[Yesterday I was en route to Las Vegas for a speaking engagement—actually one of my rock classic parodies musical legal ethics seminars with rock singer and guitarist Mike Messer—and essentially went from 7 hour trip to hotel to restaurant to bed last night, then to an all day session today. I’ll catch up: I’m not ignoring comments, just haven’t had the chance to read them.]
"If Bugs Moran has 276 gangsters, and Al Capone's men massacre 7 every Valentines day beginning in 1929, how many gangsters will he have left today?" Hey, math is fun!
At the Trinidad Center City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., third graders have been given math problems like this…
- “Tilda Tiger had many hungry children to feed on Thanksgiving Day. She caught 169 Africans, 526 Americans and 196 Indians. She then put the people equally into 9 enormous ovens to bake. How many desperate people were in each oven?” Not to mention…
- “When I was sleeping in a forest last night, 2555 fire ants crawled up my nose and built a nest in my brain. I woke up screaming the next morning. My distraught mother rushed me to hospital for an emergency operation. The doctor was able to kill 1953 fire ants. The remaining ants in my brain formed themselves into 7 equal-sized groups and fled to 7 different organs in my body, one being my stomach. a) How many fire ants escaped? b) How many ants fled to my stomach?” As well as…
- “Green aliens landed in Chicago and rounded up 1479 math teachers. The bloodthirsty aliens then sucked the blood of 828 teachers and left them for dead. The aliens tied up the rest of the teachers and marched them into 3 UFOs. If there were an equal number of poor math teachers in each UFO, how many teachers were in each UFO?”…and this:
- “Susan Shark had 15 pieces of $50 notes in her handbag and had to cook dinner for her hungry children. She went to the supermarket and bought 8 tender humans at $26 each and 7 juicy mermaids at $29 each. How much money did she have after that?”
Parents are upset about this, apparently. Now, I have to admit that even in the third grade, I would have loved getting such sick math problems. They show creativity and whimsy. They also show a rather dark sense of humor, and while it is true that traditional fairy tales are full of violence, death and cannibalism, having math problems revolving around topics like fire ants nesting in one’s brain could be seen as taking a good idea—having fun with math —to an irresponsible extreme.
Your Ethics Quiz: Are these questions ( you can see the whole list here) irresponsible to give to a third grade class?
Arrgh. It is tough for me, because I think the teacher here has the right idea, and as I said, these questions wouldn’t have fazed me (or my parents) in the least. But a lot of children…fortunately…are not like little Jack. These images are potentially disturbing, and some children won’t respond well to them. I think when a teacher wants to try something this far outside the normal expectations of parents, there is an obligation to get prior consent. There are a lot of innovative teaching approaches that won’t be appropriate for an entire class, and this is one of them.
The questions are symptoms of a training problem, a bored teacher, or the reasons why creative people end up in professionals other than teaching, Innovative as they are, the questions also show a lack of judgment, competence, and responsibility.
Or do you disagree?
Ethics Alarms 
As a person who uses humor all the time, I can’t overstate how good humor is to disarm and relax people. Then again, I think you could make word problems wacky and even darkly humorous without making them graphic. The things about blood and etc, that might be pushing it. But the third one, I don’t see any problem with.
Something like, “If the troll eats three princesses a day, and there are thirty kingdoms, how long will it take him to eat all the princesses?” Nothing graphic, but still silly enough for a kid to let his guard down.
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The teacher (or, was it a curriculum director and not the teacher?) overwhelmed her own sense of responsibility with her lack of prudence. The level of math appears appropriate for the third grade level. The use of “word problems” in general is a wonderful and, I believe, timely device to teach math at that level, to enable comprehension to “sink in” and to help a student to appreciate that “hey, I can really USE math!”
But the teacher in this case went overboard. With all the graphic content and fantastic scenarios, she practically dared the students to be distracted from the actual math aspects of the problems. It’s one thing to “work in” one “silly” test question. It’s imprudent to fill a test with them. It’s one thing to work in a little entertainment effect. It’s imprudent to make entertainment a crutch or be-all in the presentation of math problems.
I agree with Jeff that the last example you gave, Jack, is sufficiently whimsical, fantastic, and gently mocking of the implicit violence to be used with third graders. If a few of my third graders (hypothetically I mean; I do not teach them, but my wife does) giggled upon reading that one test question but nonetheless settled down quickly enough to actually solve the math, then that test problem – as a “departure” and exceptional type of problem statement within a test full of more down-to-earth examples – is defensible, I believe.
I don’t recall having word problems in my math schooling until maybe the fifth (or sixth) grade. Solving them was a difficult hump to get over. I wish I had been schooled in math with them earlier. But, once I had the “Eureka moment” – relating the in-school stuff to outside-of-school stuff like baseball and basketball statistics, and football strategies – my already good, basic arithmetic and pre-algebra understanding and appreciation of math “took off.” So I think the school’s effort, apart from the imprudent use of too many “off-color” problem statements, is commendable. I honestly suspect I would have been distracted from learning if, say, some math problem was put in front of me about military action involving killing Cubans at the Bay of Pigs or killing Viet Cong guerrillas (I would have started obsessing about visiting a zoo at that point!).
I think the fire ant one might have given me a sleepless night or two in grade three. Way more fun than the marbles, trains and coins that showed up in my grade school math problems though. Too bad so many people take the right idea in a wrong direction.
Having fun with word problems is certainly the right idea, and I’d certainly prefer a world where grade schools teachers are having fun teaching, as that positive attitude will likely help motivate students. So long as no one’s slacking on the subject matter at hand, which doesn’t at all appear to be a problem here, it should be encouraged.
These particular problems might be a problem for certain sensitive students, however. If this were in a small classroom where the teacher was safely confident in his or her students’ emotional maturity, I wouldn’t have any reservations, but using the same material in a larger public school classroom instead shows some lack of judgement. As Jeff suggests, these questions could have been toned down while still maintaining a hint of dark humor.
I wonder, were any sensitive children legitimately upset, or is all the fuss originating solely from sensitive parents?
If I were the one meting judgement, I’d let the teacher off with a warning and require submission of further homework questions for review. I doubt we can trust most actual school administrators to be capable of handling the repercussions with any kind of sophistication or delicacy.
This is a toughy for me as well. My first pass was horrified, but a second reading shows them to be pretty benign as dark humor goes. If this was 6th graders, I’d be for it, but for 3rd graders? I just don’t know. I don’t know if I have enough experience with elementary schoolers to make this call.
Then I started looking at what could have led to this. It looks like the teacher was trying to get the kids used to breaking down word problems into their parts, no matter what the subject is. While teaching this, the teacher may have done a couple oddball examples and then asked for suggestions from the class for the others. That’s what I would have done. If some of the dark humor came out during class, then the stage would be set and this would be appropriate.
Isn’t it noticable that so many of these “problems” were based on the theme of human beings as prey? Adults and teens might laugh at this as sheer foolishness, but what about young children?