Racist Math

      While flipping through the interesting and unique Yahoo news articles I stumbled across one that both shocked and disturbed me. It was about a third graders homework from a small town in Georgia that not only taught students math, but "social studies" as well. An idea that sounds harmless initially, but how corrupt it turned out to be. One question asked, "If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?". This homework assignment tried to incorporate the idea of Slavery into math. After recently completing Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass I have become familiar with the brutal hardships many slaves endure in their lives. Therefore, a simple math problem like this that is designed to "educate" students on slavery really disturbs me. Not only are the students too young to really understand the perils of slavery, but to casually bring it up in this way is absurd. According to an ABC article I read on the issue another question regarded how much cotton Frederick picked. An angry Parent commented on the issue saying, "Something like that shouldn't be imbedded into a kid of the third, fourth, fifth, or any grade". While I agree that these students are too young at this age I believe that at some point, during either middle school or junior high, students should be introduced to the history of slavery. Clearly this homework assignment was unacceptable, but it made me think about the cross-curricular activities we are susceptible to at New Trier High School.

      Cross-curricular simply refers to a combination of academic subjects through either a class or activity. At our school we have many examples of this such as American Studies, Literature and Film, Sports medicine, and many more. Part of what makes these cross-curricular combinations so effective is that it forces students to  think of subjects in different ways, and also gives students the opportunity to express their ideas in different ways. For instance in our American Studies class we were able to take the idea of storytelling, and then think about how history is told through textbooks, the changes and recreations of a story to stress certain points, and even created an oral history essay through conducted interviews. This being said, the idea behind this homework assignment was not necessarily a bad idea, but the way they executed it turned out to be a nightmare.

Is there any way to really incorporate Social Studies and Math?
What other positives and negatives are there to cross-curricular activities?