Category Archives: Outrageous

Gruesome Assignment Spells Termination for D.C. Teacher | ABC News Blogs

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Gruesome Assignment Spells Termination for D.C. Teacher | ABC News Blogs – Yahoo! News.

A math assignment that required students to figure out how many Africans, Americans and Indians to bake in ovens for Thanksgiving was a recipe for termination for a third-grade teacher in Washington, D.C.

The unnamed teacher was fired from the Trinidad Center City School in Northeast Washington last Thursday, just one day after she was outed by outraged parents for assigning a set of violence-laced math problems to her students.

Local TV news station WUSA-9 was the first to report on the problems which featured situations involving kidnapping, deaths, and killings, including one that was said by a parent to invoke the Holocaust.  That question asked students to figure out “How many desperate people were in each oven?” referring to Africans, Americans and Indians.

“I was absolutely distressed,” Dr. Beverley Wheeler, CEO of the Center City Public Charter School System, which oversees Trinidad, told WUSA-9.

“We are about character, excellence and service and I found them to be violent and racist,” she said.

The mandatory 20 homework problems included instances such as, “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?”

Another problem asked students, “My 3 friends and I were caught and tied up by 1023 screaming cannibals in a jungle last night. Soon we were feeling terribly itchy because of the mosquitoes. We begged the cannibals to scratch us. 219 cannibals refused because they were busy cutting vegetables. The rest of them, however, surrounded us in equal numbers and began to scratch us with their teeth, just like dogs. It felt good! How many cannibals scratched me?”

Read the full set of 20 math problems here.

Wheeler, who described it as “incredibly bad judgment” for the teacher to use the problems as homework questions, said the teacher went off the approved curriculum (YA THINK??) and instead downloaded the math problems from the HomeschoolingParadise.com  (And these questions are ok on the HomeschoolingParadise.com site???) website.

Sources told the station that the teacher, said to be a minister, was told she had to use the problems.

“Not true,” said Wheeler, while also adding that even if that was the case the teacher still showed poor decision-making.

“It doesn’t follow anything we do,” she said.

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Gainesville High School Students’ Racist YouTube Rant Forces Girls To Leave School, Apologize (VIDEO)

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Gainesville High School Students’ Racist YouTube Rant Forces Girls To Leave School, Apologize (VIDEO).

After two minors from Gainesville High School in Gainesville, Fla., posted a nearly 14-minute-long racist rant on YouTube, the girls are “no longer students at the school,” WCJB-TV reports.

(Scroll for video.)

Last week, eight police officers were brought to the campus in light of death threats the girls were receiving in response to their videos. The videos included comments like, “You can understand what we are saying, our accents, we use actual words. Black people do not.”

Gainesville High School principal David Shelnutt did not go into detail on the extent of the disciplinary action taken against the girls, but did tell WCJB that their comments were not welcome at the school.

“There’s no place for comments like that, that video here at GHS,” Shelnutt told the station. “There’s no place for that in the Alachua County Public School System, and my opinion, no place for that in society in general.”

Since the video went viral last week, the girls have experienced harassment and said they feared for their safety. According to one report by the Gainesville Sun, one of the students involved was hiding out at a relative’s house while her mother was at work.

“Our lives have changed totally, 180 degrees,” her mother told the paper. “This has made her an adult really quick.”

The girls and one of their parents issued a formal apology in the paper Monday:

“I am one of the girls who were in the racist video that got posted. I’m writing this so that I can tell people how truly sorry I am. I could never, in a million years, have pictured this happening with me involved. I wasn’t raised to hate people for their race, and I still don’t. I made a horrible decision in being a part of this video … “

The girl also writes that she won’t make excuses, but hopes the community will eventually forgive her.

In another apology, the second girl’s mother says her daughter has gone into a depression following the backlash of the video, and hopes that the community will forgive her and end the harassment:

“While we can never take back the words and actions that these two children have said, we have to start to heal and forgive IMMEDIATELY. Stop the violent threats to our homes and our children, stop the anger, because this will solve absolutely nothing, and most importantly, look at yourself for change and love.”

According to the Gainesville Sun, the high school will wear orange, the color of racial tolerance, this week as a sign of solidarity.

The response to the girls’ videos echos sentiments of racial issues in school communities across the country.

Just last summer, 18-year-old Kymberly Wimberly of Arkansas filed suit against McGehee Secondary School after four years of nearly straight-As, honors and Advanced Placement classes had placed her at the top of her graduating class. The suit alleges that though she earned the marks, the school denied her valedictorian status because she is black.

A separate suit filed against a Minnesota school district last August claimed that a Red Wing High School homecoming event called “Wigger Day” caused a black student “severe emotional distress including depression, loss of sleep, stress, crying, humiliation, anxiety, and shame.”

“Wigger is a pejorative slang term for a white person who emulates the mannerisms, language and fashions associated with African-American culture,” the complaint explains. Students were encouraged to dress in oversized sports jerseys, low-slung pants, baseball hats cocked to the side and ‘doo rags.

Most recently in Norcross, Ga., a Beaver Ridge Elementary School teacher resigned after outcry over a third grade math assignment that used slavery examples in word problems. Parents were outraged at both the assignment and the school district’s response to the reports of those math problems, which included references to cotton, orange picking and beatings.

One problem read: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?”

On the other end of the spectrum, this sensitivity — or sometimes, lack thereof — seems to create a bit of an identity crisis among schoolchildren. Some black students say they feel ostracized for acting “too white.” One Connecticut middle school student said he was stabbed in the back with a pencil by a peer who thought he wasn’t acting “black enough.”

WARNING: the following video is disturbing, contains lewd language, and is NSFW.

WATCH:

Pet buffalo is a Texas groom’s best man

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Pet buffalo is a Texas groom’s best man.

American Bison (also known as Buffalo) and their calves, forage for food at Yellowstone National Park. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

American Bison (also known as Buffalo) and their calves, forage for food at Yellowstone National Park. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

When grooms are picking the best man for their weddings, they typically want the friend who is the most loyal. For Ronald Bridges, that meant choosing someone who was big enough to trample him, but chose not to.

Married couple Ronald and Sherron Bridges had their pet buffalo, Wildthing, be the best man when they renewed their wedding vows on a Texas ranch, the Daily Mail reported Saturday.

“We are always aware that he is so big that he could hurt us with a swing of his head, so we are careful,” Sherron Bridges told the Daily Mail. “But Wildthing absolutely dotes on Ronald – that’s why he chose him to be his best man when we renewed our wedding vows. Wildthing follows him round like a shadow.”

Ronald Bridges had tamed Wildthing when the animal was just a calf.

The Bridges are not the first couple to make headlines for keeping a tame buffalo as a pet.

In October, NPR reported on a couple in Canada and its beloved 1,800-pound buffalo.  Owner Jim Sautner brings his pet buffalo to bars and other neighborhood hangouts.