From many comments on this Thread about Childhood I got the impression that many people suffered quite a lot in school.
Hazing and harrasment are how bad in US schools ? I went to a American School in London… so I figure my experience as a teen there was bad but not due to hazing, harrasment and generally shitty life that seems to be portrayed in mainland US schools. (Most americans there living abroad probably were more well off ?)
I know a lot of attention is being given to this issue due to the Columbine shooters and things like that being blamed on suffering teens. Still I thought it was overdone… recently from reading some stuff around here and the news I have the impression that school bullies and things like that are very common in the US. Media buzz only ?
It depends on the school. Many of them really are terrible. Many of them are wonderful. There is huge variation between locations for several reasons: schools are partly funded by local taxes, and a given area may vote to raise or refuse those taxes. Schools are influenced a lot by the parents in the area, too. And school board members are elected. If a given area wants to make dealing with bullies a priority, they can. Or they can choose to ignore bullying unless it gets violent and obvious.
I always lived in towns where the local university was the major employer, so most parents valued education and supported local schools. My husband wasn’t so lucky.
It’s been about 14 years for me (yikes!), but IIRC, high school is largely about belonging and cliques. Columbine and its ilk are a rarity, but the insecurity and self-centeredness of teenagers combined with adult ignorance/tolerance/acceptance of bullying helps ensure that most teens who are perceived as different from their peers will be persecuted to some extent.
As Stephen King said in his book Danse Macabre, kids like that often have their spirits “broken for good in that pit of man- and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school.”
I think it varies from person to person and school to school far too much to make reasonable generalizations about it.
Personally, middle school was hell. At twelve and thirteen, I’d go to school every day and face rumors like that I was a lesbian and nicknames like “herpes girl”. I remember getting my street clothes stolen and soaked in gym, being pushed into prickly plants, and getting rocks thrown at me. I also remember the horrible attitude of my teachers, such as the one who wouldn’t reprimand the rock throwers because he “didn’t see it thrown” even though a six-inch bruise from the rocks was forming before his eyes. Basically I’d get harrassed every day and there was nothing I could do about it. The teachers didn’t care.
I remember high school as pretty utopian though. I went to a large, diverse high school, and it seemed like there was room for everyone to fit in. The racial, cultural and gender tensions that ruled middle school relaxed. Even wierdos like me (who’s walk around in things like flourescent green floor-length hawaiian halter dresses, or dressed like a boy, or 1960’s dresses completed with pillbox hats and combat boots) rarely got harrassed. There were cliques, but there were so many of them that at least one clique was bound to accept you. There was some bullying, but it was rare and really out of place.
I spent most of my school life harassed, elementary to high school. Once I reached highschool though, my own personal depression was a lot more significant than some lame immature classmates trying to make fun of my non-existant flaws. Ie. the level of harassment didn’t change, really, but my way of dealing with it did.
If you are ‘different’ in any way school can be completely miserable.
When I was in elementary/junior high the kids would chase me home to beat the crap out of me.
Somewhere in junior high and into high school the taunting was mostly mental harassment. Lots of threats left in lockers or just nasty hateful rumors and crap like that. I did get spit on a few times too.
I’m sure there are better schools but the one I went to didn’t really have the staff or the training to deal with bullies. I was told to get over it.
If you are ‘different’ in any way school can be completely miserable.
When I was in elementary/junior high the kids would chase me home to beat the crap out of me.
Somewhere in junior high and into high school the taunting was mostly mental harassment. Lots of threats left in lockers or just nasty hateful rumors and crap like that. I did get spit on a few times too.
I’m sure there are better schools but the one I went to didn’t really have the staff or the training to deal with bullies. I was told to get over it.
When I said I was suicidal, I didn’t really mean it. I never thought about hanging myself, shooting myself, slicing myself up so I’d just die from blood loss. Never thought about buying poison or tying really heavy weights to my feet so I could drown. No thought like that ever entered my mind during my four years in high school.
