<p>Thanks, Seahorsesrock, that lays out how you might do this effectively.</p>
<p>My point was if you see the two different ways to ask a math question, the first two are like the slave questions, very matter of fact and cold, while the second two show a sensitivity to the subject matter </p>
<p>I chose assault on amen, which is more the just sex Ed, and drunk driving because it is a real life issue that kids deal with</p>
<p>Just tying to show with a bit of of thought, the questions can lead to more critical thinkingmof hmmm why aren’t rapes reported, and wow, drunk driving causes how many deaths, as opposed to how many time did he get away with it</p>
<p>You could, perhaps, ask a question which shows just how many people were enslaved in the US before the Civil War.</p>
<p>The question itself is idiotic, even as a word problem it is not exactly challenging.The racism is someone writing this question without thinking about how it could come off, to a white student reading this it is a dusty fact from the past, to an African American student it could represent promoting the idea that slave beatings were such a mundane thing they could be used in a stupid word problem, like it was calculating the rate of speed of a dog running in furlongs/fortnight or something. As another poster said talking about the 1776 essay, it is ignoring the feelings of other. No, it doesn’t compare in crudeness to using an example of the holocaust but it shares something in common, it teaches something in a way that is insensitive where another better example could be used. </p>
<p>If this is an example of ‘new teaching’, eek. Interdisciplinary studies are wonderful, showing, for example, how math would be critical in let’s say an explorer travelling around the world (celestial mechanics, provisioning, dead reckoning navigation) or, for example, using math to show the economic disadvantage slavery made to free farmers or businesses without slaves (for example, for a farmer, how much more work a slaveholder could get out of a given plot of land versus a free farmer, cost v benefit). This sounds to me like someone took an old word problem “If johnny can cut 10 pieces of wood an hour, how many pieces could he cut in an 8 hour day” and simply changed the text, rather then using math to teach about another area.</p>
<p>This is a story where the races of the participants mattered to me. When I read it, I tried to decide if it mattered whether the question writers were white and the students black or vice versa. Only the video added some clarity there. </p>
<p>I don’t see racism here. I see insensitivity. </p>
<p>Maybe it would be better to stick to pop culture references. </p>
<p>“If the 3 Kardashian sisters got married 3 times each, how many E Television specials would we see?”</p>