21st Century Educator

My wife and I have never been so horrified of watching televised coverage of a major sporting event in our lives.

Your Much Music news broadcast, sent slightly before 5pm today was absolutely beyond the limits of what we consider decent for viewing before 10pm.  We are worried that we will not be able to watch the Olympic coverage with our son.

First you showed video footage of a young adult male in a hot tub with what were obviously underage girls in bikinis, which is an extremely inappropriate sexualization of those poor teenage girls.

Second you showed some video footage of some people doing body shots in a bar.  The impression we get is that the Olympics are going to be one gigantic party and this is a very poor impression of the Olympics to be passing along to other countries.

In terms of what we consider appropriate footage during televised coverage during the late afternoon we found your story to be quite disgusting and in poor taste.  We were not anticipating being exposed to an a MTV style wild party during coverage of the largest sporting event in the world.

You have tarnished Canada's reputation in mere minutes that we as a nation have been attempting to build for many decades.

Remember that you are the sole source of information on the Olympics and as such have a great responsibility to represent Canada in an appropriate way.

If you insist on showing footage of a small minority of Canadians partying like wild in bars, you can expect us to stop watching your network, and to encourage our friends to do the same.

Thank you for taking our concerns seriously,

David Wees
Vasilia Wees

• David Wees's blog

About David

David is a mathematics teacher and a learning specialist for technology at Stratford Hall in Vancouver, BC. He has been teaching since 2002, and has worked in Brooklyn, London, and Bangkok before moving back to Canada. He has his Masters degree in Educational Technology from UBC, and is the co-author of a mathematics textbook. He has been published in ISTE's Leading and Learning, Educational Technology Solutions, The Software Developers Journal, The Bangkok Post and Edutopia. He blogs with the Cooperative Catalyst, and is the Assessment group facilitator for Edutopia. He has also helped organize the first Edcamp in Canada, and TEDxKIDS@BC.