This mainly shows that there are some teachers who care enough for their students to not copy questions from books. Given the context I see no offense.

1. I don't see what it has to do with the discussion since the original question in the topic was as neutral as possible.

2. I don't see racisms anywhere.

during the history of america people of african origin often defined as "niggers" worked as slaves under precarious work conditions.

This is history. It's offensive because it's true. The only way to make it racist is to ignore (as in not teach) that it happened in the first place.

The question probably has been given to provoke indipendent thought in the children i.e. were the working conditions right? Was it fair that they were not paid for the fruits of their labour? rather than having an adult tell them "Mmmkay kids, slavery and racisms is bad, and if you are a slaver or a racist you are bad, Mmmkay?"

Again we can discuss about the quality of the question, but i don't see how they are "wrong"

The question about picking apples is harmless, the question about baskets of cotton is insensitive and the question about the beatings is horrible. It takes the entire emotional experience of being completely at the mercy of another human being with no recourse whatsoever, and desensitizes it down into nothing. As a math problem it could just as easily be trains or flowers or ooblecks, but as a history-crossover question it's unforgivable.

Part of the reason people hate learning history is because historians in the last century or so have worked very hard to boil everything down into nothingness... just dates and places and battles. Thus, history is boring. When really, history is the STORY OF EVERYTHING THAT EVER HAPPENED, which is the opposite of boring. If the math question referenced how badly his wounds from the beatings got infected, and was tracing the rate of the sepsis that would kill him at the end of the two-week period, would you be so calm? Because slaves died from beatings all the time, especially on large plantations with dozens or hundreds of slaves.

As a white guy living in the South, these are exactly the sorts of things that make me sad and angry, because the whole idea of "Southern Heritage" has become so tainted with racism that I'm not sure we'll ever recover, and moronic things like this aren't helping in the slightest.

1. It was a hypothetical to key into a similar(hypothetical) situation you might be more familiar with, being Italian and all.

2. Simply put, you just DON'T ask kids about beatings as part of a math question.....that alone makes it wrong. It'd be like asking young kids to count how many people a mugger shot per week on average(with the appropriate info laid out to make calculations) before he was caught. Going further and making it about slaves being beaten is where it becomes racist.

1 Uh i still don't get what you mean, let me try this.

if you transformed this "If your salami eating, greasy moustached wop brother gino had an extortion racket going and extorted three elderly shopkeeps a week for 52 dollars total.... one paying 32% of that total, one paying 26%, and the last paying 42%, how much did each shopkeep pay?"
Into
"If a Mafia family had an extortion racket going and forced three shopkeeps to pay 52 dollars total one paying 32% of that total, one paying 26%, and the last paying 42%, how much did each shopkeep pay?"

It's a crude but acceptable question to ask, provided the teacher first explained the context to the kids.

2. as i said the quality of the questions is rather poor, but i don't see the problem with questions that make kids think about history, again, having had a good exposition to the treated subject first.

I do agree with that, I think the main difference is how the educational systems handle things. In the US, we have what is probably a somewhat lower standard for everybody at the elementary school level.

My friends mostly got to go to Horizon which was later renamed Spectrum, which was supposed to be for the brightest students. The problem was that they made the decision about whom to promote at age 8 or so which ensured that any late bloomers would be at a comparative disadvantage. On top of that because of my birth date being in November I had to have a higher score in order to gain admittance.

In the US nobody is skipped in grade except under rare circumstances. I had one friend who skipped a grade and that was purely because they had held him back the previous year and first grade isn't that big of a deal.

And yes you are right about that wasting talent. I was in the unenviable situation of being with people that were less intelligent and less mature for most of my growing up until I went to college a few years early.

All educational systems have their issues, unfortunately nobody has ever done a fair evaluation of the US educational system versus ones in other parts of the world which makes it really tough to know. Most of the time it's the best students in Asia, Europe etc., versus all of our high school students.

I tend to get a bit emotional about this subject not just because of personal experience, but also because of the time I've personally spent trying to get smart students to see themselves as smart after having been run down by an uncaring system.

EDIT: As far as productivity and happiness go, I think the 110-120 range is probably about optimal. It's high enough that those facilities are going to put a person ahead, but not so high as to impair the ability to comprehend how other people see the world. It's just normal to me to be able to see things several steps out and nudge things in the direction that I want them to go.
In the class I took about cultural differences there was a bit where we tried to identify the gestures with the culture in which they were offensive. And quite frankly I was stumped on most of them because without being a part of the culture or having familiarity they're just gestures.

I still don't understand why the middle finger is such a big deal here in the US, even though I was born and raised here, apart from this odd sense that it should be offensive.

It would appear the Gwinnet School district have 'form' with this sort of rubbish, with the question reported here

What does the U.S. do with illegal aliens?

A. The U.S. puts them to work in the army.

B. The U.S. shoots them into outer space.

C. The U.S. puts them to death.

D. The U.S. sends them back where they came from.

That question was allegedly also directed at the third grade

Some of these dopes should be directed to run, not walk, to the nearest unemployment office.

I lol'ed. But I find it hard to believe. It can't be real.

... Nah this can't be serious. this if hopefully just going to be huge hoax, i couldn't think a modern nation could teach such shit.

May well be a hoax - or some ratbags using the education system (and the kids) to push an agenda.

1. As I said before, what if they didn't explain the context and wrote that question up to be offensive? How would you feel about it being on your kid's test then?

2. I don't know how Italian schools do it but we don't try to intentionally subject kids that young(around 8) to such things.

For one, I can see the point of people here who live in Europe and find nothing wrong with the tests, since from our point of view there were no explicit references to racism in them. On the other hand, I have some very casual and surface understanding of American culture partly from my studies but mostly from the internet, and I see how even mentioning the word slaves is a sensitive issue for a lot of people there. I think putting those questions in was tasteless at best.

1. That's bad education (in this case specifically, yes, racism), and speculation on our part. Well to be honest given the second test posted here a bit above i hope they do some kind of investigation in that school, to see what's actually gong on there. the rest is pure speculation on our part and without any evidence of ill will rather redundant.

2. http://youtu.be/1W2AIECx6cc?t=4m19s

Sorry couldn't resist. :D

Anyways i think i did the roman empire around 3rd grade and really that's already the whole programme of slavery, racism, imperialism and even incest. fun times those. well okay i don't think they really explained it that way but that's what stuck when we had the same thing again in highschool.

Precisely, it would be unreasonable for me, or really any other American, to expect for a European to understand as most of it has to do with American history over the last, well entirety of American history.

Slavery being mentioned in a historical context and studied in a normative way isn't likely to cause much offense, but not always. I remember objecting pretty strenuously to a lesson in health class that blamed whitey's treatment of slaves on slave ships well over a hundred years previously for modern blood pressure problems in black people.

If I had it all to do over, I would have objected on grounds other than wondering what the relevance was, but I definitely would have objected to the racism involved with such a lesson plan. That was in the late 90s and our schools had only been integrated in the mid 70s. In fact most of the teachers I had in grade school started out teaching in segregated classrooms.

Really? Why so late?