Thanks JavaMan for the welcome too. I thanked Lissla Lissar, but I forgot to thank you. Referring to SpazCat’s post, the students at my school openly mock the teachers a lot. It usually depends on the teacher though. There are a few teachers where they yell out curse words at in the middle of class. There are others though that my classmates usually leave alone while in class. And the class where they call where the cuss words are shouted is an honors course too. At my school, the mocking of authority figures all depends on the specific teacher.
Right. I’m a relative newcomer too… blame Guinastasia for dragging me from LAF. I should have added that I was picked on as well. There are few things worse than being bright, bored, insecure, and a bookworm in a 7/8 grade gifted class. My SO and I are seriously considering homeschooling because of our miserable experiences, and the state of the Toronto school system. A grade 8 stabbed her principal with a letter opener sometime last week. Gah…
Also in my experience, gifties (gifted kids) are verbally nastier than slower kids, at least in the grade 4-8 range, because they have better verbal skills, and thus, more ammunition. Girls are more manipulative than boys, and tend to play mind games.
Heaven forbid that i should ever recommend a Margaret Atwood book. (shudder). My apologies to all the Atwood fans out there, but i can’t stand most Canadian authors…
I’m a high school student (not like I need to remind myself right now–my Euro thesis is keeping me from celebrating 4/20, sigh) and right now and it’s really not that bad. I know people who do try to make people feel like shit all the time, but most of those people have few close friends themselves. Most often if someone is saying something stupid they’ll be ignored. Maybe if someone is very popular they’ll get made fun of but it’s all in good humor.
When I was in high school, my male friends and I (and one of my female friends) constantly mocked one another. Saying in an annoying voice, “Oh nyo – my name is Mark, and I’ve got to stay after school today!” would be a perfectly acceptable response to Mark saying he had a driver’s ed class. Mark would then respond, “Oh nyo – my name is Daniel, and I’m making fun of Mark!” until it descended into imbecilic sniggering. Not always highbrow humor.
We also mocked a group of kids that we hated, and would tag-team up on them. For them, we were much more inventive: we’d write love songs to them (we mainly hated them for their loud homophobic jokes), we’d express sincere sympathy for their haircuts, we’d pass love letters to them. We finally quit when we found out that one of them was on probation for bringing a gun to school.
I wasn’t nearly so mocking toward my female friends, but maybe that was because I had crushes on most of them.
This was all, btw, 10-12 years ago.
Daniel
Sometimes when I say something smart in class, one or two of the ingrates will pipe in by repeating what I just said in the most nerdiest way possible, with nasal pitch and everything. Or they’ll just say “naagh, the square root is equal to the hypotenuse naggh” or something like that. I deal with it by repeating their “naagh naagh” back at them and laughing nerdily. It’s hard to explain that noise. Something like what professor Frink would say.