Don’t worry about those teachers. It’s well known, when they get home at night their fat and psychopathic wives will thrash them within inches of their lives.
Wrong! Do it again! If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any puddig! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?!?
Eh, Rubystreak, you’re just another brick in the wall. 
Wow, this has gone to three pages! Apologies for not getting back here sooner - I pulled an 11 hour shift at work today and just got home. Obviously, with so many replies since my last post I can’t respond to everything point by point, so here are the highlights.
I was also nonviolent, and still am. In fact, I’m turning 41 next month and to this very day I’ve never been in an actual “fight” - I’ve never even thrown a punch. The rest of your points … that could have been me writing all that.
Exactly. You know what response I heard most often when I tried to report bullying? “Well then stay away from <bully’s name here>” Right. On the playground, the bully can follow me everywhere I go, so unless I wanted to spend my entire recess hanging around the playground monitor instead of, oh, playing, there was no way to physically “stay away” from the bullies.
I was looking through my old grade school report cards not long ago, and noticed one teacher’s comment in the “Needs work on:” section: “Richard is quite the tattletale!”
I was also not helped by a mom who assured me that the only reason other kids picked on me was that they were just jealous that I was so smart. My dad tried to teach me to defend myself (he was a brawler himself back when he was in school), but for some reason I was always more afraid of his self-defense lessons than the bullies, so I didn’t really learn anything.
Very true. Junior high school was hell for me, and the girls were worse than the boys.
Technically, I was quoting my sister, but I agree with her in principle. Part of the issue my sister may have is that my older niece (now almost 9) was molested by an older boy when she was in kindergarten, and my sister wants to make sure nothing even resembling that happens to her youngest daughter.
You would have been back when I was in school. I had grade school teachers who, whether they intended it or not, actually encouraged bullying. One day in fifth grade, I was absentmindedly drumming my fingers on my desk shortly before recess. Mrs. Snitzler’s response to this was not to ask me to stop but instead make me continue drumming my fingers and make the entire class miss five minutes of recess listening to me drum my fingers. In other words, an asinine attempt by my teacher to use peer pressure to ensure I didn’t do anything that irritated her. Naturally, I got the crap kicked out of me and that tree bark stuff they use as a playground cushion stuffed into my underwear at recess because I had made the other kids miss those five minutes.
Also, I don’t believe I claimed that my niece was 100% innocent. Anyway, I don’t know if hers was a case of bullying or not. I’ll concede that perhaps it was a case of horseplay that simply got out of hand. And yeah, it shouldn’t be a gender issue (I’ll blame my sister. She started it! 
)
Another thought I’ve had is that maybe I’m seeing one side effect of having kids later in life (as is happening more often these days). My sister and I did kindergarten in 1973 and 1971, respectively, while my niece is doing it more than 30 years later. That’s a lot of time for things to change. We only have our own experience with “what school is like” to draw on, and “what school is like” now is considerably different from what it was then.
Um. Let’s not talk about how it was 26 years ago. That was then. This is now. School boards are supposedly being proactive in bringing in anti-bullying programs. If they haven’t yet stepped up to the plate, then parents need to get busy.
We are supposed to be learning from the past as we move forward and rectifying the mistakes of the past. If nobody ever sheds this frontier mentality, we’re doomed.
Then again, psychologists talking about Cho were mentioning that some people equate violence with power with masculinity. I was hoping it wasn’t true, but it probably is.
I wasn’t addressing you particularly; rather the ‘learn to beat up people - yeah, that’ll end violence’ types. Something you said triggered me to answer is all.
WRONG ANSWER!!!
The correct response is to tell the principal that her daughter will continue to defend herself against physical assaults and if any action is taken against her for doing so, the cops will be involved and you will file charges against the principal as an accessory to the assault.
Your sister should not blindly accept idiocy like that from the school system. When her daughter is in their care, THEY are responsible for her safety. And if she is assaulted by another student, it is THEIR problem to deal with. And the operative term is deal with, not avoid through asinine zero tolerance bullshit.
WRONG ANSWER!!!
