Math pupils learn how to drown Turks

[ensho]

http://www.polskieradio.pl/thenews/foreignaffairs/artykul106067_polands_math_pupils_learn_how_to_drown_turks_.html


“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.


“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. (mg/pg)
----------------------------------

and then they snickered

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Sixty-five years ago, Polish textbook probably had Jews instead of Turks.

Those who forget the past are condemned to live it again.

[rockymountaindem]

4. Possibly, but

don't forget that the Polish victory over the Ottoman army outside the gates of Vienna in 1683 is one of the proudest moments in Polish history, aside from the time the "beat" the Mongol horde.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. Unfortunately discrimination against Turks isn't limited to Poland.

Germany is just as much to blame although I don't believe it's in textbooks. Turks were encouraged to be guest workers in a way similar to Mexicans and Latin Americans here. They cleaned toilets and the streets for cheap labor for Germany until jobs became scarce and the Turks weren't needed but stayed anyway in their new homeland. They aren't considered as German as non-Turk Germans (here we go again . . . ) and are not as welcome as they once were.

[On the Road]

2. What's Particularly Strange

is that this is almost identical to the famous Flavius Josephus problem.

http://everything2.com/title/The%2520Josephus%2520problem

Perhaps with the memory of the Holocaust still alive, the author didn't want to write about Jewish zealots killing each other. But going out of their way to change it to drowning Turks is much, much worse. Is this kind of thing considered normal in Poland?

[izquierdista]

5. I wouldn't call it 'normal'.

After living in Poland for a year and traveling around the country a bit, I can say that I saw very few Turks, at least in comparison to Germany where Turks are everywhere. I don't understand why they used Turks as the group to be selected for destruction, as opposed to any other group. Poland is very ethnically homogeneous, and the number of African, Vietnamese, Chinese, and others of obviously different ethnicity total less than 1% of the population. Sometimes it works to their advantage, as when I saw a Ugandan immigrant on a TV game show and it was obvious that the producers picked him as a curiosity to entertain their audience. So Poles have little experience with what we call 'diversity' in America, and they may be naive and clumsy at times in dealing with foreigners.

The problem is not necessarily with the average Pole, who well knows what history has done to his country, but with the mathematician who composed the word problem. I can understand how mathematicians, with excellent analytical and very poor social skills, could be too obtuse to understand the need to reword a problem so that it did not assume that genocide was 'normal' behavior.

[On the Road]

7. Thank You --

That's kind of what I was trying to understand about Poland.

It just seems really strange that anyone who had a problem with zealots engaged in a mutual suicide pact would substitute Turks drowning themselves. Maybe because it's a very Catholic country it's a holdover from Ottoman days when part of eastern Europe was occupied and the Turks were the adversaries of Christendom. It was like cowboys and Indians, with the Indians always being the bad guys.

[damntexdem]

3. Yeah, sure, it's all about the math: that's why they have Xians and Turks.

Why, all the math would be so different if, for example, the issue were selecting from two types of cookies so that only one type was selected.

The math is abstract, without substance. The example has religious and racist substance.

[JVS]

6. It won't help because they're on a submarine with a screen-door.