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New York, 5:57 AM
Tue Nov 10
67 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/15/09
09/15/09
09/15/09
09/14/09
Teachers don't do shit about bullying, and bullies grow up to be assholes. I always wonder if the sexual harassers I've encountered at work were those bullies in school---and if the girls who are such unsympathetic, "Oh-get-over-it" women are the special girls that every bully seemed to have a few of around him. Then again, all the bullies at my school were rich, white, popular, and bullet proof. Their parents were on the school board and they couldn't be touched.
09/14/09
I was awkward, fat, and friendless. School didn't do anything for two years. Got beaten on a weakly basis. Learned where all the cameras were, moved between them as best I could.
Early on I tried to actually defend myself. Got a week of ISS for my trouble.
Got death threats if I ever thought of going to an after school function. Of course the one time I threatened to hurt someone kids who weren't even in the classroom heard me "threaten to blow up the school".
Kids actually started beating me with the field hockey sticks during gym once. I think someone got a day of ISS.
It was interesting, I had three primary bullies, but I could count on ten or twelve people to show up during a targeted attack.
I was always the one who received counseling or took anger management classes.
During that period I became very detached and clinical about alot of things. I pretty much became a total loner. I also became a cunning little bastard.
I found one of the dead ends where a camera was watching. One day I let them corner me there. They were going to use me as a human punching bag. I headbutted the primary bully and broke his nose.
He bled all over me. I then proceeded to start chasing the mob that had inevitably gathered around screaming in rage. Apparently a tall, blood covered 12 year old running at you is frightening.
1:I found out several things that day. None of my bullies had been given so much as a detention despite sending me home bruised and beaten on a regular basis.
2: Cops are sometimes okay. The school resource officer was pretty much my only friend. He frequently asked me how I was doing and how my day had been and not in the "We are worried you are going to kill someone" way. When the principle wanted me arrested he basically told the principle to fuck off. He wasn't going to arrest someone who had clearly been trapped and in fear for his life. Not to mention it was on camera that I was not the aggressor.
3: Many adults do not like it when a 12 year old gives a clear cut and logical rational for why they did something that they find completely and utterly shocking. I basically told two assistant principles, two Counselors, and the head principle that their lack of action had forced me to take action. I was given the choice of putting up with continued abuse or present myself as so something so different that the other kids would find leaving me alone to be preferable to interacting with me at all.
I clearly remember that being told that it was my fault that I was bullied. If only I was more normal and more social. If only I wasn't so quiet and reserved. If only I wouldn't try to stay away from the people who made my life hell for two years. If only I didn't read. If Only I wasn't asking for all the abuse I received by not being normal.
After a few years of this, I finally picked up on something. The really out there kids, goths/skaters/punks didn't get messed with. They kept to themselves and no one bothered them. I could never join them, so I made myself a nice little pariah.
No one bothered me again and I started making friends when I went to the new highschool a year or so later.
Wow. That was the first time I've actually ever typed that whole thing out. Sorry.
I lol everytime someone mentions bullying laws in Georgia. I remember them well. Putting the victim in detention and suspension with their bullies is a great idea when the guy who runs both is deaf and sleeps constantly.
09/14/09
09/14/09
It took a long time for me to get over what I dealt with. I still have social and head issues due to how I was treated.
However, It made me aware and able to be there for people who are still dealing with shit like what I dealt with.
09/14/09
I've been in counseling almost all my adult life (admittedly, some of that is for family issues, as well as the bullying shit from school), and I don't know if I'll ever get over the things kids said and did when I was in school.
I don't really know how bullying is handled in school now, but it if it's anything like it was when I was a kid, the bullies are mostly left to bully. I plan on teaching English, so I hope to be an anti-bully teacher. I definitely think there should be anti-bullying lessons in school.
09/14/09
09/14/09
09/15/09
So some kid "tattles" and the swim team is disbanded? The victim gains even more enemies ("It's John's fault we don't have a swim team, let's teach him a lesson."), and is worse off. Macro-level things like that just aren't going to motivate bullies into anything but indignant rage.
09/14/09
I think you can stop bullying to a large extent, but it takes having policies in place from the first year of school on. My daughter's school district is really big on anti-bullying. It's wonderful. Last year a kid was being a run-of-the-mill pest to Lil' Jenn, playing with her hair in line, saying annoying but not overtly mean stuff, things like that. She was unsure about how to talk to her teacher about it (she was in 2nd grade) so I wrote a quick note explaining the situation and asking for help. Lil' Jenn's teacher dealt with it that day, telling her what she could do if it happened again and telling that boy not to be obnoxious anymore. She alerted the other teachers to the situation so they could keep an eye out. And that was that. It didn't happen again. Well, a week later he tried to play with her hair, she turned around and loudly told him to stop, he got disciplined by his teacher and that was that permanently.
