My Grade 7 Science teacher (and many other since then, due to my heightened academic and intellectual ability, although this story is about this particular teacher.)

This Grade 7 Science teacher was a lady, whom I shall call “Ms Jones”

Ms Jones was heavily Christian (New-Born, perhaps?), constantly encouraging her classes to go to church on Sunday, and to be “thankful for what god has given you”. She was such a believer in her religion that she refused to accept evolution - a mandatory topic in the syllabus. She would teach these scientific ideas, and afterwards tell us how she does not believe they are real, and that this could only have happened by gods hand.

One day, she was teaching about the solar system, and she gave us a marvelously false fact. “If the earth were to be 500 meters further from the sun than it is now, we would be permanently frozen, and if it were 500 meters closer to the sun, we would all burn and die”. She then proceeded to inform us that “we are so lucky that god favorited us and put us in the one place where life could form.”

Luckily I remembered something from a book I read a few years prior. The earth orbits at an average distance from the sun of 150 million kilometers. At our furthest point away from the sun, we are 153 million kilometers away, and at our closest point we are 148 million kilometers away. 5 MILLION KILOMETERS difference. And yet we don’t every year have this so called “permanent freeze” and we don't all “burn”.

So I told her “That’s impossible. The peaks of our mountains are at some points over 500m closer to the sun and people don't die on them.” I also told her “between winter and summer the earth moves millions of kilometers away and towards the sun”.

Obviously, being a notoriously stubborn person, she refused to accept my premise, instead arguing hers saying “but what if we were 500m closer at our closest point”, and then she decided to say we're moving on and I'm wrong.

Since then I never listened to her nonsense again. I knew I was smarter than her and clearly had nothing to learn from her. Even so, I still got 98% on her exam.