Public school encourages students to "practice punishment" during math homework

It's no carrots, all sticks at Tom Heck's son's middle school. Click the thumbnail to see the entire page.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

disillusion

Hah, I thought graded homework WAS the punishment. Silly me.
jimh

Spellcheck auto correct? Trying to figure out what it was supposed to be…
- Palomino
  
  Synonym FAIL? “Homework allows a student an opportunity to practice (self) discipline.”
  - Palomino
    
    This is “Practicing (Self) Punishment”
pjcamp

My classes start next Wednesday. I am SO rewriting my syllabus.
SoItBegins

A slip of the tongue, there?
BarBarSeven

Practicing with a painstik have made many of my Klingon friends strong warriors.
corydodt

That’s such a non-sequitur that I’m sure it’s a kind of typo. They were probably thinking about the word “punishment” for some reason while they typed out the sheet, then later edited it to put in the right word but forgot to delete the wrong one.

In any case, math homework is clearly an opportunity for the teacher, not the student, to practice punishment.
- Donald Petersen
  
  I’m sure Palomino has nailed it. Substitute “discipline” for “punishment.”
  
  Still, how often do electronic spellcheckers autosuggest synonyms? Maybe it’s all the time, and I’ve just had that “feature” turned off for the last decade.
  - http://profiles.google.com/joshuabardwell Joshua Bardwell
    
    What if it was a non-native English speaker? That’s exactly the kind of error such a person would make.
    - http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075
      
      The phrase “daily maintenance of homework” also suggests non-native speaker.
      - Palomino
        
        Missed that phrasing…nice job.
    - jsandin
      
      The school outsourced the writing.
  - Jonathan Roberts
    
    Unless it was one of those global find / replace stories:
    http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2008/07/christian_sites_ban_on_g_word.html
    - ldobe
      
      ”Tyson homosexual today became the fastest runner in the world. After stellar start, homosexual beat out Usain Bolt…”
Lyle Hopwood

I’m more worried that the students are asked to participate in class “everyday” rather than every day. I suspect the math teacher needs English lessons.
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenahoo Ken Williams
  
  I dunno, I like it. The kids need to participate until it feels “commonplace, ordinary, or normal.”
nixiebunny

Is that what it is. I thought math homework was a way to allow their dad to brush up on his rusty math skills.
MonkeyBoy

Maybe they are also being taught the mathematics of game theory such as in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. I wonder if they will cover Zero Determinant strategies?
steve_wildstrom

The class is using Core-Plus Mathematics, which is another sort of self-punishment.
Chandler Lewis

I suspect the teacher originally wrote “an opportunity to practice, not as a form of punishment” or somesuch. Upon reflection, s/he then highlighted the phrase intending to delete it, but only got the first bunch of words.
TsukiNoKemuri

Could it be an autocorrected attempt to write “penmanship”?
http://www.angrycrank.com woland

That could happen if the teacher is not a native speaker of English, wrote the syllabus in his or her native language, and machine translated it. I do a lot of translation and sometimes use very sophisticated machine pre-translation to speed up the work and ensure consistent use of terminology, but this is exactly the kind of thing you have to watch for as you revise.
http://andrushka.net/ Scott Cushman

The word should be “discipline.” It’s sometimes a synonym of punishment, but it can also mean to develop in oneself habits of order and self-control.