On a worksheet that echoes both Fox News’s “fair and balanced” slogans and Donald Trump’s “blame on both sides” comments about Charlottesville, San Antonio middle schoolers were tasked with an impossible exercise: imagine the upside to being a slave.
The homework assignment, titled “The Life of a Slave: A Balanced View,” asked students to list the positive and negative aspects of being owned by another human being and forced into hard labor. One student tells CNN that he called bullshit on the assignment immediately—literally.
"When I first read it, I thought, this was b.s.," said Great Hearts Monte Vista eighth-grade student Manu Livar.Manu said his teacher told them to draw on information from their textbook and "stuff that we could think of off the top of our head."It was a precursor to the class reading former slaves' accounts of their lives in slavery.
When his mother picked Manu up, he showed her the assignment; she immediately sent a picture of it to her husband.
Manu’s father, Roberto Livar, quickly contacted the school and posted Manu’s (brilliantly) completed worksheet on his Facebook page on Wednesday.
The charter school responded quickly, insisting that the assignment was limited to one instructor. That teacher, identified by Facebook commenters only as “Mr. Thomas,” has been put on paid leave pending an investigation. The school’s Facebook post led to a heartbreaking debate from other Great Hearts parents who defended both the assignment and the teacher, even alluding to some personal struggles that might have led to Mr. Thomas being “hasty.”