Saturday, January 7, 2012

Two Plus Two Equals Bigotry

This story has been pissing me off all morning.

A math worksheet for third graders that used examples of slavery in word problems has angered some parents at a Norcross elementary school, Channel 2 Action News reports.

One word problem stated, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" Another said, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?”

Such questions can evoke bitter memories in Georgia, where African Americans were enslaved for generations until the Civil War and the elimination of slavery.

"It kind of blew me away,” Christopher Braxton, a parent of a child at Beaver Ridge Elementary School, told Channel 2. "I was furious. … Something like this shouldn't be embedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade."

Another Beaver Ridge parent, Terrance Barnett, said, "I’m having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slave or beatings is in a math problem. So that hurts.”

That's not the infuriating part, although it is unremittingly horrendous.  The part that's absolutely floored me is the school's response:

Gwinnett County School District officials said teachers were attempting to incorporate history into math lessons.

No.  Here's my response: You all should be fired immediately.  Any such justification is a failure on part of the administrators, plain and simple.  We have a zero tolerance policy for such behavior from students precisely because we're told it cannot be tolerated in a school environment.

I think educators and school administrators need to be held to even higher standards on setting examples for students.  This was at best, so brain-numbingly misguided that the school administration should have stepped in and stopped it immediately.

But the millisecond the administrators decided to excuse the behavior, they lost their rights to be administrators, period. Time for heads to roll.

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