“How would you place Christians and Turks on a sinking ship so that only the latter drowned?”reads a problem in a math textbook for Poland’s primary school pupils.
Good things to teach students encase you ever need to lose weight on a sinking ship filled with Turks. So racist or an attempt at humor or just trying to get context for a math problem?
http://www.polskieradio.pl/thenews/fore … urks_.html“On board a sinking ship there are fifteen Christians and fifteen Turks. In order to save the ship from going to the bottom, half of the crew needs to be thrown overboard. One of the Christians proposes that the whole crew form a circle and every ninth person jump overboard. How should the Christians place themselves so that only the Turks are drowned?”reads a problem, quoted the lay Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny.
The rather controversial problem appeares in The Mathematical Miniatures for Primary Schools, a manual for second to twelfth grade students who want to participate in the International Mathematical Kangaroo competition. The book was published in 2004 by Aksjomat Publishing House from the northern city of Torun and has already been translated into English, German, French and Russian.
“We did not try to exhort anyone to hate. What mattered to us was the mathematical model – the historical context was irrelevant. In order to solve the problem one needs to be acquainted with principles Maths, not the ways of murdering Turks,” said co-author and publisher of the manual Piotr Nodzynski, naively.
Good things to teach students encase you ever need to lose weight on a sinking ship filled with Turks. So racist or an attempt at humor or just trying to get context for a math problem?
