Teacher fired after assigning violent math problems to third graders

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OMGoodness!

Thats horrible!
 
This is the website the teacher got the worksheets from...

http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/free-printable-math-worksheets-third-grade-math.html

This is what they say about themselves...

Our Third Grade math worksheets are hilarious and are accompanied by cool math clip art.

Why? So that your kids won't be tearing out their hair in agony when they get to the obnoxiously difficult math problems. Some of the questions are like deep pits. It will take a lot of struggle to get out of them.

Judging by the thousands of visitors we get, it seems that our hilarious printable math worksheets are tickling kids worldwide. We hope your kids will have a blast too!
 
I've been browsing their site and it gets worse.

One that I kinda remember:

"I was walking in the woods and stumbled across a hunters dead body. There were 4 green flies hovering over the smelly body. The flies proceeded to lay 5 eggs each in the gaping mouth of the corpse..."
 
That site also refers users to adaptedmind.com through a clickable ad. It doesn't look much like a legitimate resource. They are a subscription by month service and say this:

AdaptedMind was created by graduates of Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard to improve the way children learn. We aspire to bring a revolution to education, improving it by pushing the frontier in learning science.

Your child is unique. But the mathbooks and exercises your child does are the same as other children's. AdaptedMind creates a custom learning experience for your child. A learning experience that identifies your child's strengths and weaknesses, and delivers a curriculum and exercises that adapts to these needs. That's adaptive learning.

We created our curriculum in consultation with teachers, parents, and most importantly - children.

The result is a learning experience that significantly improves performance, guaranteed.

They also have a disclaimer regarding their user posted content. Apparently just about anyone can post stuff there for educators to download and use in class -and- AdaptedMind does not review or endorse any of that content.

Homeschooling Paradise's webhosting company is a cheesy sounding place with a focus on how to use your idea to make money online, no matter how silly that idea may be. A whois search says this place been online for exactly two years. The site is registered to a person named Kumar Kota of Sunnyvale, CA.

The whole thing looks to me like some guy figured out he could set up an online subscription site that gives out math problems and virtual badge rewards. It sure doesn't look like it's worth $10 per month. I couldn't go anywhere on the site without being hounded to subscribe.

Stanford, Berkeley, and Harvard graduates are unaware that "mathbooks" is not one word? "The mathbooks your child ... does"? I guess it's a good thing they're not in the grammer and spellin bidness. lol
 
Homeschooling Paradise? Really now?

Doesn't exactly do much to elevate the perception of homeschooling, does it? There are ways to make learning fun and interesting without resorting to gross-out, offensive material, IMO.

Oh, and when a website tells me to turn off my pop-up blocker, my Spidey sense starts tingling. That page looks like it could give you a nasty trojan or two.
 
Gah!!!!

Don't click on their "Great Products" tab at HomeschoolingFoolery or whatever that place is called. They are promoting the most ridiculous stuff, have pop ups galore, and try to mousetrap you. They have everything from picking the sex of your next baby to bizarre financial advice.

As a mom who homeschooled both my kids all the way through graduation, I can say that whole site is nothing but junk. Their sponsored and unsponsored (?) ads look like complete scams. Homeschool newbies might not be able to tell the difference between legitimate sites and whatever the heck that mess is. I'd love to know what homeschoolers who are still in the loop have to say about them. I'm sure these people are just scamming folks completely based on the increased popularity of homeschooling.
 
It was on yahoo homepage today and man, I have a DIL that teaches third grade, this is just unbelievable
 
Well I am glad this guy was fired. He was only fired because he was teaching in charter school and they live by different rules and can, therefore fire him on the spot.

Obviously this guy is not competent to be a teacher. But sadly, there are many many many more like him out there with our kids every day.


JMHO
 
Maybe it was some cack handed attempt to warn them not to put marbles in their mouths? Very poor judgement though.
 
Kimberlyd125 said:
This is the website the teacher got the worksheets from...

http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/free-printable-math-worksheets-third-grade-math.html

This is what they say about themselves...

Our Third Grade math worksheets are hilarious and are accompanied by cool math clip art.

Why? So that your kids won't be tearing out their hair in agony when they get to the obnoxiously difficult math problems. Some of the questions are like deep pits. It will take a lot of struggle to get out of them.

Judging by the thousands of visitors we get, it seems that our hilarious printable math worksheets are tickling kids worldwide. We hope your kids will have a blast too!
Click to expand...

I really have issues with this new theory and practise of shocking kids into learning.
Your kid is a struggling reader? Let's get them to read something that's so disgusting they may show some interest.
Your kid has trouble with math? Let's equate it with death and they might show more interest. :banghead: :banghead:

My 8 yr old DD is dyslexic, and is being tested for dyscalcula on Monday. I'm pretty certain that the test will show she has it.
The thing is that she also has GAD- so if she were given the equation in the OP, she'd likely be sitting there worrying that if she ever plays with marbles, she will choke and die.

And it doesn't matter how many visitors they get to their website. I know that I visited the website of a trashy book the teacher had my DD reading, and it wasn't because I liked it!!

To me, a teacher that has to resort to this kind of thing is just too lazy to help students the right way.
So glad he was fired!

ETA:Check out the 'bad' on the feedback page.

http://www.homeschooling-paradise.com/share-your-thoughts.html
 
Wise Old Owl said:
Well I am glad this guy was fired. He was only fired because he was teaching in charter school and they live by different rules and can, therefore fire him on the spot.