My brother was treated similarly as a kid and the teachers rolled their eyes and told him to suck it up. So the teasing escalated to the point of outright bullying. He was miserable, my parents couldn't get the school to do anything, so they left and he was fine at his new school. Talking out of turn is normal kid behavior. Running in the halls is normal. Getting out of your seat too many times is normal. But all of that stuff is not okay in a school setting and it gets dealt with. Treat teasing the same way. It's not hard.
09/14/09
09/14/09
Now kids have to worry about facebook groups, myspace pages, cruel email and instant messages. There's no escape now. Not even your own home. At some point, you're bombarded with these messages to the point where all the pep talks and hugs just won't fix it anymore. At some point, the bullies *do* win and you stop being able to really believe all the good things these people are saying about you.
I understand what you're saying and I think you've got a really good point about the lack of parental involvement. I can't imagine what would have happened when if my parents hadn't been around to support me. But I think that only compounds the problem with technology removing the one safe haven a bullied kid really has: their own home.
09/14/09
09/14/09
And I was a planner. I had several means of suicide planned, right there in my head. And I wouldn't say a word. It's amazing what a kid can carry in their souls.
09/14/09
Unfortunately, most school districts in the US do not included specific policies to address anti-gay or anti-trans bullying. I heard students drop "That's so gay" or "You're such a fag" many times as a public school student, and as a teacher-in-training I know I will struggle against these behaviors in the classroom. I wish we included conflict resolution and diversity-sensitive materials in public school curricula, starting in elementary school. How many lives could that potentially save?
But this is a country where parents and schools refuse to let their children listen to our democratically-elected President, where we can't even get comprehensive sex-education in all districts to teach teens how NOT to get pregnant/HIV-infected. I guess some people consider other things (politics, religious ideology) more important than their own children's lives.
/end rant/
Sorry, but almost nothing gets me more riled up than education and kids.
09/14/09
BUT.
This is never going to work if the students' PARENTS leave it up to the SCHOOL and never speak to their own children about the right way to treat people.
It seems as if many people take it for granted that parents won't teach their children anything about being a decent person so schools should pick up the slack and give kids their moral upbringing.
We just cannot do this effectively! That's not what school is like! And if we change school so it IS like that, I don't think it will be compatible with the instructional role that society still presumably wants it to fill.
I feel badly for all the people who have experienced bullying and received no help from their teachers. I try hard to be helpful to my own students when they are in that situation. I do not expect the school to be able to fix the problem when the parents of bullies clearly don't spend any time on their kids' morals, manners and social skills.
09/14/09
As difficult at is it, schools are a far more manageable environment than figuring out what every kid is being taught at home. If anti-bullying measures were taught as part of the curriculum, as a constant, not occasional, lesson, we might start to see progress. Kids spend the majority of their time at school during the day so relying on it being taught at home just isn't feasible.
So, rather than assuming that school can fix every bad thing taught at home...I think the expectation should be that schools do their best to counteract what might not be taught at home (just like, really, they do with everything). We rely on schools to each kids basic skills so they can function in the world. This isn't any different. But it has to be taught the same way we teach anything else. Through repetition and consistency.
It's not about making sure no kid is ever mean ever to another. It's making sure it's not habitual, or targeted, or abusive.
09/14/09
A big part of what I'm thinking about, and I don't think I made this clear enough in my first comment, is the way the media covers the issue. Statements about what schools and teachers should do are frequent. Statements about what parents should do are far less common and less likely to appear in the headline or the first paragraph, even though what parents do is more likely to be effective. We need to be stating these things directly, so there's no reason for any parent not to know.
09/14/09
I would really disagree with the comment "One of the questions is how do you quantify bullying? It could even be as simple as a rolling of the eyes." That's just someone rolling their eyes. We have to stop acting like bullying is generally that minor. It's not. It's about intimidation and it's usually habitual, targeting kids who are different in some way. I think we do it a disservice by acting like any behavior is open to being interpreted as bullying. Kids don't kill themselves because someone rolled their eyes at them.
I think everyone can agree that childhood is difficult. And an important lesson to learn is that not everyone is going to like you, sometimes thats legitimate, and you may need to learn from that and move on. Other times, people are mean, and you need to learn from that and move on.
