Idiot Teacher Asked 4th-Graders to Give 3 Good Reasons for Slavery
https://www.theroot.com/idiot-teacher-asked-4th-graders-to-give-3-good-reasons-1821982084?utm_source=theroot_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow“It’s highly offensive and insensitive. I was in shock. I couldn’t believe they sent something like that home,” said Brown-Berry, apparently able to contain the God-given slapping-the-shit-out-of-fourth-grade-teachers instinct gifted to most black mothers.
School Principal Jim Van Dellen admitted the assignment was “out of line” in a letter to parents, explaining that the assignment was intended to “spark debate.”
“The purpose of the assignment was not, in ANY way, to have students argue that ANY slavery is acceptable, a concept that goes against our core values about the equality and worth of people of all races,” the letter read, despite the fact that the explicit instructions of the assignment were to ask students to argue about the acceptance of slavery.
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Word "fuck" to be used in all the ways it can by fucks who don't appreciate how it can be a noun, adjective, adverb, verb, and exclamation... fuck! I'm sure I'm missing a few parts of speech. 
Seriously, this is a NC17 board, in that it's highly unlikely that any minors who aren't going to be 18 by November 2018 will be on here.
I agree that often overuse of expletives makes a person look less than bright. At the same time, sometimes it's appropriate to use a word that adds some punch to one's exclamation of derision.
" is the surest way to make you look stupid..."
No... not really. The best way to look stupid is to justify the teacher's actions as anything other than stupidity, deny other teaching mechanisms that would be just as, if not more effective in teaching critical thought, and pretend to know the subject matter.
But that's just me.... 
(That said, I'd also pretend the emotional hysteria lies with others and not me... much as you did. It allows us self-validation. Id also ignore my own logical fallacies (three), while demanding that others list their own, as it certainly assists a pretense of cleverness)
Fark came about while living with kids. Though given my friend's experience with a daycare calling her because her daughter was using "What the?" in the manner of cussing and they were sure she was saying the "f" word under her breath (wtf had been her favorite exclamation, so she tried to moderate it to "what the?" )... I have a feeling either would sound the same in a toddler's mouth.
Fsck came about because of working as a HPUX sysadmin. When drives were corrupted so badly fscks had to be run on them, the disks were probably... well, fscked. And also the hapless sysadmin who was likely to spend all night restoring the system.
What the hell, Wisconsin? 
Why don't you just stick to cheesemaking, and leave primary education to the states with brains?...
I'll be honest -- 4th graders generally aren't very high on the Piaget/Kohlberg scales of moral development, and it's at that time they're just beginning to hit stage 3, if that, in Kohlberg's scale, that of moral direction coming from the views of others.
As such, any lesson about slavery at that age that doesn't make it clear slavery had no redeeming qualities, only rationalizations made by people who benefited from it, is beyond them. In junior high, in high school, you might have a debate team deliberately try to argue the pro-slavery argument, just as you might have them do that for numerous "bad positions", to learn more in-depth ways to counter such arguments.
But in 4th grade, such an lesson, hopefully, was more along the lines of (in the classroom), "Some people who benefited from slavery justified what they were doing. They weren't good rationalizations, each had flaws." An assignment to then list the reasons used to justify slavery and a counter-list of why slavery was actually bad would then be an appropriate homework assignment.
Or, even, "And some people were more honest in why they wanted slaves, instead of trying to justify their behavior with 'good' reasons." Then an assignment listing the flawed rationalizations and why they were flawed, and the honest reasons and why they violated morality, would also be good.
But neither is teaching critical thinking beyond "These people may have had reasons for doing what they did, but those reasons were wrong -- just because you have a reason doesn't mean the reason is factual or moral".
I admit I think kids should learn the reasons slavery-supporters justified it. Knowing the reasons people did bad things helps you learn not to do bad things, or fall for crappy reasons to do bad things. Just as we should teach kids why people justified westward expansion ("Manifest Destiny" . But we *shouldn't* argue, or have children potentially not even at the Interpersonal Conformity stage of moral development try to argue, that those reasons had any validity -- the prejudice, religious intolerance, and selfish self-interest that motivated those reasons should be stated all as bad things too.
Because they are. And yes, education is partially indoctrination. Especially at that age.
