How's this for a school assignment?

This is a grade 8 geography assignment in Toronto.

A Toronto area teacher was "shocked and disturbed" to discover a geography assignment she handed out to her students on Monday contained messages she says are anti-Semitic.

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.

"When someone burned the church down it seemed like a good time to move," it goes on. "My father cannot find a job because the Jewish people will not hire him. We have trouble even buying food because the shop keepers are afraid to sell to us. Gangs of youth will break their windows and wreck their stores if they did."