What does "mind your p's and q's" mean??

my teacher the other day said to me Hey! mind your P's and Q's!
and I just thought it meant shut up so I shut up.
but what does it actually mean???

- Mind your pints and quarts. This is suggested as deriving from the practise of chalking up a tally of drinks in English pubs (on the slate). Publicans had to make sure to mark up the quart drinks as distinct from the pint drinks. This explanation is widely repeated but there's little to support it, apart from the fact that pint and quart begin with p and q.

- Advice to printer’s apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs. I've never heard any suggestion that printer should mind their ds and bs though, even though that has the benefit of rhyming, which would have made it a more attractive slogan.

- Mind your pea (jacket) and queue (wig). Pea jackets were short, rough woollen overcoats, commonly worn by sailors in the 18th century. Perruques were full wigs worn by fashionable gentlemen. It is difficult to imagine the need for an expression to warn people to avoid confusing them.

- Mind your pieds (feet) and queues (wigs). This is suggested to have been an instruction given by French dancing masters to their charges. This has the benefit of placing the perruque in the right context - so long as we accept the phrase as being originally French. There's no reason to suppose it is from France and no version of the phrase exists in French.

- It is advice to children learning to write to take care not to mix up the lower-case letters p and q. Again, the 'd' and 'b' counter argument applies.

- It derived as reminder to children to be polite. This is supposed to be as a form of 'mind your pleases and thank-yous' - 'mind you pleases and kyous'. Pretty far-fetched that one.

This last one is probably what your teacher was talking about.
hope this helps!

it means mind yur manners.
p=please's, I think q= ?
Yeah.ha.

yea mind your ps and qs pretty much means be polite

Means - Be on your Best behavior.

mind your please and thankyous.. or something to do with manners

When sailors would reach a port after a long tour; whalers would often go several months without seeing land, ladies or BEER! P a Q's refers to pints and quarts. Something the captain or superior would yell to the sea dogs before they left the boat. Basically saying don't be a belligerent fool.