What should we call it, when a homework problem for high school biology posits that a woman can’t identify the father of her child; that she had four sexual partners who are candidates for that honor (described only by their occupations or how she met them); that she needs “the state” to perform a blood test on each one; and that “the state” would be on hand to take the child away from the mother, depending on what it found?
It certainly comes across to the average person as mainstreaming a pattern of indiscriminate, irresponsible sexual relations.
A Michigan father was astounded when his freshman daughter asked for help with her biology homework, and he encountered this word problem, presented for students to solve as a question of blood type and heredity. The basic question reads as follows:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The sister of the mom above also had issues with finding out who the father of her baby was. She had the state take a blood test of potential fathers. Based on the information in this table, why was the baby taken away by the state after the test?
The candidates for fatherhood? A “bartender,” “guy at the club,” “cabdriver” [sic], and a “flight attendant.” Not even Joe, Paul, Rick, or Tom.
The implications about how the woman in question is getting pregnant are obviously problematic for a high-school biology question. But so is the premise that the woman would automatically have recourse to the state if she needed to establish paternity.
Then things get even weirder, if we work through the problem using the blood types given, and discover that there is no chance the baby at issue is the woman’s own child. So not only does she sleep around indiscriminately, but she’s a baby-napper to boot.
Apparently, someone thought it was a good idea to write a biology question featuring all these factors in a woman’s life. The teacher at Romeo High School says she got the question off a website with classroom resources for teachers. (And yes, Michigan is a Common Core state. There doesn’t appear to be a specific connection here, however.)
It strains credulity to imagine that no red flags went up for the teacher when she included this question in the students’ assignment.
But at least the school superintendent agreed that the question was “inappropriate”:
“[T]his painted a picture, I think, that was not appropriate,” she told WWJ. “My first thought when I saw it was that it certainly been worded better.”
I’m not actually sure how you word better a question about a woman who had sex with four men at random, sought paternity tests by the state for all four, and then turned out to have abducted the child she was passing off as hers.
The freshman daughter had to have explained to her what the sequence of questions was implying:
After talking to their daughter about the questions, Audri was concerned. “Now that I see what it really means, I think it like depicts women in a really uncomfortable light,” she told WWJ.
According to the superintendent, Nancy Campbell, she received only one complaint about the homework problem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4t-hrZs_1I
