Bay Area

Except that everything in that question pointed to the other answer, including the text book's own answer key. They weren't attempting to make a point in good faith--they were refusing to admit they'd made a mistake, and doubling down when they were challenged.

For people like that, admitting you're wrong is practically immoral, and challenging someone "above" you is abhorrent. Beurocracy and process trump factual correctness.

I think I see the teacher's attempted point, that the carbon and oxygen are combined into carbon dioxide

That teacher's point was nothing but vacuously true bullshit, purely grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to save face. If that were a valid answer, then every element involved participates in both sides of every reaction, so WTF is the point of making a distinction?

Other than blatant bad faith, the only possible way for the teacher to make that argument would be if he's so incompetent he thinks he's teaching "alchemy" instead of chemistry and shit's getting transmuted!

I had some instructors and administrators that would welcome corrections like this. And I had some that were exactly like those in the article. For the latter group, they generally cared more about process, authority, and hierarchy than about the facts. For these people, correcting someone "above" you is already a violation.

In 9th grade, I was in science class. We were doing some problems that involved measuring the net distance someone traveled after following cartesian directions (e.g., 3 cm north, 4cm west). The instructor explained that we could do the math and calculate it exactly if the directions only included either north/south or east/west, but if they included both, we'd have to draw it out on paper and measure it. I countered with my newfound knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem (which we had just learned about in math) to calculate the net N/S and net E/W and use the theorem to calculate the length of the remaining angled distance. The instructor said it was impossible. After I insisted, even proving it by drawing it out and showing it matched the calculated value, she started screaming at me how I was wrong. Literally screaming. So on the test, I "measured" my answer to something like 6 decimal places.

Mrs Johnston, if you're somehow reading this, I hope you turned out to be a less miserable person than you were 20 years ago. Also, fuck you for being more concerned about your own ego than about your students.