Unknown column... but it exists

Im an SQL beginner, and I’ve searched high and low for answers to this error that has me stumped, but all forums I find end with “oops I was connected to wrong db” or “oops I was looking in the wrong table”… that is not happening to me.

I am running a basic update query (in my tester file it is

$qry="UPDATE studentinfo SET session1StartDate = 'Thu Aug 4 2011', session1StartTime = '12:18:05 PM', session1Started = '1' WHERE id = '10001'";

), and I am getting the “Unknown column ‘session1StartTime’ in ‘field list’” error. From what I have read this error is basically that it can’t find that column, correct?

I know the column exists,for two reasons. (1) phpMyAdmin tells me so (2) I have a function that adds all columns to the table that don’t exist before it runs the update query.

What else can cause this error?