Education

Public School Sixth Graders Get SPERM BANK Vocabulary Question

Font Size:

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.

Follow Eric on TwitterLike Eric on Facebook. Send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel