My daughter knew all twelve cranial nerves by the time she was six. Olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, vestibulocochlear, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, hypoglossal. Six years old. Could rattle them off like other kids recite the alphabet. Some parents dread parent-teacher conferences. Me? I am counting down the days until I get THAT phone call.
You know the one.
“Mr. Borowski, your daughter corrected me in front of the class today.”
And I will show up to that conference with the biggest grin you have ever seen, because I GUARANTEE whatever my daughter said was right, and whatever that teacher taught was wrong. Not because the teacher is dumb. Not because teachers are bad people. But because the American education system has been playing a decades-long game of telephone with scientific facts, and somewhere along the line, the message got butchered beyond recognition.
I teach high school science. I have been doing this long enough to know that by the time students walk into my classroom, I have to spend the first few weeks UN-teaching the garbage they learned in elementary and middle school. Not opinions. Not interpretations. Actual, verifiable, demonstrably FALSE information that some well-meaning teacher passed along because THEIR teacher told them the same nonsense twenty years earlier.
And that is exactly why I cannot wait for the steam conversation.
Here is how it is going to go. Some middle school teacher is going to point at a boiling kettle and say, “Look, kids, you can see the steam coming out!” And my daughter is going to raise her hand and say, “Actually, that is not steam. Steam is invisible. The white cloud you are looking at is condensation… liquid water droplets suspended in air. The steam is the part between the spout and the fog that you CANNOT see.”
And that teacher is going to call me. And I am going to bring coffee. Maybe donuts. Because we are going to have a LOVELY conversation about phase transitions.
See, this is not about embarrassing anyone. Teachers work harder than almost anyone I know for pay that would make a fast food manager laugh. I started at $30,000 a year and I fed a family of six on that. I get it. Teachers are not the enemy. But the LIES… the lies are the enemy. And teachers are the ones unknowingly spreading them because nobody ever told THEM the truth.
So let me do what I do best and set the record straight. Buckle up. This is going to sting.
YOUR BLOOD IS NOT BLUE. EVER. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.
I cannot tell you how many students walk into my class convinced their blood is blue until it hits oxygen. Their middle school teacher told them. Their elementary school teacher told them. Probably their parents told them. All wrong.
Human blood is ALWAYS red. Always. Deoxygenated blood is a darker shade of red. Oxygenated blood is a brighter red. That is the whole spectrum right there. Two reds. Your veins look blue through your skin because of how light scatters and absorbs as it passes through tissue. It is an optical illusion, not a biological reality. You know what animal actually HAS blue blood? Horseshoe crabs. They use copper-based hemocyanin instead of iron-based hemoglobin. You are not a horseshoe crab. Your blood is red. Moving on.
THERE IS GRAVITY IN SPACE.
Every single year. EVERY year. Some kid tells me there is no gravity in space because their teacher told them astronauts float because there is no gravity up there. I want to scream into a pillow.
Gravity exists EVERYWHERE in the universe. It weakens with distance but it never, ever reaches zero. The International Space Station orbits at about 250 miles up, where gravity is still roughly 90% of what it is on the ground. Ninety percent! Astronauts float because they are in FREEFALL. The station and everyone inside it are falling toward Earth at the exact same rate, creating the sensation of weightlessness. The Moon does not just hang there out of politeness. Gravity holds it. The same gravity these teachers claim does not exist.
While I am at it, the same gravity that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth? That is described by Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. Beautiful equation. Predicts orbits, tides, falling apples. But here is where it gets fun, and where another massive misconception lives…
A THEORY DOES NOT “BECOME” A LAW.
This one drives me absolutely up the wall. I have had students, parents, even OTHER TEACHERS tell me that evolution is “just a theory” or that theories are basically unproven guesses that might someday graduate into laws if they try hard enough. That is not how ANY of this works.
A scientific LAW describes WHAT happens. It is a concise, often mathematical statement of an observed pattern. Newton’s Law tells us that every two masses attract each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. F equals G times m1 times m2 divided by r squared. Beautiful. Elegant. Describes WHAT gravity does.
A scientific THEORY explains WHY and HOW it happens. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity explains that mass and energy curve spacetime, and objects follow the straightest possible paths through that curved spacetime, which we experience as gravitational attraction. The theory explains Mercury’s weird orbit, gravitational lensing, time dilation, black holes, and gravitational waves that we actually DETECTED in 2015.
The law tells you WHAT. The theory tells you WHY. They are complementary, not sequential. Newton’s law did not “upgrade” into Einstein’s theory. The theory EXPLAINS the law while showing where the law has limitations. They coexist. Different jobs. Neither is “better” or “more proven” than the other.
So when someone says evolution is “just a theory,” they are telling you they do not understand what the word theory means in science. The theory of evolution is one of the most rigorously tested, extensively supported explanations in ALL of science. It is not a guess. It is not a hunch. It is a comprehensive framework backed by genetics, fossils, direct observation, and lab experiments. Calling it “just a theory” is like calling gravity “just a theory.” Go ahead. Jump off a building and let me know how your skepticism works out.
WE DO NOT ONLY USE 10% OF OUR BRAINS.
If you believe this, you are ironically proving it wrong by using even less. Brain imaging shows that virtually every region of the brain has a function and gets used regularly. Different areas activate for different tasks, but over the course of a day, you use the whole thing. This myth probably started from a misquote of William James or some early misunderstanding of neural mapping. Either way, it is dead wrong and I am tired of hearing it.
EVOLUTION DOES NOT MEAN YOUR GRANDPA WAS A MONKEY.
Humans did not evolve from modern chimpanzees or gorillas or any primate alive today. Humans and modern apes share a COMMON ANCESTOR that lived millions of years ago. We went one direction on the family tree. Chimps went another. Gorillas went another. The fact that chimps still exist does not disprove evolution any more than the fact that your cousins still exist disproves that you share grandparents.
And while we are at it, evolution is not goal-directed. Organisms do not evolve “in order to” survive. There is no plan. Random genetic variation happens. Natural selection filters it. Traits that happen to improve reproductive success in a specific environment get passed along. That is it. No blueprint. No destination. No cosmic plan for improvement. Parasites LOSE complexity when it benefits them. Evolution can go backward, sideways, or nowhere at all.
HEAVIER THINGS DO NOT FALL FASTER.
Galileo figured this out. In a vacuum, a bowling ball and a feather fall at EXACTLY the same rate. Air resistance is the reason things seem to fall at different speeds in everyday life. Drop a hammer and a feather on the Moon where there is no atmosphere, and they hit the ground at the same time. Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott actually did this on camera in 1971. The footage is on the internet. Watch it. Then explain to me why we are still teaching kids otherwise. Oh yeah… we went to the Moon. It would be too hard to fake this experiment.
And here is one that REALLY gets people. A falling elephant and a falling feather. Which one experiences more air resistance? Go ahead. Think about it. I will wait.
You said the feather, did you not? Wrong. It is the elephant. By a LOT. The elephant has a massively larger surface area plowing through the air, which means the actual force of air resistance acting on it is enormous compared to the tiny wisp of drag on a feather. “But Bski, the feather floats down slowly and the elephant plummets!” Yes. I know. That is because the elephant has so much MORE MASS that it overwhelms its incredible air resistance. The feather barely weighs anything, so even that tiny amount of drag is enough to slow it to a lazy drift. It is not about which object experiences more air resistance. It is about the RATIO of air resistance to mass. The elephant’s mass wins that fight in a landslide. The feather’s mass loses it spectacularly. Same principle, completely different outcomes, and almost everyone gets it backward because nobody taught them to think about the relationship between force and mass instead of just force alone.
THE TONGUE MAP IS A LIE.
You do NOT taste sweet only on the tip, sour on the sides, salty in the front, and bitter in the back. Every taste bud on your tongue can detect sweet, sour, salty, bitter, AND umami. This myth came from a misinterpretation of a German research paper from the 1800s and somehow made it into every biology textbook for the next century. Textbook publishers apparently thought fact-checking was optional.
SEASONS ARE NOT CAUSED BY EARTH GETTING CLOSER TO THE SUN.
Earth’s orbit is nearly circular. The difference between our closest and farthest points from the Sun is only about 3%. Seasons happen because Earth’s axis is tilted at roughly 23.5 degrees. When the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the Sun, we get summer. When it tilts away, winter. Meanwhile, the Southern Hemisphere experiences the opposite. Fun fact… Earth is actually CLOSEST to the Sun in early January, right in the middle of Northern Hemisphere winter. Chew on that one for a minute.
DIAMONDS ARE NOT MADE FROM COMPRESSED COAL.
Coal comes from ancient plant material near Earth’s surface. Most natural diamonds formed over a BILLION years ago at extreme depths in the mantle, long before land plants even existed. They are both carbon, sure, but that is like saying you and a pencil are basically the same thing because you both contain carbon.
CHAMELEONS DO NOT CHANGE COLOR FOR CAMOUFLAGE.
They primarily change color to regulate temperature, communicate with other chameleons, and signal mood or social status. The camouflage thing is mostly Hollywood nonsense. A chameleon sitting on a red couch does not turn red. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this works.
BATS ARE NOT BLIND.
All bat species have functional eyes. Many see quite well. They use echolocation as an ADDITIONAL sensory tool, not as a replacement for sight. Calling someone “blind as a bat” is scientifically illiterate. Bats see fine. You are the one who is blind… to the facts.
LIGHTNING ABSOLUTELY STRIKES THE SAME PLACE TWICE.
