Phil online

My third grade teacher was a lot of fun. But she wasn’t too smart. The best thing I learned in third grade was that I was smarter than my teacher. That’s also the worst thing I learned.

This teacher once told our class that cows and humans were an example of a symbiotic relationship (though I don’t think she used that term). It was also proof that there is a grand design to the world.

You see, cows rely on humans to milk them. If man was no longer around to milk the cows, the cows would all die from rupture udders. And if cows weren’t around, man wouldn’t have milk. “See how it all works together?”

I don’t know if my teacher had any kids. I assumed she did, but I don’t know for sure. If she did, though, she would surely have a better idea about how mammary glands (and udders) work.

But maybe the “woman’s liberation” 70’s had freed her of the need to know these things and her kids were bottle-fed.

I may have only been 8 years old, but I wasn’t buying this story anyway. I knew that cows didn’t explode if they weren’t milked. That couldn’t happen because not all cows were “owned” by humans. But I did learn to take third grade with a grain of salt.

I wonder if she was smoking her breakfast.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Fallacies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.