according to google translate pouce actually means thumb.

Who has a thumb only 1" long? Mine are 2½"!

The “French foot” thing is so interesting thank you!

she will look strangely over-invested if she insists on correcting every minor error made by every single one of her child's teachers. This is going to happen, it is inevitable
I'm not sure we should see it as so inevitable tho, with something like GCSE material? Surely the teachers job is to know this content really well, and give correct info?
Mistakes are understandable in a general knowledge quiz, I know it sounds mean, but this is the stuff the teacher is paid to know about?

And the other thing about Napoleon is that his generals were all massive (over 6 feet tall) and his Republican Guard were recruted because they were big and tall and also wore enormous plumed helmets, so he appeared smaller than he really was.

I live in France where I teach English in a state school and I am also the mother of three (now adult) bilingual kids so can totally relate to what Evelynis, XXFactor and Margarita have said.

When I was a kid I spent the summer in France and when i went back to school in the Uk I realised that my Primary teacher who was trying to teach us French was saying something completely wrong so i waited until the rest of the class had filed out at break before i tried to explain the error: and got a bollocking for my pains. The teacher is always right and should never be corrrected - even when they are wrong. They tried to brush it off as "regional variation" or somesuch but now I live here full time and speak the language fluently I know that I was right - and could now explain why in a way i couldn't when I was ten.
My children avoided English lessons as much as they could but I know other friends in the same situation encountered the "if I haven't taught it to you then it's WRONG" attitude.

I wish someone would tell all the English teachers in France who use the term "copy book" instead of "exercise" book that it is NOT what it is called in English or American English (I have a feeling it may be called that in Ireland, but you can count the number of native speakers of Irish teaching here on the fingers of one hand.) . A copy book is for when you are learning to write and you copy out the letters, not for doing your exercises. The trouble is that by the time they get to my class they have got into the habit of calling it a copy book and now young colleagues are coming up throught the system having called it that since they started learning English so it is perpetuating itself - English as it is spoken in French classrooms but not in the UK or the US.
I correct my (non native speaker) colleagues without hesitation - but in a kind way and most of them encourage me to do so. If a pupil questions something another teacher has said I am more careful about it and say "you must have misunderstood" or "you must have written it down wrong".

Getting back to the OP's question I think the PP who suggested creating an opportunity to say to the teacher "my DD seems to have got the wrong end of the stick, perhaps the others have too... " is the way to go: I have used this technique myself..... although I in at least one case i was certain that the teacher wouldn't have said what DS swore blind she had, so it was an absolutely genuine request as he wouldn't take correction from me. (it was obviously not a language related question ).

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_complex
The conventional wisdom is that Napoleon compensated for his lack of height by seeking power, war, and conquest. At his death he was measured at 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m). This was average French male height but short for an officer.

From www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/napolean-bonaparte-having-been-short-is-a-myth/

he myth that he was short stems primarily from the fact that he is listed as 5 feet 2 inches tall at the time of his death. However, this is 5 feet 2 inches in French units. In modern international units, he was just shy of 5 feet 7 inches.

Arrrggh. No that would really bug me! There are two monarchs and a whole load of literary history out. Victorian writing is nothing like Regency writing. I would mention to the teacher that she's a Regency writer. Explain that your child came home confused and you explained, but you didn't want the child to correct them in class.

It is unrealistic to expect teachers to know everything, which I know for a fact because I know hundreds of teachers and not one of them knows everything. We are all learning. Sorry to disappoint.
I don't think you read my post. I specifically said that teachers at gcse are covering a specific syllabus, and it is therefore their job to know that material. I went on to say that it is not the same as a general knowledge quiz, where no one could know all the answers.
I stand by my view that someone employed to teach a topic, should get the information completely correct, or be glad to be corrected it they're wrong.
In my job I have to know my facts, its true of many, many jobs, not just teaching. The key is to know what you know, and what you don't know, and not muddle them up.

It's a fairly big error from someone teaching a set text.

However people getting all 'surely anyone teaching English would know such basic informatiom' might benefit from knowing that not all English teachers are literature specialists, some are English language specialists and others have a linguistics background. Someone with a 1st in linguistics from a top university may well have never studied literature above gcse. Equally, many amazing literature specialists don't have thr same academic grounding in language as thr language and linguistics specialists. Even within literature specialists, you don't study all eras through your degree. One of my friends specialised in a mix of old english & norse literature and 20th century mainly where she could (always thought it was an odd mix of electives).

I would expect all staff to have swotted up on the text they are teaching and agree a quick call might be in order / get your DC to clarify in school. Just feel the need to give some perspective to the 'surely everyone knows...' when it is quite a broad discipline.

I am a teacher of English, a literature specialist and I have an MA in the eighteenth century. So I would be a firm advocate for the long eighteenth century - if I had to!

Anyway, we teach Pride and Prejudice and Jekyll and Hyde at our school. It would be vital, and a starting point for study, to have Austen's period as Regency, or Georgian. The ideas of conduct, manners and society are pivotal to her narrative.

For example, Of Mice and Men (an old curriculum text) is set in Depression era America - the early-twentieth setting, post WW1 context of a lack of opportunity and transient labour is Steinbeck's chosen narrative focal point. To misplace the era by even a few decades would lead to errors or misunderstandings in reading it.

Right back to marking - my concerns are far more basic. If I could have a pound for every "Austin" or "Shakespear"...

Just to bring the tone down, I have never corrected my kids' teachers. Though I was sorely tempted when one of them got taught in sex ed that women have two holes. This despite an earnest little son-of-a-GP trying to persuade her otherwise.

I still feel a bit guilty that a generation of local kids think babies come out of your pee hole.

Could your child have got it wrong? That does happen sometimes.

But Maisy I did not touch Austen in my degree or indeed at school and know she is not Victorian. In fact, I read my first Austen five years ago. I haven't taught her but , if I did, I would know those basics.

I don't have a degree or any qualification in film studies, which I teach and sometimes don't know things which are very technical. But each and every film I teach , I conduct extensive research beforehand so that I know I will not be tripped up on any factual detail.