When I said I didn’t have (m)any friends, I was just looking for attention. In reality I was … well, not exactly cool, but if I wanted to escape any sort of unhappiness and be with people who’d be nice to me, I didn’t have to look far. I had a few places on campus where I could go and not be subjected to things like “You’re such a waste of skin/oxygen/food/semen” and other such things.
As a senior, no first year students ever bullied me. No sophomores, either. I was treated with respect by the majority of the student body. To say otherwise would be an inexcusable exaggeration.
What faculty who saw me when classmates were being less than courteous were often, if not always, quick to help me. Especially when I was easily surrounded and at the mercy of my fellow teens, those faculty who were paid to keep me safe and sound did nothing to shirk their duties nor did they aid said classmates.
I didn’t go four years without dreading every school day. From grade 4 to grade 8 there were several days when I looked forward to being at school.
I wasn’t really a runt … I mean, it’s not like there were kids twice my size in my own grade or anything. And they certainly didn’t bully me; common decency precluded that, of course. Nobody ever tried to throw me off a bush, and nobody at football practice ever had half the team sliding down a hill trying to make me fall.
A thoroughly astute point, Muldoon’s Squishiness. I rather look forward to your subsequent well thought-out, precise and worthwhile contributions to these threads.
iampunha, perhaps there is some history with you and Muldoon’s Squishiness that I am unaware of, but you know that your experiences may not have been representative of those of teens as a whole. I agree with Muldoon’s Squishiness in that non-teenagers often seem to discuss teens in terms of media portrayals rather than in terms of the actual flesh-and-blood young people.
Newsweek had an article a few years ago called “Meet the Gamma Girls,” for which, unfortunately, you need a pay subscription to view it online. But the gist of it, IIRC, was that there are large numbers of teenagers out there who are neither bullied nor bullys, who have their own groups of friends, who are focused on things like academics, athletics, church activities, part-time jobs. Well, we don’t hear about these kids for obvious reasons. It’s a pretty boring plot for a movie. There’s no angle to spin a news story around. But they’re there.
When my oldest daughter, now 16, was in middle school, she would be in tears just about every morning, begging not to have to go to school, because she was harrassed so badly. Not by a lot of the students, but rather, by 4 or 5 girls who decided she was their “special target”. The name-calling and insults eventually got so bad that I called the principal to see what could be done. “Well,” he said “we can’t really do anything unless they threaten violent action against her”. So, one day, one of the girls told my daughter she was gonna kick the shit out of her after school. I called the principal again, as violence had clearly been threatened, at which point he said “well, we can’t really do anything until they actually get violent”. WTF?? My daughter has to get her face pounded before they’ll take any action at all?? Shortly after that, I decided to home school.
I, myself, was mercilessly harrassed through elementary and middle school, because I’ve always been fat. In high school, though, I found my niche, and got through it.
I attended high and middle school in three countries, Cuba, Spain and the US. From that I can tell you that the school experience, at least as far as interaction with other students goes, is pretty nearly identical in all. In both Spain and the US I came to school as an outsider, with huge cultural differences from the rest of the student body, and was able to cope and flourish without any problems. In all three countries there were some kids who were picked on, but most were not.
I was one of the ones picked on by practically everyone in high school. I was even physically attacked in the cafeteria one morning by a girl I’d never met. Her reason for attacking me? My brother. He was a pompas jerk and was 3 grades ahead of me so EVERYONE in the school knew him and since I was related they decided I was a good candidate for their retaliation. Any wonder I dropped out of school in my sophmore year, got my GED, and went to college at 16?
Wow, this thread makes me look like quite an aberration. Grades 6-12 were the easiest years of my life. Especially 8-12 in Hawaii. K-5 were also in Hawaii and 6 and 7 were in Texas. it was in 6th where at one point someone did try to pick on me but one little flip out in class (“What the hell is your problem!” really loud in the middle of a lecture) and that was the end of that. If I wanted to talk to anybody I did although I primarily hung around with the chess club, science club and the like. Nobody ever tried to pressure me to take drugs or to drink.
