Here's a sampling of what I got for facts at school:

• Dolphins are mammals, porpoises are fish.
• All paragraphs contain three sentences.
• The number line stops at zero.
• "Envoy" is a variant spelling of "ennui".
• If you make an `r' curly, you get paddled.
• Zero is not an integer.
• King Norman conquered the Saxons in 1066.
• All words ending in -ly are adverbs*.
• "Cathedral" comes from "hedra", meaning "face", as in polyhedral dice.
• You convert celsius to centigrade by dividing by 32.
• "Intestinal fortitude" is not a phrase used in polite company (or school).
• Vultures are not carnivores.

Sounds a lot like those lists you see from time to time of hilarious answers schoolkids provide on tests (guess why), doesn't it? Or like the drivel the Lucy used to spout to Linus ("It's called a `palm tree', because the average person can wrap their palm around it."). But this came straight from the mouths of "teachers".

* There are lots of counterexamples -- here is what I could come up with in about a minute, back in fifth grade: ugly, lovely, friendly, silly, elderly, wily, curly. The teacher, hearing this list, reversed her earlier statement and declared that all words ending in -ly were adJECTives.