Obviously this guy is not competent to be a teacher. But sadly, there are many many many more like him out there with our kids every day.


JMHO
Click to expand...

Really? Is firing appropriate here? A reprimand wouldn't do?

I agree the guy made an error in judgment. But his kids are watching TV, playing violent video games and reading things like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. They are telling gross-out jokes and probably respond quite well to a math problem involving a kid who died from eating too many marbles.

Still not an appropriate assignment, given that children who were bothered by the subject matter had no way to avoid it. But evidence that the teacher is an irredeemably poor teacher?

I know from experience teaching much older students (college undergrads) that it is a constant challenge for a teacher to compete with all the media clamoring for the attention of children. Teaching is a creative art as much as it is a practical skill, and anybody who is creating as he goes is going to step over a boundary now and then.

I think most of us are lucky our every poor decision doesn't make the newspapers.
 
Nova said:
Really? Is firing appropriate here? A reprimand wouldn't do?

I agree the guy made an error in judgment. But his kids are watching TV, playing violent video games and reading things like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. They are telling gross-out jokes and probably respond quite well to a math problem involving a kid who died from eating too many marbles.

Still not an appropriate assignment, given that children who were bothered by the subject matter had no way to avoid it. But evidence that the teacher is an irredeemably poor teacher?

I know from experience teaching much older students (college undergrads) that it is a constant challenge for a teacher to compete with all the media clamoring for the attention of children. Teaching is a creative art as much as it is a practical skill, and anybody who is creating as he goes is going to step over a boundary now and then.

I think most of us are lucky our every poor decision doesn't make the newspapers.
Click to expand...

Thank God the voice of reason. I was thinking the same thing - seems like teacher needed a good talking to and a time out but firing him is overkill.
 
Nova said:
Really? Is firing appropriate here? A reprimand wouldn't do?

I agree the guy made an error in judgment. But his kids are watching TV, playing violent video games and reading things like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. They are telling gross-out jokes and probably respond quite well to a math problem involving a kid who died from eating too many marbles.

Still not an appropriate assignment, given that children who were bothered by the subject matter had no way to avoid it. But evidence that the teacher is an irredeemably poor teacher?

I know from experience teaching much older students (college undergrads) that it is a constant challenge for a teacher to compete with all the media clamoring for the attention of children. Teaching is a creative art as much as it is a practical skill, and anybody who is creating as he goes is going to step over a boundary now and then.

I think most of us are lucky our every poor decision doesn't make the newspapers.
Click to expand...

It wasn't just one poor decision. He didn't accept responsibility for his poor judgement, and tried to lay the blame on someone else higher up in the school system.

BBM-
At first, the unnamed teacher at the Trinidad Center City School claimed he had been ordered to assign the problems, but it was quickly discovered that the teacher had actually downloaded them from a free homeschooling website called "HomeschoolingParadise.com."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sidesho...nt-math-problems-third-graders-201910368.html
 
"I was sleeping one night when a hungry vampire sucked 3652 liters of blood from me and 1865 liters of blood from my little brother. How much blood did the hungry vampire drink that night?"
Click to expand...

After a while on this homeschooling program the children will not only be equating math with death and destruction but they will also be confused about biology.

An average adult has no more than 5 liters of blood altogether so if this kid lost 730 times that it's unlikely that he'd be constructing math problems about it.
 
I think it's cruel and disrespectful to assign vile math problems to children. Very disrespectful. I don't know if I could control myself if I were one of the parents. I always expected my children be treated with dignity by their teachers.

One of the problems was about cooking Americans and Africans in an oven. That isn't funny. Imagine an 8 year old picturing people in an oven. How dare a teacher bring that kind of imagery to his charges?
 
At that age I'd be scared to death if I heard my teacher ask me such horrible questions. I was such a scardie-cat when I was little. I remember just hearing cats fight outside would make me scramble into my brothers room.

I can't imagine the phobia's I may have developed had I been given such math problems.

YIKES!

Mel

ps: I still can't tolerate a cat yowling - it creeps me out!
 
butwhatif? said:
It wasn't just one poor decision. He didn't accept responsibility for his poor judgement, and tried to lay the blame on someone else higher up in the school system.

BBM-
At first, the unnamed teacher at the Trinidad Center City School claimed he had been ordered to assign the problems, but it was quickly discovered that the teacher had actually downloaded them from a free homeschooling website called "HomeschoolingParadise.com."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sidesho...nt-math-problems-third-graders-201910368.html
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what that means. At first, the unnamed teacher claimed that to whom?

(Obviously he didn't tell his superiors he had been ordered to assign the problems. So I'm guessing he gave the first reporter who called some lame excuse. Not very clever, but he's hardly the first person to lie to a reporter.)

And we don't even know which problems he gave to his students. The article just says all the problems dealt with inappropriate subject matter.

(This is not to blame you, butwhatif?. I think the linked article is unclear.)

Frankly, this case reminds me of two teachers in my high school who were fired when the press learned they had assigned an article from Playboy magazine to an English class. They xeroxed the article, mind you, so no student had access to the centerfold, but they were fired nonetheless. Both were excellent teachers and a real loss. And it's not as if any of their students hadn't seen an actual Playboy magazine before.
 
Donjeta said:
After a while on this homeschooling program the children will not only be equating math with death and destruction but they will also be confused about biology.

An average adult has no more than 5 liters of blood altogether so if this kid lost 730 times that it's unlikely that he'd be constructing math problems about it.
Click to expand...

That was precisely my objection to that problem. LOL.
 
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