"Johnson aimed to teach his English students words like 'aberration' and 'lethargy' by including them in purposely outlandish sentences relying on gory imagery and absurdist humor..."

"In a further attempt to engage his pre-teen students, he’d insert their first names at random into the sentences. Sometimes he’d string sentences together, such as in the story of 'Crazy Lobster Boy' — a student who grabs two pairs of pruning shears, declares himself a lobster and runs around terrorizing his classmates while teaching them words like 'simulating' and 'alleviate.' Most students adored the vocab questions....  [But t]he parent who filed the complaint with the school felt that his son was being mocked for his speech impediment in a sentence describing 'his tendency to babble like an idiot and drool on his classmates.'... The parent was also furious that his Jewish son was made the protagonist of the 'lobster boy' story, arguing that a joke that the boy probably 'had a crab or crayfish somewhere back in his ancestry' was evidence of Johnson’s 'thinly veiled antisemitism' because the sentence connected the boy’s violent behavior to his crustacean DNA. 'Humiliating a young boy on the verge of puberty by calling him a crustacean and referring to his "lobster claws" at a time already complicated with fears and ambivalence about body image and sexuality is utterly shocking from any adult, let alone the Head of School and English teacher,' the parent wrote...."

 

From "‘Lobster claws’ test questions land Crowden School principal in hot water/Teachers are quitting and parents are pulling their kids from a private Berkeley music school after the principal was fired in connection with a fill-in-the-blank vocabulary test involving crustacean jokes" (Berkeleyside).