To supplement the reading of Sounder, about a black sharecropping boy and his dog in the Deep South, a Tennessee teacher assigned fifth graders to complete a crossword puzzle from a site called edhelper.com. The clue for 17 Across is: “An insulting way to label a black person.” The answer is a six-letter word starting with “n.”
A parent complained that this is one word students don’t need to be taught, the teacher apologized and it appears that life will go on at Sequatchie County Middle School.
Oh what a web we weave when we don’t carefully examine assignments ahead of time for relevancy and accuracy.
Doing the assignment yourself first is a valuable tool so that you can anticipate where problems might crop up, it only takes minutes. Sometimes the problems are poor definitions, typos, and sometimes they are real zingers like this one.
50/50 chance of a new policy going into effect that any handout not in the official curriculum must be rubber stamped by the administration before giving it to the students. This will make life lots of fun for the rest of the teachers who actually carefully monitor what they give to their classes.
I have used edhelper.com to homeschool my kids. I want to know how that clue got in there, and if there isn’t a sufficicent answer, will stop using it, and remove all links to it from my blogs and websites!
Nagger?
(cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3My0Mtwesw , not work-safe but very funny and not, actually, racist.)
If this is a word that students don’t need to be taught, they’d better not open their copies of Sounder!
Is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn next?
Happy Banned Books Week, everyone!
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm