I always thought it was misguided to advice parents to demand homework be done at a certain time or enforce certain metrics (test scores, volunteer hours, etc), rather than just having intelligent conversations about, well, anything!
Parents are one part of it, but teachers are another. I grew up in a very rural but fairly rich community, not because the people were rich (quite the opposite actually), rather because there was a nuclear power plant in town that paid 98% of the towns taxes.
I don't remember the exact prompt but I do recall writing a paper for 10th grade english class about quarks. My english teacher went and talked to one of our science teachers because she thought I made up the entire thing, she didn't think quarks were real.
That in itself is fine, this was 1998, I doubt many english teachers would be aware of them. What bothers me is that I'm fairly sure that the only reason my paper wasn't just thrown out was that we were lucky enough to get a science teacher who was an ex-Harvard associated researcher whom moved 'out to the sticks' for family reasons. It was this chap that my english professor asked, thankfully, since I'm relatively certain that no one else in the school, let alone the rest of the science department, would have had a clue. Without that stroke of luck I'd have probably been given an F and not even considered writing outside the box papers again, or at least delayed writing another one.
Side note, but this random teacher I had was amazing, he really changed a lot of the way I look at things. From his profession (biology), to thinking entrepreneurial, to learning the basics of the stock market when I was 14...I learned a lot from that guy. All because we were just lucky enough to have someone of his caliber there to glean knowledge from. It's amazing what a single teacher can do to change someone very early in their life.
Which is to say, your (depressingly typical) English teacher shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt on this. She probably had a dictionary sitting in her classroom that could have told her what "quark" means and that they come in six flavors. But she didn't even think to reach for it. Nevermind actually going to the library like she probably orders her students to do.
Nobody can be faulted for not knowing everything, but not even trying to learn is unforgivable in an alleged teacher.
Not only did people use online dictionaries, but we also used online maps (mapquest.com), movie listings (moviefone.com), greeting cards (bluemountain.com) and hundreds of other online services. Netscape had already hit its peak and was on its way down. High school textbooks spoke of the internet. I don't think I knew students who hadn't used instant messengers like Yahoo!, AIM or ICQ.
I was in a town of about 100,000 people in Colorado.
What I don't understand is, if there was such confusion over units, why didn't they simply use known values for the distances involved? I imagine angles weren't a problem. Or, god forbid, do their own measurements now that they had the technique? If it was repeatable to that degree of precision 240 years apart nearly 2000 years earlier, I should have thought they could at least settle the gross magnitude error that misled Columbus.
[1]1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographic...
I was referring specifically to the pattern of how long it took in the Middle Ages for literature folks to get ahold of the idea. The fact is those 8th century monks got the idea from classical sources.
The subtext of the paper would be "you English teachers can't expect to know about scientific discoveries of the last couple hundred years, can you?"
quark n. (Phys.) one of several (orig. three) hypothetical components of elementary particles.
That's from the 7th edition (1982, reprinted 1984) of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, about the size of a thick hardback novel.
Granted, there's not much there, but enough to prove that a student's not just making something up.
The outperformers did get a few Bs along the way (or many) but to your point had intellectual parents. In some cases they enforced studying. In others it was providing early access to computers.