The Empire State Building gets hit roughly 25 times per year. Tall, conductive structures are lightning magnets. This saying should have died with the first lightning rod, but here we are, still repeating it like it is some kind of profound wisdom.
A SCIENTIFIC LAW CAN BE WRONG.
Here is one that really bakes people’s noodles. Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation? Technically wrong. It works beautifully for everyday calculations and most of the solar system, but it cannot account for Mercury’s orbital precession, gravitational lensing, or the behavior of objects near extreme gravitational fields. Einstein’s General Relativity superseded it, showing that Newton’s law is an excellent approximation but not the complete picture. Laws describe observed patterns. When new observations break the pattern, the law gets refined or replaced. Science is not dogma. It is self-correcting. That is the whole POINT.
THERE ARE NOT THREE STATES OF MATTER. THERE ARE WAY MORE THAN THREE.
Solid, liquid, gas. That is what they teach in elementary school and apparently some teachers just… stopped there. Plasma is the FOURTH state, and it is the most common form of visible matter in the entire universe. Stars are plasma. Lightning is plasma. Your fluorescent lights contain plasma. Then there are Bose-Einstein condensates, supercritical fluids, fermionic condensates, and a bunch of other exotic states that exist under extreme conditions. Three states of matter. Sure. And there are only three flavors of ice cream.
ELECTRONS DO NOT ORBIT THE NUCLEUS LIKE PLANETS.
The Bohr model is a teaching tool, not reality. Electrons exist in probabilistic clouds called orbitals. They do not follow neat little circular paths. Quantum mechanics describes their behavior through wave functions and probability distributions. An electron is not a tiny ball zooming around a tiny sun. It is more like a smeared-out cloud of probability, and if that makes your head hurt, welcome to quantum physics. It makes everyone’s head hurt.
WATER DOES NOT CONDUCT ELECTRICITY.
Pure water is actually a terrible conductor. It is the dissolved minerals and ions in tap water, lake water, ocean water, etc., that carry electrical current. Distilled, deionized water is essentially an insulator. So when your teacher told you water conducts electricity, what they SHOULD have said is that the stuff dissolved IN the water conducts electricity. Details matter. This is science, not poetry.
DINOSAURS ARE NOT EXTINCT.
Birds are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs. Literally. Phylogenetically. This is not up for debate. So technically, every time you eat a chicken nugget, you are eating a dinosaur. You are welcome for that mental image.
THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA IS NOT VISIBLE FROM SPACE.
Multiple astronauts have confirmed this. The wall is long but narrow, and its materials blend with the surrounding terrain. You can see highways, airports, and city grids from low Earth orbit, but the Great Wall? Not with the naked eye. Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei even confirmed it when he got up there. Sorry to disappoint.
Now. I know what some of you are thinking. “These are small things. They do not matter.”
They matter ENORMOUSLY. When students learn incorrect information from a trusted authority figure and carry it for years, it creates a foundation of scientific illiteracy that makes them vulnerable to misinformation later in life. The kid who thinks blood is blue grows up to distrust medical professionals who tell them otherwise. The kid who thinks “just a theory” means “just a guess” grows up dismissing evolution, climate science, and germ theory with equal confidence and equal ignorance.
Every single one of these myths started with a teacher who was taught the same myth by their teacher. Nobody checked. Nobody questioned. Nobody said, “Wait, is this actually true?” And the cycle repeated, generation after generation, until these lies became so embedded in our culture that correcting them makes YOU look like the crazy one.
I have spent my career breaking that cycle. Sometimes it makes me popular. Most of the time it makes me the annoying guy at the faculty meeting who raises his hand too much. I can live with that.
So to every elementary and middle school teacher reading this… I am not attacking you. I know you work insane hours for insulting pay in a system that often treats you like babysitters with whiteboards. I respect the heck out of what you do. But PLEASE, before you teach something as fact, take thirty seconds and verify it. Google it. Check a primary source. Ask the high school science teacher down the hall. Because I promise you, whatever you teach those kids, they will believe it with their entire little hearts, and it will take me an entire semester to undo it.
And to my daughter… keep correcting people, kiddo. Daddy’s got your back. And daddy’s got the donuts for the conference.
But what do I know? I am only a high school science teacher who has spent over two decades correcting the myths that other classrooms created, a guy who has published two science textbooks, and apparently the only person left who thinks we should teach kids things that are actually TRUE.
So here is my question for you. Which of these did YOU believe was true before reading this? How many of these lies were you taught by a teacher you trusted? Drop it in the replies. I genuinely want to know. And if you are a teacher who just realized you have been accidentally lying to kids for years… welcome to the club. The first step is admitting it. The second step is stopping. The donuts are on me.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
—
X (Twitter): x.com/BskiMike22802
Substack: substack.com/@bskimike22802
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@BskiMike22802
AFNN: https://afnn.us/author/mikeborowski/
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA