Weird story

None of the students volunteered it? That just means the few who may have been paying attention didn't feel at that moment like speaking up. You may have noticed a few with question marks on their faces, but their were probably some who simply look at their desk or straight forward and tried not to roll their eyes at the forgetfulness of the teacher.

Walt
 
Walter Wayne said:
None of the students volunteered it? That just means the few who may have been paying attention didn't feel at that moment like speaking up. You may have noticed a few with question marks on their faces, but their were probably some who simply look at their desk or straight forward and tried not to roll their eyes at the forgetfulness of the teacher.
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Doesn't fly. I appealed to the class as a whole to find someone to back me up, and the teacher did likewise. There was comprehensive support for the teacher's position. And this wasn't a group who would have agreed black was white just because the teacher said so. They could all have forgotten, but I think it was a genuine response.

No, I didn't take notes. I'm a rotten note-taker. I prefer (even at university) to try to remember the lecture as it's being given.

Rolfe.
 
thanks for bumping this Rolfe, because now i can correct one very large mistake. There is NO ichneumon "fly". there is, however, a large family of Ichneumonidae, parasitic *wasps.*
This group includes many caterpillar parasites, including one of the cabbage butterfly.

There is a parasitic fly group (tachinids), but these are large and are not at all "wasp-y" in appearance.

link to the Canada parasitic wasp page

[/pedantic entomological ranting]
 
Rolfey,
i think you are making the whole thing up. these things could never in a million trillion years happen. You are woowoo.
 
Interesting story Rolfe! I never saw it originally.

Dingler remarked:

The question is where did that information come from? Had you read, heard of or studied the fly before and simply forgotten the original source? Did you unintentionally replace your forgotten source with the teacher's previous lesson? We all know that the mind is both creative and fallible.
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I feel disposed to feel that this scenario is most likely to be correct. I was thinking this after I read your opening post.

But, unlike the skeptics, I am not at all 100% confident that this explanation is the correct one. I just feel that, taking everything into consideration, the explanation is going to lie along these lines.

Another explanation is that, because it was near the end of the lesson, the rest of the class simply weren't paying attention.

Most of the other explanations are fairly weird (apart from the hypothesis you're just winding us up!). But the weirdness in itself shouldn't compel us to reject these hypotheses. This is where I differ from skeptics.

But on the whole I feel disposed to go for dingler's explanation. Of course it's really quite impossible for any of us to say. Now if this phenomena were quite frequent, that would be somewhat more interesting. Maybe it is, I really don't know. Do you?

But anyway, even if it were relatively common we could appeal to the extraordinary capacity of the mind to mix up and even fabricate memories etc. On the other hand this hypothesis is unfalsifiable i.e it can always be appealed to.

It's difficult to know what to believe in anecdotes of apparently anomalous occurrences. My general rule of thumb would be that if it is a one off event, or the anomalous phenomenon in question tend to be limited in time or space, or be unmistakably culturally specific, then we should be more disposed to accept any possible "normal" explanations then if the alleged phenomenon reported were universal.
 
So according to Bug Girl, and yourself, the facts were not correct? The teacher did not tell about this, because it is not so. So somehow, you dreamed or daydreamed up this information, probably from things you had heard elsewhere (I'll bet you were an inquisitive kid ;)), a memory slip making you think the teacher told it.

When you related the story the next day, the teacher did not know enough to tell you that you had the facts wrong, so he just let it hang.

Not too mysterious, methinks.

Hans
 
Rolfe said:
If someone else told me this, I wouldn't believe it. It's only because it happened to me that I'm still puzzling at it.
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Beats the hell out of me. I regularly have experiences where I'm watching television and see the same thing after the commercial break. This usually happens when I'm drinking Fuller's ESB or Abbot Ale. But I've never actually recorded it in such a way that it would stand up to scrutiny later. Either I'm a precog, or it's some trick of memory.
 
This is quite an interesting thread!Thanks for bumping it.

I agree with those who suggested you were the only student in class paying attention - it is not impossible at all.

It reminded me of a funny incident that happened in my biology class, some 11 years ago. Our teacher was telling us about some flower, insect, fungus, whatever, and telling us about various species within the group. We were all writing it down (about 15 students in class). At some point she realised that noone was actually listening, we were mechanically writing things down. So she started making things up to see if anyone would notice.

She was saying ridiculous things like: (lets say she was talking about fungi) "in this group we have the blue angel fungus, the purple dotted fungus, the chocolate velvet fungus, the sweet dream fungus". We just kept writing it down, noone realising it was a bit weird. After a couple of minutes, she started laughing and we all looked up, puzzled. She explained she saw we were all writing without listening, and to check how robotised we were she started saying nonsense. We looked into our notepads and realised we really jotted all those things down without realising so.

On the other hand, it happened quite a few times that teachers forgot the exact point in curriculum from which they should resume the lecture, and either skipped a part or started again on a subject they already did the day before. If you teach five or six classes who are in the same year, so you need to repeat the same lecture five or six times and each class probably has a slightly different speed, it is easy to forget where you stopped last time.

On the possibility that you read the information before - do you have an older sibling whose science books you were occasionally reading or looking at? My sister was two years ahead of me in school. The nerd that I am, I often read her school books, and probably managed to retain some information.
 
bug_girl said:
thanks for bumping this Rolfe, because now i can correct one very large mistake. There is NO ichneumon "fly". there is, however, a large family of Ichneumonidae, parasitic *wasps.*
This group includes many caterpillar parasites, including one of the cabbage butterfly.
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Mmm, I wonder if there has been a change in nomenclature? Because the book I looked it up in (Animals Without Backbones, by Ralph Buchsbaum, which I note was first published in 1938 and revised in 1948 - though it was a set book for my university course in 1971) definitely calls it the "ichneumon fly".

I don't have any elder siblings, and the thing about the story is that I remember the teacher telling us about it. Not of reading it in a book (I didn't own the Buchsbaum book at the time this happened), not of seeing it on TV (which we didn't have at the time anyway), not of being told by anyone else, but of hearing Mr. Brodie standing in class the previous afternoon telling us about it.

It's possible I was the only one in class paying attention. But that would have to include the teacher, who swore that he hadn't got that far in the lesson the previous day. (But you know what? I still entertain that explanation.)

It's possible the entire class plus the teacher were involved in some weird plot to wind me up. Assuming that I would answer the question, and then nobody ever in the months following admitting it was a wind-up - I don't think so!

It's possible I dreamed the second day's episode. It's just that the memory doesn't have the quality of a dream. Like I said, I was wearing clothes, and I knew the answer - I was prepared for class. Neither of these sounds like the sort of dreams I have!

It's possible I'm lying to you all and made the entire story up.

And then there are woo-woo explanations. Which I suppose needn't be woo-woo as in supernatural, just rather creative interpretations of the space-time continuum!

I honestly don't know. And since it was a one-off, unrepeatable, untestable, I don't think there's any way to settle it. It's just something that has mildly intrigued me over the years. And I thought Olaf would enjoy the story.

Rolfe.
 
Nice story.

Not sure there's any way forward on these kinds of things without getting outside of the 'memory' of it and actually interview the teacher or some of the students.
 
Im' sorry, but "creative interpretations of the space-time continuum" IS woowoo (or science fiction). There is no such thing in the real world.

I'm still puzzled about the mixed infirmation here: Is there or is there not an ichneumon fly that does what you said it did? I find it rather important to the story whether the information was correct or not.

OTOH, at thirteen, an inquisitive kid has a LOT of factual information stashed away in her brain, and, well even if you do not remember it now, you could have read about the ich... whatever, somewhere, sometimes.

Hans
 
Rolfe- I have no Biology training at all, but I've known about Ichneumon flies (as they were called when I first heard of them), since about the same time as you - around 1970. I do not recall where I first encountered them , but I do recall knowing about them when in high school ( Some years later I read about Sphex wasps , which have similarly nasty habits, but I definitely knew of Ichneumons as flys, not wasps. Bug Girl's comment is my first encounter with that term.)

We both grew up in Scotland , so I can't help wondering if we may have learned of Ichneumons from the same source. (For instance, Cabbage whites are common garden butterflies in Scotland I believe and may have featured on programmes like "Gardeners' Question Time" on the radio.) (Nb. I STILL don't have a telly!)

I'm surprised you did not consider earlier that Day 2 might be a wrong memory, as it had occurred to me before I was done reading your first post. It should be checkable, even after all this time.
Among several recent coincidences, I met an ex schoolmate who could recall my birthday and home address, after a quarter century, so memorable lessons ought to be clear in some classmates' minds.

