I know the title doesn’t make sense, but I don’t know how else to describe my feelings about this story.
What the hell?!
These are the types of math problems 3rd graders were given in a Georgia school system last week.
Are the people running our schools really this stupid? Or is there a troll somewhere, making up crazy curriculum and laughing at those who take the bait? Please let this be it. I’d rather this be caused by malice than idiocy.
Isn’t this basic multiplication & division? Isn’t 3rd grade when you learn that? Maybe I’m not understanding the problem.
Ooops, getting it now. subject matter not appropriate
I think it was better before they started “explaining.”
Nonsense. The kids were doing their lessons on slavery that week, and they structured the math problems around it. Their biggest mistake was in underestimating how butthurt some people can be.
This would be inappropriate and offensive if it came out if the blue, but it’s relatively harmless in context.
So, what’s the math problem going to be the week they do a history lesson on the Holocaust?
“A gas chamber fits 50 Jews. It takes an hour to remove the corpses to the corpse pile. How many Jews can you kill in one day?”
If you think this is fine in any context, you’re a moron.
Go fuck yourself, brainless. Your holocaust example about killing Jews is magnitudes worse thsn a math problem about slaves picking apples 150 years ago.
No, absofuckinglutely not. They’re both terrible. Someone in Georgia took ‘culturally responsive education’ a wee bit too far.
</vomit>
Why is it racist? Slave labor isn’t limited to any race, the Greeks had scores of slaves who I’m sure did mundane tasks like picking fruit and took physical punishment.
It’s still in rather poor taste, but I fail to see the racism.
The productivity (or punishment frequency) of individual slaves, however, is not relevant at all to the social studies curriculum–at least not at this grade level. It’s either purely gratuitous, or some kind of trolling.
I think it was a bad move at the end of the day, but I don’t think the teachers are terrible people, or trolls. From what I heard on the news last night, this is consistent with what they’d been doing all year with math and social studies.
I can see a higher-level questions in middle and high school:
If 80 per cent of US wealth is controlled by Jews…
If Shaniqua has three kids and no job, how many benefits…
According to this chart, if Juan lives in Denver, Colorado, what are his odds of being an illegal…
Seriously? Seriously?!
A cross-curricular activity? Are they going to incorporate slave beatings into PE, too?
Didn’t they shoot Larry Flint in Gwinnett County?
Huh?
I agree, the context does not make this harmless.
How many white girls can a black man rape in a night, if it takes 30 minutes to rape and 90 minutes to achieve another erection?
How many black teen-agers can Jeffrey Dahmer kill and eat in a year if planning and execution for each incident takes an average of 17 days?
None of those examples are comparable to the problems in this case.
If the school is making you incorporate social studies and math, you’re pretty much fucked come slavery week.
Shouldn’t that be “How many Asian teenagers can Dahmer kill and eat in a year if planning and execution for each incident takes an averagae of 17 days and there is a 92.3% chance that police officers encountered during the course of the incident do not interfere”?
What if your name is Frederick and your daddy beats you every night? How are you going to answer that question without tears welling up in your eyes?
Teachers don’t usually write materials–not real, in-the-trenches teachers. Usually it’s the people who couldn’t hack it in the classroom, and got out to go into administration as soon as they could.
This whole issue of contextualizing math problems belies how curriculum design often happens. There’s usually some kind of rubric that people end up following mindlessly. For example, every problem has to have a different context, with different subjects. It wouldn’t’ve detracted from the effectiveness of the first problem to change “slave” to “worker,” and in the second problem, to ask about how many times the cows get milked, or something like that. Nor does it enhance the social studies curriculum to throw in reference to the mechanics of slavery, which are pretty much givens.
It’s in Georgia, one of the southern states of the United States. Just in case you are not familiar with the history of racism and slavery in Georgia, you should realise that historically both were strongly associated with people of African descent. The Black schoolchildren of Georgia, when told about slavery, will associate it with what happened to their ancestors 150 years ago – not what happened in Greece 2,000 years ago.
7- and 8-year-olds are not yet tackling world history in social studies classes. In Georgia’s history, there’s only one kind of slavery they’d be referring to.