Teacher fired after assigning violent math problems to third graders

[left is right]

6. I read the examples cited in the article

and I think he was trying to appeal to the mind set of 3rd grade boys: vampires, fleas, and leeches all sucking blood. I bet the boys giggled and then set to work figuring out the answers. I saw only two problems with the approach. 1) The creature population of the problems were so fantastically large that they were absolutely improbable/the one about sucking 1300 pints of blood is also scientifically impossible but the science was already corrupted by the presence of vampires so maybe that is a wash. 2) The problems would have little appeal to girls and that in my mind was the biggest problem by the time they hit middle school, girls will have given up on math as either too boring or too complicated. Perhaps their 3rd grade teachers never engaged them in by providing them with fun questions.