What idiocy!!

I read in the San Francisco paper about a school in Manhattan using a lesson on slavery and math.

Seems like I wrote about that same lesson months ago. Can't remember where it happened but I'll swear it was somewhere around here.

**updated** I was right!! I wrote about this a year ago here. It was stupid then and it is stupid now.

The Slave Narratives

I am obviously not doing schoolwork but am cruising the Internet. I read Bob Greene's article on the Slave Narratives, a series of interviews of former slaves taken in dictation during the 1930s by the WPA.

Bob Greene is an excellent storyteller and this article is no different. I did some searching and some of the narratives are available online - here and here and here, for starters.

Since the stories were taken down 65+ years after the Civil War, the tellers were old - and very young when they were slaves. Very much worth reading.

word problem problems in Atlanta

In January a middle school math teacher in Gwinnett set up a couple of math problems like this and shared them with other teachers.

The question read, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?"

Another math problem read, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"

Another question asked how many baskets of cotton Frederick filled.

The parents were outraged, the teacher resigned.

This week in Clayton County a teacher wrote a problem "A plantation owner had 100 slaves. If three-fifths of them are counted for representation, how many slaves will be counted?" and the parents are outraged.

It is a stupid topic to try to build a math problem around - about as sensitive as doing something with the concentration camps in Germany or the Trail of Tears.

In defense, there is so much pressure to make the questions work across the curriculum, be relevant, be word problems, that I think it is easy to lose sight of what is appropriate.

I am going to county tea cups and tea cozies instead.