This one hit especially close to home, because Donview Middle School is where I went to school from Grade 7 to Grade 9. I played Soccer and Flag Football behind the school. I slid down the iced slope on the north side of the school on my Adidas gym bag for hours after school in the winters.
But now I am finding out that my old junior high school is giving out assignments to 8th graders that pushes all boundaries of tolerance. This is NOT the Donview I remember. It is NOT the Geography Mr. Waisglass taught us. It is NOT the Geography Mr. Jardine taught us.
The material includes a fictitious story that depicts Jews persecuting Christians, including the burning of a church. It is one of seven vignettes, and the only one that identifies an oppressor by ethnicity or religion.
“The implication that Jews are burning a church, given our own past, is really offensive,” said Janis Rosen, who teaches Grade 8 geography at Donview Middle School in York Mills. “It just hit me in the stomach.”
The material — pulled from another Toronto area school board curriculum in 2002, according to the Canadian Jewish Congress — comes from a group assignment in “Grade 8 Geography Resources” (2000), a binder that Ontario teachers photocopy looseleaf lessons from.
In a chapter about migration, students are asked to read the ficticious vignettes and identify push factors like war, death threats and natural disasters, before sending refugees to a new country.
In one such vignette, Jamal and his Christian family are forced to leave their hypothetical country, “Country F,” after being tyrannized by Jews.
“Refugees from Jewish neighbourhoods slowly took over the apartment buildings,” it reads.”Great anger” grows between Christians and Jews, and all but one Christian family — the speaker’s — are forced to leave.
The whole article can be viewed here. I urge anyone who knows me and knows people in the old neighbourhood to share this with their friends and urge parents with kids at Donview to complain. This is just too Officially Screwed for me.
H/T to Gay and Right for this one.