Sixth graders in a quiet Florida town saw a lot more vocabulary-lesson excitement than usual recently after a fill-in-the-blank question about porn magazines and the ethical considerations of sperm donation cropped up on an assignment.
The kerfuffle occurred at Corkscrew Middle School, Fort Myers NBC affiliate WBBH reports.
Here’s the question in full:
“He merely signed a waiver of anonymity. Locked himself in a room with a cup and a sexy magazine. And didn’t consider the emotional or genetic [FILL IN THE BLANK] for another 30 years.”
A parent at the school near Naples spotted the question and contacted school officials.
The question is part of a collection of over 100,000 vocabulary questions at Vocabulary.com, a website.
It’s not clear how many students saw the question.
The school district suspended its contract with Vocabulary.com over the sperm-donation-sentence-completion kerfuffle (at least temporarily), according to the Naples Daily News.
“We immediately contacted the vendor,” school district spokesman Greg Turchetta told WBBH. “We’ve asked them to suspend our account.”
Turchetta suggested that the district may use the words website if it “can assure us that their vetting process is better.”
The taxpayer-funded Collier County school district had paid for the extensive array of Vocabulary.com fill-in-the-blank questions to the tune of $22,000 each year.
A spokesman for Vocabulary.com, Ben Zimmer, defended the online service, saying the website screens its content for offensive wording and only very rarely receives content-related objections.
Zimmer noted that the fill-in-the-blank question about the guy who glibly masturbated at a sperm bank came from Newsweek (which somehow still exists).
“During the past school year, students across the United States have collectively mastered more than 7.6 million words on Vocabulary.com,” the spokesman bragged to the NBC station.
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