Cut 'em some slack, teachin is harrd

Education leaders: Slave math lesson should not end careers
[ajc] “This is an unfortunate incident,” Rollins [Calvine Rollins, president of the Georgia Association of Educators] said. “I don’t believe the teacher wanted to expose those kids to anything offensive. Gwinnett County teachers are dedicated. They work hard and try on a daily basis to do the right thing.”
But mistakes can occur because the burden on teachers to create lessons, tutor kids, analyze data and complete paperwork can be daunting, especially in a district the size of Gwinnett County Schools, the state’s largest system.

The second paragraph is clearly a paraphrased quote from Ms Rollins as well, although unattributed. Sloppy work, there, AJC reporter, to throw this mix of facts, allegations, opinions, and unsupported deductions out there as if all of it were inarguable.

This is exactly what I would expect a teacher union leader to say. Over in the real world, unions have two purposes: To oversimplify, I'll say (1) To protect workers from an unreasonable employer and (2) to ensure that the employer has a qualified pool of potential employees from which to hire. I haven't seen a teacher union yet that had any interest in (2). Protecting teachers' jobs is Job One And Only over there.

Heck, they didn't want to fire APS teachers who were caught cheating, they sure don't want anybody fired over the phrasing of a word problem on a worksheet. It's like the only lesson they took away from their own school days was "duck and cover."

If it isn't obvious, this has to do with the now-infamous "if 8 slaves pick 56 oranges..." worksheet. This update has some additional details I hadn't seen before:

• The worksheet was written by one of the third-grade teachers at Beaver Ridge Elementary.
• Four teachers used it.
• Beaver Ridge has nine third-grade classrooms.
• The school has a total of 1,260 students. (I'm not sure that, over the ten years or so my spouse has worked in education, that all the schools she has worked together total that many students. That's probably not relevant, just appalling.)
• Beaver Ridge's student body is about 60 percent Hispanic, 28 percent African-American, 5.3 percent Asian, and 4 percent white. We still don't know the racial makeup of the teachers involved, or of the school faculty overall.

I could make a pretty good guess as to their IQs, though.

"If eight slaves pick 56 oranges equally..."

Parents outraged over math problems referring to slavery
[wsb] Several Gwinnett parents contacted Channel 2 Action News in outrage after their children brought home a math assignment that referenced slavery and beatings.
...The question was a word problem that said, "Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?" Another math problem said, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?"

I don't usually go far afield of Atlanta Public Schools: There's plenty of stupidity going on there to keep me busy. But this little gem from Gwinnett County just hit the national news -- and the wonder is that it took from Wednesday (when the worksheet was assigned) until Friday to do so.

Nobody at Beaver Ridge Elementary will speak, or even consent to be named, for the report. But a spokeswoman for the Gwinnett district allowed as how, while the question was, er, unquestionably inappropriate, the motivation behind it wasn't unreasonable. It was cross-curricular, part of a current trend for some assignments to be relevant to more than one class, in this case math and social studies. Consider it a built-in answer to the question, "Why do I have to know this?"

Still, I have a feeling this story won't let go until somebody answers the question, who could possibly have thought this wouldn't generate complaints? Who wrote the questions? Is it purely local to Beaver Ridge, or is it on a preprinted handout that came from somewhere else, and might find, or have already found, its way into other classrooms? Who assigned it? How do you get to be a teacher anywhere in Georgia and not know that slavery is a hot-button issue?

LATER: My thoughtful spouse has observed that if this worksheet were obtained from a book (School Box carries plenty of books full of photocopyable elementary school worksheets), Gwinnett would have swiftly named that source to divert attention from itself. The fact that they didn't do so, then, is a strong indicator that the teacher who assigned it created it herself.

On further thought, I realized that it is simply not possible that neither of the parents who complained know which teacher assigned this worksheet. Nor would they have failed to share that name with the reporters to whom they talked. Therefore, Gwinnett has asked the reporters not to name the teacher, and for reasons I cannot fathom, the reporters are respecting that request.

They don't have to give the money back already?

School cheating bill proposed
[ajc] Teachers who cheat in helping their students score higher on standardized tests would have to pay back financial bonuses linked to the scores under legislation proposed Monday.

Maybe I missed something, but isn't this already illegal? Isn't there some kind of "ill-gotten gains" law that prevents convicted criminals from profiting from their crimes? I could have sworn this loophole was already covered.

And if they're not actually convicted of crimes, then why do they have to give the money back? Who has to say they're guilty in order to trigger this law?