Perhaps this is unreasonable, but I expect an American who describes himself or herself as “a history teacher” to know the basic events of the past 100 years.

Prominent Western leaders. Scientific breakthroughs. Inventions. Cultural Milestones. Wars.

Which is why I was startled … disappointed … semi-appalled … when a history teacher could not pick the correct answer, on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on a question that went something like this:

“In 1936, this nation’s plan to stage a People’s Olympiad as an alternative to the Berlin Olympics was cancelled, three weeks before it was to begin, by a civil war.

“A: Russia

“B: Spain

“C: Ireland

“D: Mexico”

The contestant had no real idea. So after acknowledging that, she called for her “friend” to come down out of the crowd to help her.

“She’s a history teacher,” the contestant said of a woman who also is her cousin.

It never got more specific, on what sort of history the woman taught, but even if it were “my home state’s history” … she should have known the answer to the question.

She joined her cousin and they hemmed and hawed, and the history teacher said “my gut tells me it’s Russia” about four times. But she was unsure enough that when the contestant said she could use an aid that takes two of the four potential answers off the board … she said yes, that was a good idea.

Ireland and Mexico were taken off the board. That left Russia and Spain.

The two women kicked it around a bit more. The teacher said something like, “I don’t remember anything like a civil war happening in Spain”, and recapitulated her “gut feeling” that it was Russia that was planning an alternative games interrupted by civil war.

The contestant, who really had no idea, allowed as how she has “been thinking it was Russia, too,” and also said to her cousin, “I’m counting on you.”

Meanwhile, I was squirming on my couch.

The Spanish Civil War! The leftist (to extreme-left) Republicans versus the fascist Nationalists. Firing squads. Civilians shot. Pitched battles foreshadowing World War II. The Soviet Union and its overt support of the Republicans. Nazi Germany and Italy and their overt support of the Nationalists. Picasso’s Guernica, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Lincoln Battalion of American volunteers.

The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, causing the cancellation of the People’s Olympiad, which was to have been held in Barcelona.

So.

Doesn’t everyone who is paid for their knowledge of history have to know about the Spanish Civil War? And even if they do not, wouldn’t they know that the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war happened from 1918 to 1923 — most of a generation before the Spanish Civil War? Meaning the only possible answer was “Spain”?

But no, the history teacher helped convince the contestant the answer was Russia, and that was that.

The mistake on the $10,000 question prompted more than a few bleats on social media from people surprised a history teacher could get it wrong. Like this one.

I prefer to think this history teacher was exposed to material dealing with the Spanish Civil War on her way to graduating with a college degree. Maybe she simply forgot that bit, or missed class that day.

Anyway, it left me unsettled and I stewed over it for hours.

Other history teachers in the United States would get that right. Wouldn’t they?