And how did you do that? I’m not trying to be snarky at all. I really wish that more teachers knew how to “nip it in the bud” effectively, and I don’t get that they’re getting the training and support of the administration in doing that. I know I wouldn’t have a clue how to do it myself. Were you taught techniques to deal with bullying in your Education education, or was this just something you knew how to do from personal experience, or did you just wing it?
Maybe what we really need to do (radical notion, I know) is to learn from the teachers, not the administration, what really works on the floor, as it were, and to teach that, instead of the current strategy which doesn’t seem to please anyone.
I take full responsibility for making her cry. But I also blame her parents and the other adults around her for not working with her on ways to better handle teasing.
You can go through life believing:
A) The world is a utopian paradise where no one will ever insult me, or
B) The world has some messed up people in it. If I come across one, I won’t let him ruin my life.
Why did no one prepare this girl to handle insults? It’s awful that people tease her about having a lazy eye and having thick glasses. But come on people, look at the world we live in. It’s absurd to think she will never get teased. Fighting bullying needs to be done as a two pronged approach: getting bullies to not bully and getting victims to not be perpetual victims.
Why do you see her crying as a bad response to being teased? After all, didn’t it have a positive result, i.e., you realized how hurtful your words were *and *felt really bad for saying them?
Man, I had a reply typed out yesterday to defend you from SFG, and I’m so happy I never posted it. How do you know her parents DIDN’T work with her to give her coping tactics? How do you that she wasn’t usually able to handle it, but she was nervous about it being the first day in a new class, and the very first thing someone said to her was a nasty insult, so she just lost it?
Yes, parents should and do help their kids with strategies to handle it. But those strategies don’t always work, and the fault is always that of the bully, and no one else.
Because it was not used by her as a tool to educate me. It was the consequence of her self-esteem being shattered and her emotional collapse. Yes, I did immediately feel the consequence, but at what price? Maybe she carries that moment around as an emotional scar. I so wish she had different coping mechanisms so that my rude comment would have just bounced off her.
I wish she had instead said, “Filmore, it’s hard enough to go through life like this, please don’t make it any harder.” It would have had the same effect on me, but she hopefully would have felt empowered and not like a victim.
I don’t blame her for not having the confidence–she was just a kid, like me. How is a kid going to be self aware enough to figure these kinds of things out? Instead, the adults around her should help her figure these things out. When she is bullied, don’t enable the victim mentality. When she is teased she doesn’t have to stop it herself, but she should be educated on the steps she should take to make it stop. This isn’t saying she deserves to be teased. It’s acknowledging the fact that she will get teased and here are the steps to make it stop.
If you’re going to make such a big claim, I’d like a cite. Also, if you could back this up with how many educators you personally know and interact with, that’d be splendid.
I get it: a lot of you were bullied in school and a lot of you felt like the system failed you. You felt like no one understood you and no one was there for you. But I promise: most teachers are not sociopaths. In fact, some of those teachers were probably bullied themselves coming up (of course, I’m just basing this off the fact that a good hunk of my teacher friends are big ol’ nerds :D). Sure, there are some bad apples and naturally that’s who you will remember, but the vast, vast majority of teachers want to help in any way they can and will often go above and beyond to protect their students.
My being a teacher was a bit of an odd circumstance (you can PM me if you’re curious), so I actually received zero training (ok, that’s not true: I went to safe environment training) and had no educational background in it. Obviously, every situation is different, but for me, I’m younger and more approachable to most of the kids. My classroom was always a fun, laid back one, but the kids knew that when I got up to speak, they had to zip it and give me their full attention (all year, I had parents coming in and telling me that their kids learned more in my class than any other, so I suppose this method worked for me). Anywho, because of how I did things, the kids knew that if I yelled at them, it was serious— you know, I wasn’t that teacher who bit everybody’s heads off everyday, I only did it when it was a big deal.
