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.