"Parents Furious About Sexually Explicit Maya Angelou Math Assignment."
Article by by Jeff Reynolds, February 8, 2018, PJMedia
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| (Image via Facebook) |
"A mom in Ohio posted her daughter's homework on her Facebook page and it has been shared almost 37,000 times. Despite her modest friend total of 513, the post has been liked almost 4,200 times.The reason? In an episode of political correctness and social justice run amok, her eighth-grade daughter's math homework included graphic questions about sexual assault, drug dealing, and prostitution.
According to the picture she posted, multiple choice math questions were combined with the early life abuse and exploitation experienced by poet Maya Angelou. The questions include:
y= x +2
3x + 6y = 12
Angelou was sexually abused by her mother's _______ at age 8, which shaped her career choices and motivation for writing.
a. (0,2) boyfriend
b. (4,6) brother
c. (-3, -1) father
***
x = y -1
y = -4x + 21
Trying to support her son as a single mother, she worked as a pimp, prostitute and ________.
a. (-3, -2) Bookie
b. (9, 10) Drug Dealer
c. (4, 5) Night Club Dancer
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| (Image via Facebook) |
The mother, Kindra Sue Brandon, expressed shock at the reach of her post, saying, 'My daughter brought this homework home on Wednesday Jan 31st and I posted this on my page to my friends on Facebook. Like wow. Look at this !!! I had nooooo idea it was going to go this far.'
Brandon said in a Facebook message to PJ Media that the assignment blindsided her. 'I went to the school the next morning and had a meeting with the principal and vice principal about this assignment. They had no idea about this worksheet. They were just as in shock as all of us,' she said. 'They claim... the teacher got the material from Teachers Pay Teachers. And the preview of this worksheet didn't have these questions on it. The teacher was not there Thursday or Friday and school was closed yesterday due to snow. So we shall see today if the teacher who assigned this will be there.'
It turns out that the teacher never made it to the meeting, so those specific questions never got answered.
Teachers Pay Teachers is an open source platform to share lesson plans and teaching resources among teachers. Some materials are presented at no cost, and some are paid lessons. An article in The Atlantic explained some of the pros and cons of Teachers Pay Teachers and other open source platforms:
On the site, teachers upload a mixture of resources that are free to download and ones that are listed for sale, ranging in price from 99 cents for a slideshow or activity worksheet to $40 for an entire unit plan. Individual teachers are generally the shoppers, sometimes paying out-of-pocket, sometimes using school funds allocated for materials. Copyrights on materials can also be pretty guarded: Some teachers sell licenses for the right to re-share materials with colleagues while others offer their work only as un-editable formats like PDF.
PJM asked Brandon about the Maya Angelou material. 'It actually was a four-page math workbook with the third page being this,' she explained. 'It had a short paragraph about Maya Angelou and those were the questions they decided to ask. They were using cross-curriculum, obviously, with the math but they are not or will not be studying Maya Angelou in any subject in 8th grade nor in any other grade in the school.'
When one looks up the Maya Angelou math curriculum on Teachers Pay Teachers, this is what it says:
Product Description:
Bring to life the traditional practice class or homework assignment with some global competency and diversity! While your students practice solving systems of equations with substitution, they can learn about the poet, activist, teacher, inspiration Maya Angelou!
CAUTION: Mature content is integral to her biography. This is not suggested as homework and if you choose to you it, should be in your classroom where you can control the conversation.
Person Puzzles are designed to highlight individuals with diverse backgrounds who have made significant contributions to our world. I typically use Person Puzzles as timed warm-ups which allows me to share a little about the person's background before my daily lesson. I can also drop some college readiness info like majors, degrees and careers!
Scrolling down the page, one quickly arrives at the reviews section with this at the top:
On December 31, 2013, Nikki Longworth (TpT Seller) said:
Make sure # 2 & 3 are appropriate for your class before distribution. I had to explain to my students it was proof that someone can have a rough life and still achieve great things! Otherwise great, as always
On December 16, 2014, Sharee H. said:
I rated this a little lower on practicality because I don't think questions 3 & 5 are very appropriate to have on a school assignment, especially in this day and age. It could be a trigger for some, but also it just opens up conversations that I really don't want to have with the students that I teach. Otherwise this is a resource that I would use for sure!
Brandon says that, while the principal and vice principal shared her shock, nothing appears to have been done about this issue in the week since she brought it to their attention. In a follow-up message, she said, 'The teacher is actually still at the school and it seems they have just swept this under the rug.'
Of course, today's culture routinely requires prostration to the gods of political correctness, injecting social justice into every aspect of learning and life. Even still, it remains unclear how an understanding of Angelou's history of abuse and graphic details of her past life could enhance the skill set required to pass eighth-grade math."
Article by by Jeff Reynolds, February 8, 2018, PJMedia
Note: You need to read what I posted years ago when Obama was running for office. No one seemed to care at the time. It highlights Obama's promise, a Marxist, to fundamentally transform America. - Webmaster
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"Harvard, UC-Berkeley Among FIRE’s ’10 WORST Colleges for Free Speech 2018.’"
Article by Trey Sanchez, February 12, 2018, TruthRevolt
"The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has released its 2018 list of the ten worst colleges for free speech. Both Harvard University and the University of California-Berkeley, where the free speech movement was born, made the cut.
'Each year, colleges across the country find dubious ways to silence student and faculty expression,' FIRE’s study explains. 'In the last year, administrators became embroiled in litigation for telling a student he couldn’t hand out Spanish-language copies of the U.S. Constitution outside a free speech zone, continued a years-long effort to ban a group from campus due to its political viewpoint, and even investigated a professor for a satirical tweet — eventually driving him to resign.'
FIRE has recorded other infractions from so-called institutes of higher learning where the funding and editorial process of an independent student newspaper was threatened, where fences were erected to hold peaceful student protesters away from donors, and where a months-long investigation all over a student telling a joke has kept him unsure of his future.
FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley said:
'College administrators, and sometimes even students, are going to greater and greater lengths to justify muzzling expression on campus. This type of censorship makes for a sterile environment where lively debate and discussion can’t thrive. The public deserves to know which colleges will defend free expression — and which ones will go to seemingly any length to silence it.'
Their list in no particular order:
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, N.Y.)
- Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pa.)
- Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.)
- Los Angeles Community College District (Los Angeles, Calif.)
- Fordham University (New York, N.Y.)
- Evergreen State College (Olympia, Wash.)
- Albion College (Albion, Mich.)
- Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
- University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif.)
- Texas State University (San Marcos, Texas)
Each institution is detailed on FIRE’s website as to why they’re on the list. As for Harvard, this is the prestigious university’s fourth time to be featured.
Besides blacklisting single-gender groups and clubs on campus, Harvard administrators 'rescinded offers of admission from 10 students for sharing joke images in a private group chat on Facebook,' according to the report. A new president will take over Harvard in the next academic year. Time will tell if free speech is allowed back on campus.
The reasons for UC-Berkeley’s inclusion on the list are as follows:
The riots in response to a Milo Yiannopoulos speech a year ago that was successfully canceled thanks to the violence and destruction of Antifa. Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter returned to the school later in the year for another attempt at free speech which wound up costing Berkeley $800,000 in security. TruthRevolt founder David Horowitz also had a speech canceled at Berkeley in April 2017 due to security concerns over tyrannical students who want to shut down opposing ideas.
FIRE also awarded DePaul University a special Lifetime Censorship Award 'in recognition of its decade-long rap sheet of suppressing speech at every turn.'
'From denying recognition to a student organization criticizing marijuana laws, to forcing the DePaul Socialists, Young Americans for Freedom, and College Republicans to pay for security in order to host speakers at their meetings and events, to forbidding a group from using the slogan ‘Gay Lives Matter,’ DePaul has staked out a leadership position in stifling campus expression,' the report adds.
FIRE notes that though public institutes are bound by the First Amendment, private universities aren’t. However, they 'explicitly promise' to uphold their students’ constitutional rights.
But for those on the above list, they obviously don’t."
Above article by Trey Sanchez, February 12, 2018, TruthRevolt
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