Claim:   Teacher's letter home upbraids student for correcting him in class.

Status:   Undetermined.

Example:   [Collected via e-mail, 2006]

This letter is supposedly from a teacher named Adam Hilliker. I suspect that it's humor or perhaps a comment on teaching some controversial issue, but I'm not sure.

Origins:   Many of us, during our time in school, have encountered teachers who made mistakes in class and viewed corrections from students not as opportunities to learn something themselves, but as unwarranted and intolerable challenges to their authority

That is the set-up in the letter displayed above, putatively written by a teacher (Adam Hilliker) to the mother of one of his students, notifying the parent that her son (Alex) will be serving one hour's detention for "disregarding authority" and demonstrating a "complete lack of respect for his school." The student's transgression? Having corrected a teacher who insisted to his class that a kilometer was longer than a mile. (In fact, a kilometer is only about 62% of a mile.) Although Mr. Hilliker acknowledges that the student was indeed correct, he maintains that young Alex "would be better off simply accepting my teachings without resistance."

Is this image a scan of a real letter? Many readers have seized on small details to declare it phony (e.g., the similarity of the names "Adam Hilliker" and "Adolf Hitler" combined with a letter dated on Hitler's birthday; the supposedly too-early appearance of smart quotes in a letter dating from 1994, the seeming lack of distortion in wrinkled portions of the page). All we know all this point is that the image was posted on the Internet back in May 2006 by someone who claimed it was a letter from his math teacher.

Last updated:   29 November 2006

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