Like it or not -- and I certainly don't -- there are still pockets in the South where Jim Crow is alive and well. IIRC, Gwinnett County is northeast of Atlanta (Fulton County), and lots of affluent and conservative white people live there.
Hell, yeah, these questions are inappropriate! And their spokesman was using some form of managementspeak to downplay the nature of the questions.
I got a call from my son's first-grade math teacher because they couldn't word their math problems correctly. (I was told he was a smart aleck.) The question was, "What is two apples plus three oranges?"
My son answered, "Fruit salad."
I told the teacher that was a perfectly acceptable answer. She said the answer was five. I said the book needed to work on its wording and common units of measurement if they wanted that to be the answer. (That teacher only lasted three weeks.)
Yeah, that's definitely a "2X + 3Y" question. And as such it *can't* be taken any farther. Well, ok, "5 pieces of fruit" might bre an acceptable answer, but it's not a *reasonable* answer, especially not at that grade.
Hell, "you can't add apples and oranges" is a maxim for a *reason*. Yeesh.
*sarcasm on* Yes and 8th graders will be given infant mortality rates and odds of a woman surviving child birth in 12 century rural France and asked to calculate how many wives farmer Luke will have to have over his 40 year lifetime to have 4 kids reach adulthood of 15 years as a lesson in how feudalism and serfdom worked. *sarcasm off*
I do like the idea of "cross-curricular activities" in showing students how different subjects interact, but there had to have been a better way to do it. Maybe a question involving how many bales of cotton per acre a plantation gets asking how big a plantation needs to be to get a certain number of bales.
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Hell, yeah, these questions are inappropriate! And their spokesman was using some form of managementspeak to downplay the nature of the questions.
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How many would each slave pick? They aren't even asking the right wrong question.
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I got a call from my son's first-grade math teacher because they couldn't word their math problems correctly. (I was told he was a smart aleck.) The question was, "What is two apples plus three oranges?"
My son answered, "Fruit salad."
I told the teacher that was a perfectly acceptable answer. She said the answer was five. I said the book needed to work on its wording and common units of measurement if they wanted that to be the answer. (That teacher only lasted three weeks.)
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Hell, "you can't add apples and oranges" is a maxim for a *reason*. Yeesh.
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Yes and 8th graders will be given infant mortality rates and odds of a woman surviving child birth in 12 century rural France and asked to calculate how many wives farmer Luke will have to have over his 40 year lifetime to have 4 kids reach adulthood of 15 years as a lesson in how feudalism and serfdom worked.
*sarcasm off*
I do like the idea of "cross-curricular activities" in showing students how different subjects interact, but there had to have been a better way to do it. Maybe a question involving how many bales of cotton per acre a plantation gets asking how big a plantation needs to be to get a certain number of bales.
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