Slavery Math Questions?

Cross-Curricular? No.

I fail to see how those questions could have been put together "without malice" unless they were the output of someone unqualified to teach. She (he?) is an idiot. An unfeeling, blinkered, imbecile.

I think it is easy to over react to everything! Here are my thoughts on it and it is funny how these same parents have no problem listening to rap with their children, exposing them to movies and television shows that are far above their level with no instruction. Maybe, parents should just teach and we should close all public schools and save our tax dollars,seems to me all the non-educators feel they can do a better job so then do it.

www.blogher.com/we-should-close-all-public-schools-and-save-our-tax-dollars

I don't think a discussion of something like slavery should be combined with any other kind of lesson. The level of teacher intuition necessary for that topic is so high I can't imagine him or her trying to do anything else but address the subject at hand.

It's easy to blast the teacher (which is what I wanted to do), but I also wonder how much collaborative planning time the teachers have to work on developing themes and "big ideas" to focus on during their units. So much of the focus on education these days seems to be on teaching to the tests, which leaves much less time for educators to focus (and learn) how to integrate curriculum and develop deep meaningful understandings of issues.

Clearly the teacher was an idiot. She/he didn't understand the purpose of embedding math into a social sciences topic which is to give deeper understanding of social sciences, as you point out. Given it was an agricultural society, a much more appropriate question would have involved calculating the size of the field needed to yield crops, how much seed would have been needed, how much fruit would have been produced by an orchard based on how many trees there were, how long it would have taken to harvest the crops, how much manpower would be required and how much it would have cost to hire that manpower thus leading to a greater understanding of why slaves were used in the first place and how they could be viewed as equipment instead of people. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out but it does take a human with compassion which this teacher obviously lacks. Ugh!

"I think it is quite possible that the questions were done without intentional malice."

I don't, because I'd like to think that anyone with half a brain knows that there are certain statements and actions that are inappropriate. I can't help but wonder that if a classroom leader (I'll refrain from using the term educator) did such a horrible thing regarding something so basic, what other immoral or unethical activities have taken place in their classroom?

What next? Weaving social studies with language arts and science as it relates to use of the word kite?

I'm glad to know that someone felt the need to expose what happened. I'm going to see if I can find an udpate to the original story.

I agree, my stomach kind of flip-flopped when I read those questions. How crass and insensitive! The questions you posed were so much better, but still this topic needs to be discussed in context no matter how you look at it. I am going to have to think long and hard about how this can happen, what was going through their minds? And most importantly what went through the minds of African American students who were presented with this? Humiliation? Anger? Fear?

Incredible sad right now. If my child would have brought this home, I would have hit the roof and then hit the school's roof :(