Imagine that you are in a classroom or a meeting. The teacher or the meeting leader says something incorrect. In your opinion, which of the following is the best thing to do?

Imagine that you are in a classroom or a meeting. The teacher or the meeting leader says something incorrect. In your opinion, which of the following is the best thing to do?

•Interrupt and correct the mistake right away.
•Wait until the class or meeting is over and the people are gone, and then talk to the teacher or meeting leader.
•Say nothing.

First and foremost, interrupting the teacher and correcting the mistake would be helpful to raise the efficiency of the course. To be more specific, correcting the fault immediately in class would help the other students, even the teacher himself/herself, to recognize the fault and more focus on the content. Moreover, with the correction of the mistake, the teacher could emphasize this point and help students better remember the knowledge so that they would not make the same mistake in the future.

Furthermore, it would raise an interaction between the teacher and the student since the student has to correct the mistake. Take the case of my own experiment. When I was young, I got used to the education model that the teacher is the main character in the class, and we students have to listen carefully, without saying anything only when the teacher raises a question and picks someone up to answer.  However, when I entered the university, most teachers want their students to raise questions in class so that they would know whether students have already understood what he/she said. Unfortunately, only a small group of students are willing to raise question since other have always be taught to be silent and negative in class. Therefore, if the student corrects the mistake immediately in class, this would raise the interaction between students and teacher and would have a positive effect on students’ study.

Nevertheless, a voice arises that interrupting the teacher and correcting the mistake right away would be impolite and make the teacher feel embarrassed. Ironically, the final goal of the study is to learn the truth rather than fallacy. If we wait until the class is over and then talk to the teacher about the mistake, or even stay silent, other students might get misled. Even if the teacher corrects the mistake in the next class, other students will not get impressed since they probably have forgotten the previous mistake. As a result, this would have a bad influence on other students’ understanding of certain knowledge.