Back in the early 1990s, Carole Metcalfe was a Grade 4 teacher at Perth’s Carmel School, the only Jewish day school in the state.
From what I have been told, she began in 1992 (a year after I finished high school) and taught there for a decade or so.
It has been many years since Carole Metcalfe has taught at Carmel, but ostensibly she still seems to be interested in goings on with the school and her former students:
including those living in Israel:
As far as I am aware, Carole Metcalfe was not the drama teacher… but her acting skills seem quite impressive.
You see, especially since October 7, these are the kinds of posts she has published on her Facebook profile:
I wanted to understand whether Metcalfe just snapped after October 7 (the wrong way, mind you) or was always a vile individual with possible prejudice against Jews. So I reached out to some former colleagues and students. What I learned really does seem to shed some light on her apparent betrayal.
More than one told me that they found Metcalfe to be an extremely mean teacher; that many students were afraid of her; that she shrieked in her lessons, and was “extremely punitive”; that in the staff room, she badmouthed “underdog” kids, turning other staff against them.
I was also told she bad mouthed the Jewish studies staff, and seemed to show a disrespect for Judaism. She didn’t get along with the Jewish studies staff at all, and was always butting heads with them about the time spent on Jewish studies. She was not respectful in the way she dressed at the Orthodox Jewish school, wearing plunging necklines and minis. In one incident, she reportedly made her class make papier-mâché pigs with wings, which she hung in her classroom. It was at the time seen as a dig at a Jewish studies teacher who had questioned Charlotte’s Web, which the class was reading, because it had a pig in it.
Another colleague told me she seemed absolutely obsessed with the fact that many families were well off. She would allegedly mention that the kids were clever but precocious and spoilt rotten.
My purpose with this post is really less about Carole Metcalfe and wanting her to suffer consequences for disseminating antisemitism – she does not seem to be teaching anymore, and certainly not around Jewish children. Besides, I suspect having to live with herself is punishment enough. Rather, my purpose is to shine a light on the types of people who paint themselves as “humanitarian do-gooders”, but who seem to not include the rights of Jews in their concerns list. They tend to be prejudiced against Jews, and not nice people in other ways either.
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