3．
Answer the questions.
Mr Harris
taught sixth-grade science. On the first day of his class, he gave us a talk
about an animal called "birdeat", which died out during the Ice Age.
he passed around a skull(头骨) as he talked. We
all took notes carefully and later we had a test.
When he
returned my paper the next day, there was a big red "x" through each
of my answers. I had failed! I had written. exactly(确切地) what Mr Harris said. Then I learned that everyone
in the class had failed. What had happened? Very simple, Mr Harris said he had
made all that "birdcat", there had never been any such animal. So the
information in our notes was incorrect. Did you think you would get good marks
for incorrect answers?
We felt
that wasn't fair. What kind of test was this? And what kind of teacher?
We should
have found it out, Mr Harris said. After all, at the very moment he was passing
around the "birdcat" skull, in fact a cat's. He had told us many
unbelieva-ble things about the animal, such as the size, the colour, the
strength…but none of us had questioned.
Mr Harris
said he hoped we could learn something from this lesson. Teachers and textbooks
are not always correct. In fact no one is. He told us not to let our minds go
to sleep, and to speak up if we ever thought he or the textbook was wrong.
Up to now
I haven't made any great scientific discoveries, but Mr Harris's class gave my
classmates and me something just as important; to look people in the eye and
tell them they are wrong.