I did go to an extremely diverse High School with a very heavy lean towards Asia and Polynesia with some whites which include me. And on top of that I’m a very laid back happy-go-lucky kind of guy.
I was picked on for a variety of reasons in school. I was smaller than most other kids, I wore glasses (they were rather dorky-looking I must admit), I didn’t like to play sports, among other things. Junior high was the worst of all, especially seventh grade. I had a bad case of acne, so this gave the other kids more fuel, and it didn’t help that I went into puberty early and I was starting to grow whiskers on my face.
Most of the tormenting was limited to school, but some of my worst enemies would confront me outside of school. I was afraid to go to places like the pizza parlor or the video arcade as this prick and his minions often liked to hang out at such places, too. Even at the local ski resort I had a few run-ins with this guy. One time he caught up with me on a ski run and tried to run me off the edge. To this day I hope this guy burns in hell. I’ll never forgive him.
By the time I reached high school most people became more mature and they either ignored me or found out that I was a decent guy to be around after all. Still, the problems I had growing up have made it so that I perform poorly in social situations and find it difficult to approach others. It probably explains why I am still single and probably always will be.
I wasn’t very popular, but my life wasn’t too bad. I went to a small elementary/junior high school, and back when I was really young I was friends with all the popular girls. When I grew up and became less of a social butterfly, they actually remembered that and I was mostly treated pretty well. I was one of the cowardly ones who just watched while other people picked on the really unfortunate kids. I would like to think I’d have done something had it ever become physical, but it was all words. I feel bad about it now, but what can you do?
There was a few less-than-pleasant parts as I got older, all verbal harassment style-stuff. One 8th grader (when I was in 7th grade) decided to make me his target in science class, probably because I was so quiet. I mostly ignored him; eventually he went away. On one notable occasion I was bothered about being an atheist; a small group of kids once decided I was godless and asked if I worshipped the devil. I told them that yes, yes I did. And I ate small babies in my spare time. Even that was short-lived, though.
If I had ever been seriously harassed, I would have kicked up a huge fuss. I had extremely supportive parents and I know they would have backed me up no matter what and made sure that Something Was Done. I think this gave me a lot of self-confidence back then. I went to high school during the 90’s and though it was a fairly rural school (prime location in middle of a field in the country!) it was a fairly advanced place.
As a teacher, I think the word for today is exaggeration. The sad experiences of the members who have posted are sad, but they are individual experiences. Because you were bullied does not mean that bullying is epidemic.
I’ve been teaching for 18 years, and I’ve known a lot of kids. The overwhelming majority of them led uneventful lives. School might not have been the greatest days of their lives, but neither was it a continuous source of angst. Yes there has also been a handful of bullying assholes over the years. It has been my job, mainly, to be the one who deals with them. So let me say this about bullies and their victims:
Bullies are looking for victims, targets if you will, not a fight. If you were/are bullied, you and your parents need to hold administration’s feet to the fire. If you’ve been physically attacked then you need to press criminal charges regardless of what the school admin wants. In districts where they prefer not to deal with bullying, you really do have to take matters into your own hands.
In the district where I work, BTW, we hammer bullies mercilessly. They change their ways or they find themselves in lock-up.
Middle school was the purest hell on Earth. I don’t want to get into the details, but suffice it to say that like I said in that other thread, if I found myself in that environment again I think I’d kill myself just to get away.
High school was much better. The last two were great, since we moved halfway across the country and I got to make a fresh start.
My mom did what she could, but the school didn’t really do squat about it. Hint – don’t EVER tell your kid, “Just ignore it, they’ll stop eventually.” Even if you CAN ignore it, which is damn near impossible, they’ll just up the torment until you can’t anymore.