July 17, 2012
Another slide shows the following text, again written in a child’s hand:
“I think Mr. James Watsons [sic] shouldn”t have won the Nobel Prize because this man was a racist….This man said that black people don”t have the intelligences [sic] that white people do but at the end of the day who is are [sic] President? And what colour is he?
Again, Barack Obama isn”t “are” president here in Canada, but I guess in the TDSB’s eyes, he are”I mean, is“the universal, Nobel Prize-winning President of Black People International Incorporated, so whatever.
Now: James Watson”the co-parent of DNA and “perhaps the most distinguished living American scientist“””has” more “intelligences” than every teacher working at the Toronto District School Board (possibly combined).
Yet he famously resigned from the lab he”d run for 40 years after “making politically (but not scientifically) incorrect statements about African IQs.”
Those vastly superior intellects at the TDSB”besides accidentally helping to make Watson’s point for him”aren”t “gloomy” about Africa at all. Their Africentric lesson plan also features the following “math problem”:
Imagine you are an expert Kente cloth weaver in Ghana. The people of your village have asked you to make a special cloth to send as a gift to President-Elect Obama for his inauguration….How can you accomplish this important task?
Frankly, if I was an expert Kente cloth weaver in Ghana, I”d be thinking, “Hey, how come Obama’s brother still lives in a hut? Hell, why do I still live in a hut?” (Although that presumes I was still equipped with my Western white-girl IQ, right? It’s all so confusing.)
To turn this scenario into a math problem or something like it, teachers instruct children to calculate the cost of making such a gift and to “describe the length [of the finished cloth] using standard and non-standard tools,” such as whatever the hell “a Susudua” is.
(Just a reminder: An American teacher was forced to resign after assigning math homework with slavery-themed problems. But this is different. Because reasons.)
I suppose we should feel a touch of relief that Toronto’s Africentric math problems aren”t phrased in Ebonics.
This flaky curriculum is ostensibly designed to appeal to the city’s “at-risk youth,” none of whom ever seem to be Jewish or Japanese, but all of whom”at least if our newspaper’s depressingly frequent murder reports are to be believed”are “aspiring rap artists.” (Notice that they”re never “aspiring brain surgeons.”)
Local liberals decry Toronto’s “gun culture,” but dozens of dead “aspiring rap artists” a year? Bug or feature?
If that sounds “racist,” then I plead guilty, with an explanation. I can”t help myself, you see. The Toronto District School Board says so.
Included in their “Package for Educators Grades 7-12″ is an item called “Teaching about Human Rights 9/11 and Beyond,” where children are taught that white people can never experience racism. They can only ever be the racists.
It’s right there in black and white.
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