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I learnt a similar lesson about teachers early on at school and extended it to all classes of authorities through life. See also Are Experts Real?[1]

[1]: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are-experts-real...

> When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.

This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher. If you want to be extra charitable a Science teacher. Most people don’t care about it understand the scientific method and it’s a profoundly unnatural way of thinking, much like doing formal logic.

> This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher.

I'm not sure. Physics teachers often have to deal with absolute laws of physics, e.g. "you can't make a perpetual motion machine".

You can't ever demonstrate that something doesn't exist (philosophy of the black swan/inviting disproof by counter-example), so it's challenging for teachers to communicate this as a fact to curious students: the result is sometimes teachers appearing scornful.

One slightly-misunderstood law of conservation and you're suddenly a physics teacher who is scorning the truth.

> people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent

That's genuinely a baffling lesson to take from that incident. I mean, your father was the credentialed one, with an engineering degree, and the teacher was the unqualified one who was just a science teacher. Surely the lesson should be the exact opposite?