Bullying, however, teaches us something different. It teaches us to feel helpless, hopeless, and afraid. Which are feelings that can lead to depression. And depending on the child and the severity of the bullying, that can have long lasting effects. It's not harmless, it's not character building. It's abuse. Abuse we tolerate because children commit it.
The problem, like so many problems, is that we only start treating it AFTER it becomes a problem. We don't put time and energy into prevention. If you started teaching kids how to treat one another alongside reading and writing and arithmetic, you'd start to see changes. It's like rape prevention. We alway say we need to teach that to boys, when they're young, to respect women and not be abusers. This is the same in terms of needing to address it when you're young.
My 5 year old niece gets that. I have never been happier than when my sister in law told me about how my niece stopped other children from bullying another child in her Kindergarten class. Kids that young can grasp it, they really can.
The 2nd part of the issue is really self-esteem building that's not based on status or "popularity", and letting kids know that there are ways they can cope, people they can turn to, and help available. Which requires that the help really be available. And that we start believing victims, too. It's pretty easy to find out if a kid is really being bullied, and like a lot of abuse, most people aren't going to claim they're bullied if they aren't being. It's not you'll get more popular if people find that out.
I mean, I'm a realist. I recognize that life is full of people who will not be nice to you. But there's a world of difference between that and the kind of abusiveness that typically comes with bullying. It's just not the same.
09/14/09
One of the great comforts (and, initially, surprises) of adulthood to me was that adults are generally much nicer to one another, than children.
09/14/09
Less than two months after moving to this neighborhood I went from cheerful and outgoing with little problem making friends and a love for school to a near shut in who didn't want to approach other kids for fear this boy would see me trying to fit in and "put me in my place." The other kids eventually gave up on me and joined in, calling me annoying to my face, avoiding me for partners in any project even though I always got good grade, telling me I was ugly with fluffy hair...to this day, i have problems saying anything positive about myself no matter how outwardly successful I look. I will never get that back.
And I know I'm going to get yelled at for this, but frankly the nightmare I went to could have been stopped by the school, but instead they just made it worse. The little monster that tortured me was "classified," which basically meant he had a folder full of behavior disorders filed with the school. The administration knew this kid was trouble but never punished him for what he did. Instead, every time I tried to fight back (once or twice physically when I actually thought he was going to hurt me), I was sent to the guidance counselor where she would yell at me about my lack of social skills and "bad temper." So as nice as it sounds to say that teachers and admins are all overworked saints who have no way of knowing, it's just not always the case. Sometimes it's more worth it to them to ignore the bullies and let their victims get counseling somewhere down the road.
tl;dr version: Teachers and administrators don't always give a shit and would sometimes rather let the victims suffer than try to manage the situation. After all, getting bullied is just another part of growing up, right?
09/14/09
Freshman year of high school, there was someone who frequently stuck large gobs of chewed-up gum in my locker. Again, the administration found out about, gave a talk about it, talked to me about my feelings, and nothing else happened. Except for when another student mocked me about it.
There needs to be less talking and more action. Kids are bitches, and they KNOW that what they're doing is mean. THAT'S WHY THEY DO IT. Telling them so will just make them find the whole situation hilarious, and the fact that the marginalized individual felt they needed to bring the issue to the administration will let them know they've won.
09/14/09
09/14/09
I think it's hard, though, when bullying is severe, to figure out what is and is not a legitimate censure. And though people aren't required to like you, being abusive towards you because they don't isn't okay. It's difficult, especially when young, to know what to reject and what to consider. Kids just don't know what may or may not be a legitimate criticism. And especially if it's never addressed, and especially if it's severe and habitual, I think we can end up being deeply effected by bullying in ways that are far more detrimental than positive in terms of strength building.
It is a learning experience...but I'd rather learn those things without the trauma as much as possible. You can learn everything you do from bullying that can be turned into a positive without it. What you take away that's negative often has a much longer, and more traumatizing, effect. I tend to look at it like any abusive situation/relationship. Yes, you can learn that you're a strong person if you come out the other side...but that doesn't make the abuse or circumstances any better.
09/14/09
It was simply adults in an office building doing what kids at school do. Knocking over books, tripping the person, getting up and moving to a different table when they sats down, sending nasty emails. It seems so stupid on the surface but it was really powerful, in the fact that we would NEVER let anyone in a workplace do something like that, so why is it alright for children.
I wish I could find a copy of it online, but I can't. It's probably at least 2 years old by now. Maybe some UK Jezzies remember it?
09/14/09
09/14/09