I don't think this Georgia school really
thought this one through:
The third-grade worksheet tried to mix math and social studies, and now some parents are saying a Georgia school made an error of historic proportions.
One question on the controversial elementary school test asked, “Each tree had 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”
Another question was: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week? 2 weeks?” [...]
A spokeswoman for the school district, Sloan Roach, told reporters that two teachers at the Beaver Ridge Elementary School were trying to incorporate the history the students had been studying into their math exercises. They had just read a book about slavery in their social studies class.
Mixing disciplines in schoolwork isn't all that unusual, but talking about slave beatings in your third grade math homework seems a bit over the top. Parents apparently did not take it well.
It strikes me, though, that this cross-disciplinary stuff really has potential. History may not come alive, but history can at least be used for some truly gripping word problems. I'm sure we could work Auschwitz in there. The Black Plague alone is rife with opportunities:
Q: Timmy helps to bury 70 plague victims every day. Timmy does not understand the concept of hygiene, and so frequently wipes his nose on clothes taken from the disease-riddled corpses. If Timmy wipes his nose this way 10 times per day, and each time carries a 99 percent chance of transmitting the plague, how long will it take for Timmy to be dead ten times over?
I'm no historian, though—I'll leave the heavy lifting on such matters to Newt Gingrich—so I'd rather we see this worked into the context of more current events. If nothing else we could make it a Fox News feature, thus making it the first time in Fox News history that Fox News viewers learned something:
Q: If George Bush claims we have found 50,000 weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Dick Cheney says we have found 500,000 weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and a conservative pundit says we have found eleventy billion weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, how many weapons of mass destruction have we found in Iraq?
A: Zero. They were lying.
Q: Mitt Romney says Barack Obama is responsible for a recession that started before Barack Obama became president. Calculate how full of crap Mitt Romney is as percentage of body weight.
A: Mitt Romney lives in an alternate universe in which cause and effect have no relation to each other. He is therefore 120 percent full of crap because we said so.
Q: The Senate has 100 senators. Any single senator can hold up any issue via something called an "anonymous hold." if there are 50 anonymous holds placed on 50 issues, calculate the minimum number of senators who are assholes.
A: One, and his name is probably Jim DeMint.
The possibilities are endless:
Q: Mitt Romney takes two days to change his stance on any one issue. Given 20 issues, how long will it take Mitt Romney to change his mind on all of them? Suppose that on 10 of the issues, Mitt changes his mind back to his original position. How many total times has Mitt changed his mind?
Q: Pat Robertson says homosexual Americans cause hurricanes. Use the last forty years of hurricane activity to calculate the relative increase in gay sex since 1972.
Q: Presume a class war erupts in America pitting the One Percent vs. the 99 Percent. Calculate how many robot guards the One Percent will need to protect themselves from the unruly masses, taking into account that those robots will be built and delivered by resentful people making approximately $40,000 per year with no health insurance, and that due to budget cuts the USPS will no longer deliver robot guard replacement batteries on Saturdays.
Q: The Republican Party is currently choosing a nominee for president using the Savior Method. Using this method, a savior is selected who will get 80% of the not-Mitt Republican vote. After the savior is damaged by scandal or foolish statements, a new savior is selected who will gain 80 percent of the previous savior's supporters. Presuming each savior lasts exactly one week and conservative pundits will write glowing columns praising any candidate who can muster over 5 percent of the not-Mitt vote, how many columns will conservative pundits be forced to write, and how many weeks will that take? For extra credit, calculate how much of their souls each pundit will lose in writing those columns.
I don't know about third graders, but I'm feeling pretty good about turning these into SAT questions.