I graduated high school in 1987, and I simply don’t know how to respond to your apparent naivete on this subject.
I didn’t say that you were simply a jock, or that sports was the only way, did I?
Teachers have eyes and ears too, but they can’t be everywhere at once. Were you? This isn’t a slam against you, but you’re not all-knowing and all-seeing. No way to know for sure unless you track down everyone you went to school with and ask them. You might be surprised…
But I do agree in that a smaller student body makes it easier to notice and therefore deter a lot of student abuse. Maybe that was it…
I’m about to face a student body more than 6 times the size of yours.
What you may be missing, Bricker, is that the systematic abuse the people in this thread are describing are likely not cases where just one or two people follow the victim around like puppy dogs. If one person does just two bullying things to you per week; say, a snarky remark, and shoving your books off your desk when the teacher’s back is turned, that’s hardly a problem any kid can’t handle. If 15 people are each bullying you twice per week, that’s an average of 6 incidents per school day. And in my experience, 15 may be a conservative estimate.
That’s part of the problem. No one person can be singled out as a particularly nasty bully, yet you’re still being picked on constantly. The life of a class scapegoat is ugly, and yet the abuse is virtually invisible.
Well, I have been trying to evolve into a being of pure energy, but I can’t figure out how to do that and still use a keyboard and mouse.
I admit the possibility I was simply missing it, but I’m sticking with my contention that at my school, it simply wasn’t an issue. Small class size, small community, everyone knew everyone and everyone knew everyone’s parents.
But one thing has become crystal clear: my experience was obviously not typical.
FTR I graduated in '90. High school was better than middle and elementary, by a far sight, but mostly because I’d figured out ways to avoid unwanted attention. Such as, never ever opening my mouth except to answer questions in class, growing my hair so it hid my face, and seeking refuge with people who’d had their own scapegoat status in middle school. A larger school does afford some anonymity as well.
The kind of stuff people are describing here went on when I was in high school in the 70’s and my mother says that my father was a target (simply for being poorer and having less nice clothes than the other kids). So I think this kind of stuff has always gone on. Maybe your particular environment was different for some reason or maybe you just weren’t personally involved.
I was teased mercilessly in middle school. I would go home almost every day bummed out about it.
When I got to high school, it was much better. However, I was in one particular class (my Arabic class, which I took for three years) where, for some reason, I was often the object of ridicule. I was fifteen years old when a couple of boys in the class shoved me into the closet and locked me in there while the teacher was out of the room. Once, one of the boys kept calling me retarded and doing that crippled arm thing mean people do when they are mimicking brain damaged people. I was laughing at first and but then I started crying. That often happened when I was being teased: It would start off being funny but then the jokes would get too personal and painful. The tears would make the bullies remorseful, but it would only take a few days before they’d start up again (and then they’d tease me for crying).
They did this to me and I wasn’t particularly nerdy or ugly. These were “good” kids who were on student council and made good grades (and had places on the academic team). My high school was urban and had a diverse make-up. So I imagine that I would have had an even tougher time if I had been in a more homogeneous environment without friends (which I had) and had stuck out even more.
The No-Name Calling Day reminds me of a day the kids in my sister’s class had in the 8th grade. She was teased too (allthough it seemed more like aggressive flirting, if you ask me) and the boys in her class would do crazy things like toss her lunch around the classroom when the teacher stepped out. I guess someone in the class took pity on her and decided that every so often, the harassers would lay off on her. They called these “Be Nice to K” days, and the strange thing was that they worked. The boys did not mess with her on these days. (Hence, my hypothesis about it being wayward flirtation).
Sadly, my tormenters were boys AND girls and none of them was creative or nice enough to come up with a Be Nice to Me day.
Unless you’re going to ratchet it up a week every year, it seem silly to do this one week a year. You can’t protect kids from every little pitfall of life. Besides, anyone who supports this kind of thing is a pansey-assed little do-gooder. 
When I went to school, middle school was the worst, with elementary being a close second. My curse was a strong religious upbringing, such that I was supposed to turn the other cheek, and bless those that curse you. Great. Couple that with a greater interest in academics, and I earned a first class seat for scholastic hell. One day a prime leader of the antagonistic crowd said something while he wasn’t with his posse and I hit him. And hit him. And hit him. Pounded that little sonofabitch twelve ways for Tuesday, and then cried because all the anger stored up inside had finally gotten out. They left me alone after that. Maybe I didn’t please God that day, but I really didn’t give a rat’s ass.
