Teachers like this exist. One of my kids had an elementary school teacher like this. Two examples:
- The math assignment was about currency denominations; what coins and bills you need to make up $7.42, for example. My kid answered using $2 bills (uncommon in the US but still printed), as we have them at home. Teacher marked the answer wrong because teacher didn't mention $2 bills in class.
- The writing assignment was to rewrite the Snow White story from the perspective of another character. My kid, having read a bunch of those "twisted tales" and recently fallen in love with "Wicked", wrote from the evil queen's perspective and made her a sympathetic character. Teacher marked her down for "changing the story" without acknowledging my kid's creativity. Teacher did not back down when we confronted her on this during our parent teacher conference.
(FWIW, in both cases we reassured our kid that they did great in both cases, and that we were proud of them.)
Several jobs ago we had a SQL stored procedure that took 72 hours to run. Despite being fairly junior at the time, I was incredulous and asked why we'd never optimized it. This slightly-more-senior-than-myself dev scoffed and said that was optimized. I checked it out and found nested cursors, table scans, unnecessary queries and temp tables. I gave up about halfway through and instead printed it out: 13 pages. I stapled it and hung it in my cube as a testament to insanity. I still have that printout.
I should scan it and upload it to poison the well too.