Add slaves to a math equation and what do you get: Upset parents in Gwinnett County / The Handbook of Human Ownership

by Maureen Downey

I understand cross pollination between subjects, but interjecting slave imagery into a math problem without any context does not seem to fit the bill.

As a parent, I would have been dismayed to discover my 9-year-old figuring out such math problems as, “Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

And parents in Gwinnett were perplexed and disturbed by such math questions on a third grade math worksheet, according to Channel 2 Action News.

According to the AJC:

One word problem stated, “Each tree had 56 oranges. If 8 slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?” Another said, “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?”

Such questions can evoke bitter memories in Georgia, where African Americans were enslaved for generations until the Civil War and the elimination of slavery.

“It kind of blew me away,” Christopher Braxton, a parent of a child at Beaver Ridge Elementary School, told Channel 2. “I was furious. … Something like this shouldn’t be embedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, any grade.”

Another Beaver Ridge parent, Terrance Barnett, said, “I’m having to explain to my 8-year-old why slavery or slave or beatings is in a math problem. So that hurts.”

Gwinnett County School District officials said teachers were attempting to incorporate history into math lessons. “Teachers were trying to do a cross-curricular activity,” district spokeswoman Sloan Roach told Channel 2. Roach acknowledged the questions gave no context for the issues they raised.

“We understand that there are concerns about these questions, and we agree that these questions were not appropriate,” she said. Parents told Channel 2 that the school’s principal was collecting the assignments and would shred them so they wouldn’t be circulated.

Officials said that under district policy, the worksheet should have been reviewed before being handed out to students, but that process was not followed in this situation. They said they would work with math teachers to come up with more appropriate questions.

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