Silly me.
Thanks to a friend who'd rather remain anonymous, I learned that her son's Grade 1 class was given Fun Dip to eat and write about in an exercise on adjectives.
Little did they realize they were also being taught about marketing, and about how giving kids junk food has become so normalized, that their teacher didn't see anything wrong with this lesson.
That the use of candy as a teaching tool didn't give this particular Grade 1 teacher enough pause to not follow through speaks not to her skills as a teacher, but rather to just how pervasive this sort of practice has become. People don't question normal behaviour, but just because something's been normalized, does not make it wise.