The correct response is to tell the principal that you expect that the school institute an anti-bullying program and that she will help research and present it, if necessary.
Our daughter’s school uses the Bully Busters approach. We are seeing good results and follow-through; last week our daughter reported some typical behaviour from the class bully, and the class spent 45 minutes discussing it in a collaborative fashion.
Though I don’t know whether this is a part of the Bully Busters program or not, I have discovered through classroom volunteering that the principal actively promotes positive leadership activities, such as having children in the upper classes get on the PA in the morning to announce that they would be leading games on the playground at recess, and inviting the lower classes specifically to meet them at a certain spot and join in.
Imagine that! Taking proactive and positive measures to end a problem! Wholda thunkit?
Someone explain to me why people need to be told these things.
I don’t think people do need to be told these things.
All schools should try to figure out ways to solve these problems on a long-term, ongoing basis. And I am not necessarily opposed to the typical rule that all people involved in a fight get punished, no matter who started it. My only thought about defending oneself is that sometimes some problems need more immediate solutions, and when it comes to getting hit, I would not be opposed to my kid defending him or herself in kind if need be.
Writing it real big doesn’t make it any more true, just more annoying.
You’re assuming the kid WAS defending herself. That hasn’t been established except through hearsay-- a parent, declaring her kid a victim and the other kid a bully, even though her kid has a history of fighting. Maybe it was the other kid who was being bullied. Hard to trust the word of a 5 year old, especially a chronic hitter like the OP’s niece.
No, she should teach her kid not to hit other kids. If she has a bully that’s bothering her, and she hits back the first time, OK. Then she can tell her mom and her teacher what’s going on and get it resolved. I can’t see getting in physical fights over and over with the same kid as being acceptable behavior for a 5 year old. Can you?
They are also responsibly for the safety of the other kid, who is automatically painted as the villainous girl-beating boy antagonist here. I don’t buy it.
One does get so fucking sick of parents who cannot imagine that their kid ever does anything wrong. The extent some people will go to, the level of denial, is astonishing. Parents can’t admit their child misbehaved because it would reflect on them, they might have to administer discipline or heavens forbid, admit they might have raised a kid who isn’t perfect.
I had a kid commit plagiarism recently-- she copied a Robert Frost poem and handed it in as an original work. Too bad for her I know that poem by heart. When I called her mother, the mother denied that her daughter could have committed plagiarism on purpose. “It was an accident! She didn’t mean to do it!” Umm, how do you copy a poem word for word that was written by a famous poet and then hand it in with your name on it by accident?!? But this woman insisted it was so, and went so far as to say, “How could she have copied that poem? We don’t have any books in this house!” :smack: It’s unbelievable, the denial.
(bolding mine)
Where are you reading all this in my posts? My sister is the first to admit that her daughter is a rambunctious little girl with an attitude. My sister has made it perfectly clear to her daughter that she is not allowed to start shit with other kids, and that she will be punished if she does (and my sister follows through on this). But in this particular instance, there was apparently sufficient evidence that it was the boy who started the shit, or at least hit first, and that is the only reason for my sister’s position on the matter.
Rubystreak’s interpretation is one that I picked up on as one possible reading of the OP, though not the only one. You did say, “my redheaded niece, who is in kindergarten, got sent to the Principal’s office again. For fighting!” This might or might not mean that she has a history of being sent to the Principal’s office for fighting. “The Principal told my sister that if this kind of thing happens again, she’ll have to suspend my niece from school” could mean that the principal is a zero-tolerance kind of guy, or that this was the last straw.
We’re only getting the story third- or fourth-hand. Depending on whether or not your sister has a case of “my child can do no wrong”-ism (which the OP leaves open as a possibility), what she calls a “rambunctious little girl with an attitude” might be called, by an impartial observer, “a hellion who whales the tar out of the other kids at any provocation.”
You’re quite right.
What we really need is sunshine and bunnies and lollipops for EVERYONE! In a collaborative fashion, of course! YAY!
