You can't teach about slavery by bringing a cotton plant to class?

[AleksS]

6. I imagine its a way to show kids the difference between

the cotton balls they have in their bathroom drawers at home, and the cotton from the plant which has sharp and abrasive parts. It would show kids that picking cotton was not anything at all like pulling gentle cotton balls from flowers, but was painful process.

Most kids would have never seen cotton in its natural state, and would have no idea what picking actual cotton was like. Most kids touchpoint would be the cotton balls, and that's not at all an accurate representation of cotton's natural state (it doesn't help that the sharp parts of the cotton flower, referred to as the cotton bOll, sounds confusingly like cotton bAll from the medicine cabinet!

"To pick the cotton, a worker would pull the white, fluffy lint from the boll, trying to not cut his hands on the sharp ends of the boll. The average cotton plant is less than three feet high, so many workers had to stoop to pick the cotton. As they picked, they would place the lint in burlap sacks carried on their backs. So, not only would the worker have to pick the cotton, he would have to drag the bag along with him as well. In a typical day, a good worker could pick 300 pounds of cotton or more, meaning that, in any given day, a typical picker would carry a substantial amount of weight, even if he emptied his sack several times. Here’s a great video of an interviewer with a farmer who picked cotton by hand:

"

From: https://timespelunking.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/hell-on-earth-what-it-was-like-to-pick-cotton/