Eric Bolling, 'The Five' Lament 'Liberal Agenda' In Fifth Grade Math Homework
By Rebecca Shapiro Posted: 01/11/2013 9:12 am EST | Updated: 01/11/2013 9:34 am EST
Eric Bolling accused Scholastic, the largest publisher and distributor of children's books, of "pushing a liberal agenda" in a fifth grade algebra exercise.
"Distribute the wealth, for distributive property of addition and multiplication," Bolling said while reading off the worksheet. Pointing to the illustration of a girl holding money, Bolling added, "Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big old bag of money, handing some money out."
He cautioned parents to read their children's textbooks and said, "I do it every year at parent-teacher night, you have to read your kids' textbooks, find out what's being taught. If you see a bias, make sure you explain it to your kids and by all means, tell your teachers you're on it!"
Scholastic described the worksheet as giving students "insight into the distributive property as it applies to multiplication ... Students complete each multiplication sentence using the distributive property!"
Co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle said that she goes through all of her six-year-old's homework papers, adding that she was now on "high alert after this inappropriateness!"
"So it starts in third grade [with] 'Distribute The Wealth,' and guess what happens? Through their whole educational experience they continually get indoctrinated through college," a concerned Bolling said, holding up the math sheet once again.
Co-host Dana Perino said that the assignment was probably written by an "Occupy Wall Street grad student."
Bolling made one last appeal to parents to check their children's textbooks, particularly their history books. He said he was once looking through his child's history textbook and read a section on the war in Iraq. "They were very, very liberally biased, saying George Bush went in there because he heard there were weapons of mass destruction and they were never found. It was a very liberal bias to the history books," Bolling said.
[E]ach class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich.
His Young Game Theorists, however, thought about the payoff table and realized the unintended consequences of the grading policy. So they organized a collective boycott of the final exam. Because they all did so,
a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A. “The students refused to come into the room and take the exam, so we sat there for a while: me on the inside, they on the outside,” Fröhlich said. “After about 20-30 minutes I would give up.... Then we all left.” The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had. No one did, though.
Why didn’t anyone decide to go in? As one of the students explained:
“Handing out 0's to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course ... So if you can walk in with 100 percent confidence of answering every question correctly, then your payoff would be the same for either decision. Just consider the impact on your other exam performances if you studied for [the final] at the level required to guarantee yourself 100. Otherwise, it’s best to work with your colleagues to ensure a 100 for all and a very pleasant start to the holidays.”
Professor Fröhlich was sanguine about the collective boycott, congratulating the students on their ability to come to a collective strategy, and abiding by the unintended consequence of his grading policy. He has also changed it going forward, however, to say that “0 points = 0%.”
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