Hardly. We need to teach violence. Violence built this country, violence expanded it, and violence will preserve it.
:rolleyes:
Personally, I think my niece is suffering from blatant redheadism. She’s got bright red hair which, by itself, is enough to make a redheadist say, “Now there’s a troublemaker!” and move to walk on the opposite side of the street, or at the very least watch her carefully. Maybe shout, “Go back to Scotland!” And her hair alone makes her stand out from the rest of the kids, drawing the eye the way the red car on the freeway draws the eye of the trooper with the radar gun, who tickets the driver of the red car in spite of the fact that every other driver on the road was traveling at the same speed.
Of course, I’m joking 
Anyway, at this point my niece shows indications that she could end up being both jock and nerd. She’s very smart; she put herself in the “smart kids” group at school (Seriously - her school offers the “smart kids” extra opportunities for more advanced learning, and this group leaves their normal class part way through the school day. She wasn’t initially chosen to be part of this group, but at some point she decided she should have been and just got up and went with them as they were leaving one day. That may have been the cause of her first trip to the Principal’s office, after her teacher noticed her missing. But it turned out she did so well with the advanced group that they let her keep going.) At the other end, she can throw a ball with remarkable accuracy (though catching still needs some work), and my dad is teaching her archery, and she can hit the target consistently. I hope she never has to choose between “jock” and “nerd”. Why not be both? Oh, and she has natural musical talent, too. She memorizes songs from the radio and sings them back, in tune, and she also has a good natural sense of rhythm.
Unfortunately, her older sister is a tall, skinny, blue-eyed blonde airhead (I hate to say it, but …) who so far has shown little aptitude for anything beyond looking pretty. Well, actually she may have an artistic bent. She came up with the idea a while back to glue googly eyes onto her baby pictures …
Why in the world would one institute a no fighting policy rather than a no bullying policy?
The simple fact is that there are some children who like to beat people up. For this sort of hard-core bully (as opposed to children who are simply a bit slow in learning to socially interact), all the counseling, medication and jail time in the world will not stop this behaviour – all it does is give them something to crow about. As adults, the law is available to deal with people who commit assaults, including the availability of self-defence by the victim. Why should innocent children not receive the same level of protection?
If the school is unable to protect a child from assaults, then it is the height of absurdity for the school to then punish the victim for defending himself or herself.
Actual protection from actual assaults should take much higher priority than the theoretical discussion of the philosophy of violence or non-violence.
In the grade ahead of me, there were several bullies – all of whom who were sufficiently mentally disturbed that they were confined to reformatories prior to entering high-school. In primary school they daily beat up children, including myself. The parents of the victims repeatedly raised the problem with the teachers and principal. The assaults continued. The parents took up the matter with the school board, resulting in the principal being fired. The assaults continued.
By elementary school, my parents placed me in a private school where bullying was not tolerated, and where students, both individually and by way of student prefects, were expected to comport themselves responsibly. A year later one of the bullies enrolled in that school and attempted to continue the bullying against me and others. For the first and only time in my life, I fought back, for at that school we had been taught that no quarter should be given to bullies.
Once the bully was released from hospital and returned to school a couple of days later, a school assembly was called, the headmaster gave a speech on bullying, shook my hand and publicly congratulated me, and then caned the bully. The bullying ceased.
I expect that the bully, in his disturbed little mind, came to the realization that unlike the public system, this new private school would support my causing him significant pain, so he would be best to not assault me or any other person again.
Hard, bone crushing, bloody physical violence is vulgar, but effective, when it comes to dealing with bullies. If the authorities can not protect victims from assaults (and suspending victims of assaults is in no way protecting them), and the bullies will not listen to reason or respond to treatment or incarceration, then beat them within an inch of their lives such that at a gut level they will be in fear of the victims.
Very good, Muffin, but I highly doubt that the school system, which (as demonstrated in thread) views all violence as barbaric and blindbly believes in the ability of authority to enforce Niceness (as opposed to your example, in which authority was merely a catalyst for the “grassroots” change you brought), will ever be able to mount such an effective program, even minus the caning.