I also just met the original Dr. I.Rolfe, (no relation as we established) , for the first time in twenty years.

My money is on you hearing this information on the radio. This would make it easy to wrongly recall being taught it in school.
I find it rather long odds that both of us would know about this at similar times, without being able to recall where we learned it.
 
Rolfe said:
If someone else told me this, I wouldn't believe it. It's only because it happened to me that I'm still puzzling at it.

Hi Rolfe. I believe we come to earth in a physical body to learn lessons and gain wisdom. We existed before we came here - we were what some people call spirit. In the spirit world we do not need a body because that world is a world of thought. Our mind power in our natural state is awesome. It is that power that can lift objects, interfere with electrics etc.,

When we come here the mind is locked, and what has gone before and what we come here to learn is not known to us. The mind that is available to us is like a blank book and as we go along lots of info is keyed in.

The mind that is availlabe to us is split in to three sections. The first section would be the future sub conscious, the second section would be the now and the third section would be the past sub conscious.

We are allowed help from the spirit world, to help us achieve what we came here for. We are also given things to 'wake us up', get us wondering why things happen etc., I believe that in your sleep state you were given the information about the teacher and the butterfly and it sat in your future sub conscious. It was waiting for your teacher to trigger it off and it was brought in to the present or now part of the mind and then moved across to the past sub conscious.

I will now sit back and wait for the avalanche of protest and possible name calling but I do like a good debate!!
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Welcome Lorri. You sure posted the basics for a good debate, but I suggest we do not hijack Rolfe's thread for it. How about starting a new one about your theory?

Hans
 
the only way i can see these wasps being called "flies" is the way that a "butterfly" is not, well, a fly at all. It's a very large physical difference.

Flies "proper" have a greatly reduced second pair of wings. Butterflies clearly have four large wings. A tip that the name is more popular than accurate is the spacing. It's written "butterfly." The actual parasitic fly i mentioned is a Tachinid fly. (two words).

Sorry guys, i think your memories are in error. Linnaeus recognized these as separate groups. I'm pretty sure your memories don't go back that far.:p
 
Well, if you added them together...


The oddity is that we remember the same error- ie we probably heard it from the same source. ( The use of the generic term "fly" for a flying insect might suggest either a non specialist source, or a non specialist target audience).

ps No contest BG, if you say they are wasps, I shall so name them, outside this thre
ead.
 
bug_girl said:
the only way i can see these wasps being called "flies" is the way that a "butterfly" is not, well, a fly at all. It's a very large physical difference.
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Well I'm not an entomologist. All I know is that when I looked in the index of this book I have in front of me, I found "Ichneumon fly, ovipositor of, 320".

On p. 320 what is says is, "In the ichneumon flies the ovipositor is long and sharp; and when, in some way, the ichneumon fly senses the presence of a beetle larva within a tree, the ovipositor is used to drill a hole in the wood and deposit eggs in the body of the larva."

So obviously somebody thinks it's called the ichneumon fly. (Ralph Buchsbaum, for one.)

By the way, Soapy Sam and I have established that although we lived in the same town and may have had contact as primary-age children (and went to the same university), we didn't attend the same secondary school. This happened at secondary school, obviously.

Rolfe.
 
I reckon we were just smarter than the average bears. We probably knew all about it at primary school!


Truth is, we both haunted the same public library as kids. We may well have stumbled on the same source material. (Though I usually had my dad's ticket so I could track down new Gollancz SF in the adult section.)
 
Soapy Sam said:
(Though I usually had my dad's ticket so I could track down new Gollancz SF in the adult section.)
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Oh God! I used to scour these same shelves for these same yellow covers!

But the mystery here isn't that I knew about the damn fly (or wasp or whatever). If that had been it, I'd just have stuck my hand up and been a sickening little know-all. It's that when Mr. Brodie asked the question I had a clear memory of him standing right there telling us about it the previous afternoon. I thought he was just checking to see if people had been listening, and using that as a recap of the end of the previous lesson. Until he said "where did you hear all that?"

Even then, my second assumption was that he'd got further than he meant to in his lesson plan the previous day, and forgotten that he'd already told us. Until the entire rest of the class denied all knowledge. Then I was spooked.

And all I ever read in that library was fiction.

Rolfe.
 
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