High school teacher suspended after mocking students on biology exam

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It’s probably not a good idea to openly mock students in a biology test.

A high school teacher in Sacramento, Calif., has been suspended for allegedly making a biology test that named and made fun of students in his class who were cross-eyed and included racist comments.

Alex Nguyen, who had been teaching at Luther Burbank High School for a decade, drew negative attention after handing out a biology final exam to three different classes that openly mentioned students by their full names and described their ethnic backgrounds and body types, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The exam included questions about biological traits and asked students to name classmates who might have these traits based on their ethnic backgrounds.

According to the Sacramento Bee, one such question was: “In high school, there are individuals who are cross-eyed like [Student’s Name] and [Other Student’s Name], which is a dominant trait. We call those individuals ‘weirdoes’. So, if you crossed two weirdoes [Both Students], that are heterozygous for being cross-eyed, what is the offspring that would result?”

Another question involved racial stereotypes of Black and Latina students.

“For some reason, the African American culture has influenced most of the student body. How? In African Americans, they have a gene for the pimp walk, which is dominant,” the question stated. “What is the result if you cross [Student Name] homozygous dominant Latina with a homozygous recessive Hmong like [Other Student Name]?”

Nguyen’s test also had questions featuring students who he says were sleeping in class with “if they mated” questions that involved their ethnic genes.

The Sacramento Bee reported within 10 minutes of the exam beginning, school principal Jim Peterson had talked to Nguyen and taken the exam away from students.

The following day, Nguyen was nowhere to be seen, replaced with a substitute teacher and given real grades for the test already written.

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One student claimed he got a zero, which brought his grade average down to a D. The student needed a certain grade point average in order to play on the school’s basketball team.

He contested the grade through his parents. The parents met with Peterson, who apologized, but the grade hadn’t been corrected and their son had to go to summer school to make it up.

School district spokesperson Al Goldberg told the Daily Mail there were challenges in the grading process and the academic department was looking into it. Goldberg offered an apology to the affected students.

“Sacramento City Unified has zero tolerance for the use of language that is racist or perpetuates the use of racial stereotypes,” said Goldberg. “[Peterson] took the transparent step of notifying the parents and guardians of the students who received the exam. In an email sent that evening, the principal stated that ‘regardless of the intent behind them, the words that were chosen are not reflective of the safe, welcoming, and inclusive atmosphere we work to foster at LBHS.”