Slavery Math Protesters

A Georgia teacher who used slaved-themed questions to teach math to third-graders has resigned, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Among the questions that the unidentified teacher at Beaver Ridge Elementary used in the lessons:

• “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week?”
• “Each tree has 56 oranges. If eight slaves pick them equally, then how much would each slave pick?”

Schools officials in the suburban Atlanta school in Lawrenceville say one teacher created the slave-themed questions, which were used in four classrooms.

The questions referred to beatings and picking cotton to link a history lesson about Frederick Douglass to solving math problems, the newspaper says.

The newspaper says a Gwinnett County school official confirmed that the teacher had resigned but, along with three others, is still under a personal investigation.

The Journal-Constitution notes that the incident is particularly perplexing in a school in which 88% of the students are either black or Hispanic and half the staff is non-white.

After the assignment was handed out Jan. 4, several parents and the NAACP gathered outside the school to protest, WXIA TV reports.

Please see: Melanian News Editor Commentary on this story.

News Corp, RIAA, MPAA, Nike, Sony, Comcast, VISA & others want to make that world your reality.

80 Members of Congress are in their sway, 30 against, the rest undecided or undeclared.

★★★Please take a minute to tell your Members of Congress you OPPOSE PIPA & SOPA★★★

SOPA
Corporate supporters of Senate 968 (PIPA) and HR 3261 (SOPA) demand the ability to take down any web site (including craigslist, Wikipedia, or Google) that hurts their profits — without prior judicial oversight or due process — in the name of combating “online piracy.”

PIPA and SOPA authors and supporters insist they’d only go after foreign piracy sites, but Internet Engineers understand this is an attempt to impose “Big Brother” controls on our Internet, complete with DNS hijacking and censoring search results. Incredibly, many Congress Members favor this idea.

Try to imagine jack-booted thugs throttling free speech, poisoning the Internet (greatest of American inventions, the very pillar of modern democracy), and devastating one of the our most successful industries. Totalitarian, anti-American, massively-job-killing nonsense.

Tell Congress you OPPOSE Senate 968 “Protect IP Act” (PIPA) and H.R. 3261 “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA):

Phone your Member of Congress via nifty Progressive Change app
Contact Senators who are refusing to meet with constituents about PIPA.
Reverse Robocall pro-PIPA & pro-SOPA MOC + Lobbyists (More at Ars Technica)
EFF Action Center – Strike Against Censorship – Congressional Emailer
ECA Congressional Emailer – Don’t Censor Our Internet!
OpenCongress Congressional Emailer – Oppose SOPA
Generic Congressional Emailer (You’ll need your Zip+4)
Petition Congress – Protect Innovation, Dump SOPA (Progressive Change )
Outside the US? Sign Petition Opposing US Censorship of Global Sites (EFF)
Supporters of PIPA and SOPA: RIAA, MPAA, News Corp, TimeWarner, Walmart, Nike, Tiffany, Chanel, Rolex, Sony, Juicy Couture, Ralph Lauren, VISA, Mastercard, Comcast, ABC, Dow Chemical, Monster Cable, Teamsters, Rupert Murdoch, Lamar Smith (R-TX), John Conyers (D-MI)

Opponents of PIPA and SOPA: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, AOL, Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy, Zynga, EFF, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Darrell Issa (R-CA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Ron Paul (R-TX)

Where does your Member of Congress stand on PIPA and SOPA? (Project SOPA Opera)

PIPA and SOPA Are Too Dangerous To Revise, They Must Be Killed Entirely

Congress needs to hear from you, or these dangerous bills will pass – they have tremendous lobbying dollars behind them, from corporations experts say are attempting to prop up outdated, anti-consumer business models at the expense of the very fabric of the Internet — recklessly unleashing a tsunami of take-down notices and litigation, and a Pandora’s jar of “chilling effects” and other unintended (or perhaps intended?) consequences.

Don’t believe it? Monster Cable has labeled craigslist a “rogue site,” earmarked for blacklisting and full-takedown under PIPA — resale of stereo cables by CL users reduces Monster ‘s new cable sales. (reddit).

There is still time to be heard. Congress is starting to backpedal on this job-killing, anti-American nonsense, and the Obama administration has weighed in against these bills as drafted, but SOPA/PIPA cannot be fixed or revised — they must be killed altogether.

Sen Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep Ron Wyden (D-OR) are championing an alternative to SOPA/PIPA called Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN) that addresses foreign sites dedicated to piracy, without disrupting basic Internet protocols, or threatening mainstream US sites like craigslist.

Tim O’Reilly, a publisher who is himself subject to piracy, asks whether piracy is even a problem, and whether there is even a legitimate need for any of these bills.

Learn more about SOPA, Protect IP (PIPA), and Internet Blacklisting:

Growing Chorus of Opposition to PIPA and SOPA
Open Letter against SOPA from 83 Prominent Internet Engineers
Why SOPA and Protect IP (PIPA) are Bad, Bad Ideas (Techdirt)
Piracy not a problem, PIPA and SOPA are unnecessary (Tim O’Reilly on GigaOM)
PIPA and SOPA News (Google News)
PIPA Wikipedia entry ::::: SOPA Wikipedia entry
SOPA FAQ (CNET)

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 8,100 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Dozens of parents and community members rallied outside a Norcross, Ga. elementary school Tuesday, calling on the school district to fire teachers involved in a 3rd grade math assignment that used slavery in examples.

Protesters chanted “Fire them now” and marched with signs outside Beaver Ridge Elementary School, WSBTV reports. Parents are outraged at both the assignment and the school district’s response to the reports of those math problems, which included references to cotton, orange picking and beatings.

One problem reads: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?”

“The teachers, the staff responsible for allowing this to go forward should be fired,” Georgia NAACP President Ed DuBose told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

One of the affected classes has been taught by a substitute teacher for the last two days, pending investigations, according to the AJC. The teachers under investigation are not being identified.

District spokesperson Sloan Roach told WSBTV that one teacher wrote the questions, four of the nine 3rd grade teachers handed out the worksheets to a total of more than 100 students, but all nine educators saw the assignment. Beaver Ridge Principal Jose DeJesus is meeting and speaking with parents.

“One of them had to question this and say, ‘Look, we cannot do this, we cannot let this go out … let’s make better questions,’” Beaver Ridge parent Christopher Braxton told WSBTV.

The district’s initial response to parents earlier this week was simply that the elementary school’s principal will “work with teachers to come up with more appropriate lessons.” Roach said the math problems were written in an attempt to incorporate social studies lessons in math for a “cross-curricular activity” and that the teachers meant no harm.

Following parent outcry and national attention, Gwinnett Schools district officials are now investigating the incident to determine whether to pursue punitive action. Roach said the questions were inappropriate and the investigation would seek to ensure that teachers are creating assignments that are “appropriate and respective,” ABC News reports. She declined to speculate on what action may be taken against guilty teachers or whether additional training would be required for educators.

“We are looking at what human resources actions may be taken so I do believe that is a hard stance trying to determine what does that situation warrant,” Roach told WSBTV.

She tells ABC News that there doesn’t appear to be signs of intentional “maliciousness” or racism, and the incident was simply a matter of a teacher writing some bad questions.

“This was an isolated case involving these teachers at this school and at this grade level,” she said.
(from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/10/georgia-schools-slavery-m_n_1197491.html)

The Rosewood massacre was a violent, racially motivated conflict that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six blacks and two whites were killed, and the town of Rosewood was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Racial disturbances were common during the early 20th century in the United States, reflecting the nation’s rapid social changes. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922.

Rosewood was a quiet, primarily black, self-sufficient whistle stop on the Seaboard Air Line Railway. Spurred by unsupported accusations that a white woman in nearby Sumner had been beaten and possibly raped by a black drifter, white men from nearby towns lynched a Rosewood resident. When black citizens defended themselves against further attack, several hundred whites combed the countryside hunting for black people, and burned almost every structure in Rosewood. Survivors hid for several days in nearby swamps and were evacuated by train and car to larger towns. Although state and local authorities were aware of the violence, they made no arrests for the activities in Rosewood. The town was abandoned by black residents during the attacks. None ever returned.

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