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i don't even, no fucking words, oh for god's sake, run don't walk away from these people, wtf?

What? How? What?
What the hell was someone smoking when they thought this up:

If Fred Got Two Beatings Per Day, How Much More Inappropriate Could They Have Made These Math Problems in Georgia?

Summary: Math questions in GA ask questions about how much cotton and fruit slaves could pick and speculate as to the number of beatings they'd receive.

I'm not joking.

Third graders in in Gwinnett County, Ga., were given math homework Wednesday that asked questions about slavery and beatings.

Christopher Braxton told ABC News affiliate WSB-TV in Atlanta that he couldn't believe the assignment his 8-year-old son brought home from of Beaver Ridge Elementary school in Norcross.

"It kind of blew me away," Braxton said. "Do you see what I see? Do you really see what I see? He's not answering this question."

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.

"I was furious at that point," Braxton said.

"This outrages me because it just lets me know that there's still racists," said Stephanie Jones, whose child is a student at the school.

"Something like that shouldn't be imbedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade," parent Terrance Barnett told WSB-TV. "I'm having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slaves or beatings are in a math problem. That hurts."

"In this one, the teachers were trying to do a cross-curricular activity," Gwinnett County school district spokeswoman Sloan Roach said.

Roach said the teachers were attempting to incorporate social studies into math problems.

"We understand that there are concerns about these questions, and we agree that these questions were not appropriate," she said.

Teaching about slavery is one thing. Incorporating it into math problems like it's just another theoretical issue is another thing altogether. What were they thinking?

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white_tean
2012-01-08 03:17 am UTC (link)

Back when I was in high-school (yes, high-school) my maths teacher had this adorable habit of writing out this sort of math situation question with one of her students in the starring role each time, and something they were interested if she knew (my example had horses). That was cute, this is just horrifying.

I don't think discussing how much fruit your slaves could pick or how much you're going to beat them is a way to "incorporate social studies" unless "social studies" suddenly means "slave management".

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	harrylovesron 2012-01-08 03:19 am UTC (link)
	"In this one, the teachers were trying to do a cross-curricular activity," Gwinnett County school district spokeswoman Sloan Roach said. Roach said the teachers were attempting to incorporate social studies into math problems. what what i can't even (Reply to this)

	brennalarose 2012-01-08 03:24 am UTC (link)
	Cross-curricular, my ass. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	oxfordcomma 2012-01-08 06:22 am UTC (link)
	"We can work racism into math AND history!" (Reply to this)(Parent)

staroverthebay
2012-01-08 04:21 am UTC (link)

Roach said the teachers were attempting to incorporate social studies into math problems.

LAMEST EXCUSE EVER. Do they really honestly think anyone will buy that bullshit?

And if they were trying to be cross-curricular, why are they only focusing on slavery and not, for example, the Revolutionary War or whatever, such as "How many soldiers were killed in Captain Whoever's platoon?" or whatever. Not that this is appropriate either but seriously. SERIOUSLY. Good lord.

Why am I eternally unsurprised by the state this took place in?

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	rosehiptea 2012-01-08 05:09 am UTC (link)
	So I'm supposed to buy that someone who made it through college just innocently threw slavery into a math problem as a "cross-curricular" thing? Yeah, no. This is outrageous. (Reply to this)

	quantumreality 2012-01-08 05:56 am UTC (link)
	Wow. This math teacher really has no idea what "amazingly inappropriate and offensive" means. D-X (Reply to this)

	marmaladecat 2012-01-08 11:42 am UTC (link)
	In what context could those questions ever, ever be appropriate? Certainly not a modern-day one. (Reply to this)

	sparkysrevenge 2012-01-09 12:59 am UTC (link)
	We weren't really allowed to "incorporate" the other subjects until high school... and that was like making yam dishes when studying Things Fall Apart. (Also Georgia, but not Atlanta-area schools.) This is completely unacceptable. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	bienegold 2012-01-09 06:25 am UTC (link)
	I vaguely remember doing cross-discipline projects and things in middle school, but it was pretty much always English/Social Studies. I really can't see math ever being used except in really unfortunate examples. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	madam_marozi 2012-01-09 02:39 pm UTC (link)
	Yes, it sounds like the kids are studying Frederick Douglass and the math teacher tried to make up some problems about him, without stopping to think how horribly inappropriate that material is when taken out of context and put into the neutral tone of a word problem. Yeesh. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kattahj 2012-01-14 04:24 pm UTC (link)
	I can think of plenty of ways to include maths in other subjects, but this most definitely isn't one of them. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	spawn_of_kong 2012-01-09 08:27 pm UTC (link)
	JFC. What's next, calculating how much steel the prisoners at Auschwitz could manufacture in a day? (Reply to this)

enrythe8th
2012-01-20 06:49 pm UTC (link)

Roach said the teachers were attempting to incorporate social studies into math problems.

I can actually believe this. When I was in high school not long ago they did much the same sorts of things (say, taking some kind of history assignment and attaching a bunch of barely-related math problems to it) because we had to make a portfolio of our work in order to graduate. We were given a bunch of standards to meet, and each standard had to be met a certain number of times. In the name of killing a flock of birds with one stone, our teachers would try to make their assignments cover a bunch of standards. I remember that my math teachers especially tended to approach it with disdain and do the least amount of work possible. Which I can understand, tbh.

That said, I know it's hard to get math into social studies, but there is such a thing as trying and there is such a thing as thinking about the implications of your assignments.

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