Rules, discussion, and time outs only do so much. Every class has a few in dire need of percussive persuasion to mend their ways.
This thread is pretty much the same one we had a few months ago. Nothing was “settled” them either. Therefore, in the spirit of No Name Calling Week, I pronounce you all poopyheads 
For my part, I responded to bullying in kind. Hit me, I would hit back. Then we all got “into” rock music, and since I could already jam and had the best guitar, I attained maximum coolness. How many school kids were walking around with a pristine Gretsch Country Gentleman besides me? Nobody. Instant cool. It sure beat having to hassle with people. Instead of fighting, we were forming garage bands. Maybe we were all growing up a little, or just mellowing out.
Bricker, in the interests of privacy, I won’t put the exact year I graduated here, but it’ been over 20 years since I graduated from high school. Kindler, gentler days, they weren’t. It really was routine for freshmen to yell insults at me when I walked from one building to another my senior year. When I say “routine”, I mean it happened pretty much every day.
High schools vary. Mine has a quiet reputation for being a particularly bad place to be an outsider. This reputation has persisted over the years and, in the late 1990’s, the parents of two girls who were being bullied sued the school for protecting the bullies rather than their daughters. Ironically, the girls weren’t getting treated as badly as I was. The town my high school is in is somewhere between small town and suburb, with a very insular mindset. I went to church there a few years ago and I’ve described it as a good place to live if you’re married, have 2.4 kids, and are good at being conventional. I’ve also described it as a Lake Wobegon want-to-be. If you have handicaps, like my best friend did, or try to speak up when something goes wrong, like I did, you’re ruining that perfect image of a tranquil small town with no drug use and no crime.
You might want to go out to slash dot and check out “Tales from the Hell Mouth”. In my case, it wasn’t one or two kids. If it was, I wouldn’t have had to eat lunch on top of a radiator because, despite there being empty seats in the cafeteria, if I tried to sit in one, it would be “saved.” To this day, even at a gathering of friends, I’m never quite sure where to sit and I hesitate to sit next to someone unless they wave me over. This is real. I wish it were otherwise, but, if it hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have become the person I have.
With regret,
CJ
No Name-Calling Week
How fricking wonderful. Why don’t the schools do something constructive and worthwhile? Something like Let’s Teach The Kids Basic Academics They Really Need To Know week, maybe?
Sure, just get rid of NCLB and let teachers do their jobs.
I just thought of something: High school is boot camp for life in the real world. The purpose is to build unit cohesion, pure and simple. Whadya think?
Middle school were the worst years of my life, as far as teasing from others went (6th-8th grade, graduated 8th grade in 1996). I was overweight and had a rack (I mean, damn, did I have a rack). That got me called “jugs” daily, people made fun of me constantly over my weight, how I was ugly, how I was a “dirty scrub”, I’d get shoved; I even got punched in the stomach.
I literally dreaded going to school, so much so that some mornings I would cry and cry because I couldn’t think of a reason to see if I could stay home. My friend was teased like I did, and told me how sometimes she hated herself so bad she would sit with a pair of scissors and think about jamming them into her skull. Yes, it can be that bad.
The worst incident was also, funny enough, what got them to greatly decrease the teasing (or my reaction to it was, anyway). A guy (I’m a girl, if it matters) shoved me while we were going downstairs to the cafeteria. :eek: I managed to get a grip on the banister after stumbling down a few steps, before doing a free-fall. That was it. I turned around and saw him laughing with his buddies…
and I punched him as hard as I could. He fell over.
This was in 7th grade. Months after this had happened, I had to go deliver a note to the computer teacher, who was teaching one of the 8th grade classes. As I walked out, I heard people whisper, “Dude! That’s the girl who totally punched Bryce!” Heh heh.
After that, the teasing was limited to mostly my boobs. :rolleyes:
Oh, please. I have to :rolleyes: . Bricker -if you graduated HS about 15 yeras prior to these posters, than you graduated around 1980 like I did.
HS was hell for some kids even in those “kinder, gentler days”. And alot of teachers didn’t give a damn–discipline was no better than it is now. In fact, I think that kids got away with MORE back then. There is alot of zero tolerance out there, badly thought out, and poorly executed, IMO.
I had my share of nastiness, but I never suffered from outright ostracizing like some did. Who needs to “shout”? Many used whispers, innuendo and gossip to show their malice.
Seriously, please do not sentimentalize the “past” while reviling the present. Just because it didn’t happen to you, doesn’t mean it wasn’t going on.