Mathematics and Slavery Don't Add Up
Parents of third grade students at Beaver Ridge Elementary School in Gwinnett County outside of Atlanta were shocked last week to see slavery and beatings appear on their children's math homework.
Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" read one question.
"If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week? two weeks?" asked another.
The format was similar to standard math problem solving questions, such as "Jane picked two more apples than John. Together they picked six apples. How many apples did John pick?" but the tone was entirely different.
The assignment, which was created by one of the teachers and distributed to students in four of the nine third grade classrooms at the school, was not vetted by the principal or school district.
According to Gwinnett County School District spokeswoman Sloan Roach, it was an attempt at a cross-curricular homework assignment.
Roach told CBS News, "We've been working with human resources to determine what staff development is needed for the teachers and what actions may be warranted. The principal is addressing parent concerns as he's meeting with them."
So far those actions do not include suspending or removing the teachers in question, who say they wrote the assignment after children read a story about the abolitionist Frederick Douglass in an attempt to marry social studies and mathematics.
According to 11Alive, both the teacher who wrote the assignment and the teacher who made the photocopies are under investigation, but still in the classroom.
Beyond the insensitive and flippant nature of the questions, which did not condone slavery but certainly made it appear commonplace and normal, parents questioned the necessity of teachers to introduce violence to a third-grade homework assignment.
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