So, that first time some kids were picking on the dorky kid-- I can’t even remember what they said (I do remember it was something cruel), but I immediately twirled around on my heels, stood right in front of their desks, and said something like: “Alright, stop it NOW. I want to be abundantly clear about something: what you just did is inexcusable. If I hear you say anything like that to anyone else ever again-- or if I even so much as hear from someone else that you were behaving like this again, I will make damned sure you never set foot on this campus again. ARE WE CLEAR? Good. Apologize to him. Now to your classmates for being so disruptive. Good. Now, I don’t want to hear you so much as speak for the rest of class.”
The entire class was like this: :eek:, except bully (who was like this: :() and victim (who was like this :D). Afterward, I asked a few of the more popular kids I knew to be truly good kids to keep an eye on victim for me and make sure he was ok. Like I said, I have no formal background in what’s right to do in an educational environment-- I don’t even have kids of my own and am an only child. So, my point is: who knows if what I did was right for sure. Perhaps I scarred the children for life. What I do know is that I see those kids at debate tournaments still (I moved to another school) and they are now-- just like they were a few weeks after the incident-- good friends. That includes victim, bully, and the “popular kids,”- they all get along now. So, I like to think it worked out.
Do you realize how you sound when you say this? When you don’t say “I wish I had been taught not to say hurtful things as jokes to people who won’t get that they’re jokes,” but “I wish she’d learned not to be hurt by offensive things”? It sounds like you’re blaming the victim for getting upset.
Bullying is never the fault of the child being abused. Ever. And while it can be helpful to teach them coping strategies, it is never their “fault” for reacting “poorly” to this abuse, and coping strategies are not an adequate solution to the problem. Stopping *the abuse *is.
While I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, I’m not sure that this is something that, taken literally, is a healthy attitude to have. Certainly, there are things some kids do that trigger bullying. I’ve seen kids act like super douches because. . .well, I’m not sure why, but then everybody starts picking on them. Granted, as the adult, I will ALWAYS step in and stop the bullying, but you’d be surprised how often I’ve had to have a, “don’t be a douche and people wont pick on you,” talk with the victim of the bullying.
Again, I deal with high school students, so YMMV. But seriously, a good chunk of the kids act out knowing full well that they are pushing the limits of what their classmates will deal with, intentionally drawing attention to themselves for whatever reason (and when discussing this with them one on one, they will often admit that they full well knew what they were doing). If there are any other high school teachers in this thread, I’m betting they’d back me up on this. But I would like to once again reiterate: I will ALWAYS step in and stop bullying, fighting, or whatever- regardless of who is at fault. And I will ALWAYS be there for any student that needs me. That doesn’t take away the fact that sometimes the kids don’t make their lives any easier.
(Of course, this doesn’t have much to do with the example you’re debating- since having glasses is hardly what I’m talking about. I’m simply saying that- especially with high school kids- there are times where the victim has a hand in what’s going on).
I got most of my bullying from my older brother. He would tease the shit out of me everyday. He actually spent one summer trying to make me cry everyday. He wasn’t much older than me so he couldn’t physically dominate me completely but he was expert at getting all of our friends to laugh at me when ever he so chooses.
He blames me for all this.
He firmly believes that he was just being ‘normal’ and he didn’t do anything especially bad to me. All older brothers tease their younger brothers. There must be something wrong with me if I get so upset about it. And hey, if he starts teasing me while at our mother’s funeral, he is just being normal, bringing back the good times. Right?
No, he is a piece of shit. Blaming the victim is not right. Nobody, not even the girl with the lazy eye and thick glasses has to be teased.
I don’t know how I can provide you with any official cites. Unless you know of some entity that keeps tabs on these sorts of things, what evidence you’re going to hear about this is mainly anecdotal.
But I can tell you that in high school, I saw many instances of bullying going on right in front of the teachers’ noses. Yet nine times of out 10 they chose to do Jack Shit about it.
