Just some more reflecting

I've been collecting alot of my thoughts in a notebook immediately after my tutoring experiences, so I apologize for the lack of blogging! Handwriting allows me to focus my thoughts a little bit better for what I write here.  One experience that I had four weeks ago involved a substitute teacher that was in my class on the day of my tutoring.  I didn't know that the substitutes that came in were in for the full day, and were qualified elementary educators.  This scared me when I learned how often my teacher was out of school, and how often a new teacher who may not be as experienced was responsible for teaching a classroom of students with whom they were not familiar with.  We were doing a language arts exercise in which the children were asked to change the proper nouns to common nouns.  The words were Florida and Africa.  As I went around to check on how all of the children were doing, I noticed that all of them, first of all did not understand what the exercise was asking to do without explicit direction, but that when they did understand the question, they all wrote "country" next to the word Africa.  The substitute remained at the desk texting and shouting for silence as I walked around to the different tables explaining the question, and trying to pry the correct answer out of them.  To my surprise, all but two students (two of the more advanced students in the class) had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what a continent was.  Now at first I figured it was something that they may not have gotten to, but then i remembered that a lot of the language exercises mix mostly things that they already know, with newly learned language and grammatical rules... so why would this generic third grade exercise include information that a generic third grader would not know?  Isn't the idea that everything in these exercises reinforce things that the students have already learned? 
After hinting at this answer to the students, I was more surprised when the substitute teacher began to write the answers out on the board and go over it with the class.  She looked at the question and then looked at me, and then back to the paper again.  In front of the students, she asked me whether it was a continent or a country.  I said continent, so she checked the answer book after the children protested for the answer to be country, and she said she would accept either answer.  On one side, the incident was pretty comical, but on the other, it was just downright sad.  The fact that a third grade classroom in Providence doesn't know the difference between a country and a continent blows my mind.  More so, the fact that an educator allowed students to learn something incorrectly blew my mind as well.  Granted, I will admit to struggling with math corrections/ calculations with the students here and there, but I recognize them and correct them accordingly, and make sure that when I do something, I can clearly and properly explain my thinking with the students.  It's kind of like teaching a preschool of toddlers that a desk is called a chair, and that they put their clothes in an oven, and dinner in their closets.  As an educator of young children I feel like you have to have some kind of control over the information you share, and be knowledgeable.  Learning at this age is so important, and its frustrating to see where their struggle with the material in class comes from.  That's why their test scores are so low, and their understanding of the subjects that I've been helping with so sub par. It's even more frustrating because as I prepare to teach at the high school level, their academic progress and ability to succeed or want to succeed and care about education will have been greatly depleted and decayed by the time they reach the high school.