It would have been so easy to change “cop” to “Pop” (as in “dad”), but I guess running from your dad would bring the critics too. Maybe just go full-Seuss and make up a silly name like “Grop” or “Blop.”
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UGH! If they don’t mention slavery, that shit is wrong, wrong, wrong… hopefully you gave her some appropriate corrective for her age. Or maybe her teacher did?
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About 10 years ago, my aunt showed me a graded worksheet by one of my youngest cousins:
I can understand how a child might not immediately realize both are true under some circumstances. I can’t understand how a grown educator could fail to understand that. Even an idiot would guess “well, one of them must be right”.
(cue Juggalo memes)
There is a wide variation in the quality of public education.
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Catch twenty-true
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Hmmm… I am guessing “FUCK the PO-LICE!”?
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Aside from all the other problems, I feel like, in a list of hardships faced by civil war soldiers, “even the possibility of getting killed in battle” should rank higher than bad weather.
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I think the goal is to ignore the violence of war at all costs, because they believe it will somehow warp and harm children to understand that human beings have done terrible things to each other in the past.
I do wonder how they talk about world war 2 and the holocaust, though for that age group if this is how they handle the American civil war.
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I suspect the purpose of this exercise was to get kids to recognize the differences between b, p, d, g and so on. It might also help catch dyslexic kids…or doom them to stupid-kid classes if the teacher doesn’t know what to look for.
That’s probably the entire reason they used a cop for this scenario, actually. I mean, that’s the optimistic view.
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we might infer the kids haven’t covered the silent e yet, so words like are are out for now
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In that case, “Rob’s sock is wet” would be fine.
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yeah, that would be better
it could just be a typo, or considered acceptable in the local dialect
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They can still conjugate. Where do you think little authoritarian bootlickers and probably racists come from?
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Shakin’ my head at this numb skull teacher. At least it did not get into “the exit speed of a bullet from the cops pistol is…” so maybe this scene ended peacefully?
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If it was anything like the schools I went to - they simply don’t. I remember going on a class trip to see a dramatized portion of the diary of Anne Frank… where zero context for it was provided beforehand, at an age when I didn’t know what it was. Nor was there discussion after. I don’t know why. I don’t recollect ever having a class go into the Second World War to any degree - even my high school history class, when we were supposed to, didn’t. We never got to it. These were “gifted” and advanced placement classes. I guess they figured we were smart enough we could learn it on our own…
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Weird. We not only covered both world wars in 5th grade, we were shown films taken at concentration camps that showed many of the terrible things Nazis did to the Jewish captives. The idea was to drive home the point that Nazis are very, very bad, don’t let this ever happen again. This was in Texas. Of course when they went over the civil war, it was painted as “the war of Northern agression” with a passing mention of chattel slavery. 
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https://www.pghschools.org/domain/20
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No. Elementary schools and Grammar schools are totally different things.
But the cop did not bop! (I’m bopping, right now!)
Someone wrote that. At least a few other people were probably involved in formatting it, editing it and including it in the final workbook. And not one of them stopped to think “hmmm, is it really necessary to use a story about children running from cops to make points about grammar? Could that be problematic in any way?”
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Good point. If only they would get grammatical a little less often, maybe restrict their conjunctions outside of periods and just let their participles dangle.
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I have a pretty good guess about the problem there…
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