Also my sister is a teacher and judging from what she tells me, most teachers just want to get through the day with as little crap as possible. As I said in my others posts, in a way I can’t blame them, as they’ve got enough problems to deal with not just from disruptive shits in their classrooms who insist on copping an attitude with her, but political shit from the administration. But if making her life easier means staying out what looks to be personal disputes between students, so be it.
I thought about that, too, but here’s how I considered the issue: If the kid is being “bullied” because of something negative they did, then I wouldn’t call it bullying. And if the behavior is out of proportion to the negative thing the kid did, then it’s back into bullying territory, and still unacceptable.
But there’s the rub: I guarantee you some of the people we see complaining about what hell high school was for them were some of the douches I have to talk down every day. Why? Because the douche-acting kid thinks they aren’t doing anything wrong; they’re just being themselves and gosh darnit, shouldn’t you be allowed to be the individual you are? To them, when they get picked on by the other kids, it’s straight up cruel bullying that they didn’t do anything to deserve. I guarantee you, someday they’ll be using some space aged computer to post on the intertubes about how everybody in high school was SO mean to them for no reason. As an adult sitting back and watching it unfold, I can tell you that a very high rate of bullying* in high school is more what I’m talking about and less what everybody else is talking about.
And again, just so no one jumps on me: I do not think of all of these things before interjecting myself into a situation to stop it. I will ALWAYS protect a child who needs protecting, first and foremost. But part of being the responsible and wise adult is helping both sets of kids also come up with long term plans to make sure this shit doesn’t happen again.
*As I said before, I’ve very rarely seen things be actually physical. So, I’m more talking about taunting and things like that.
Well, yeah, but just 'cause somebody claims they were bullied, and has the emotional scars from that experience, doesn’t necessarily mean it *was *bullying, and doesn’t mean that they somehow become an exception to “there’s never an excuse for bullying” because they personally acted like a jackass and that’s what people got down on them for.
I guess my point is that this sort of thing sort of diminishes what’s happening to kids that are really bullied. And I can at least understand why if an administrator or teacher sees what I see more often than not, that they are less likely to take seriously real bullying. Again, I’m not justifying it-- as I’ve made clear, my personal policy is one that I’d rather over react than under-- I’m simply explaining the rationale of the administrators and such. Because of this, it’s so, so, SO important that parents and students have good communication with their teachers. Even if there’s just one teacher a kid or parent can trust and talk to, that one teacher can handle the problem. Like I said before, we’re not all psychic- we can’t know what we don’t know. Communication is absolutely key in resolving this problem on the bigger scale. We’re also not sociopaths though, as some other Dopers are suggesting.
That was very good of you to do that, Diosa. Mercifully, my students are all adults and I don’t have to deal with harassment and bullying in the classroom. Wait, I tell a fib; I’ve been verbally bullied by the students before, quite severely at times, and I can’t even fight back because they’re paying me to be there. I guess that’s one reason I only teach overseas now.
Bullies among siblings is pretty common obviously, though it sounds as if yours was worse than most.
Were your parents around? Did you enlist their help?
It’s interesting to me that people expect teachersto be able to stop bullying in the schools among hundreds of students, when many families can’t stop/prevent bullying from happening under their own roofs.
What kind of shitty policy wouldn’t give you the power to discipline your own classroom? People who write shit like that should be dragged into the street and run over, repeatedly.
In today’s world my brother would have been put on meds. He was very hyperactive. (That’s the term they used then) Most of this of course happened when the parents were not present. We actually played outside most of the time. After a me throwing a few ‘fits’, getting so frustrated that I would take something of mine, so I wouldn’t get in trouble, and destroying it with a hammer or something, (a model ship I had built) I was taken to see doctors and put on meds myself.
Later in life, my mother apologized to me for not being able to stop him from what he did to me. She was the first family member to support me in my decision to cut him out of my life. My brother and I were the youngest of six, so lets just say my parents attention was divided.