Totally bullied, mostly because my mother and sister had me believing it was okay to do this to me and it was all my fault. Oddly, since I didn’t respond to the bullies, it would stop and I’d be totally ignored. I learned to be invisible at home, and carried it with me to school.
Nerdy, shy, skinny, glasses, male who excelled at English, clarinet player, mostly left alone (the bullying happened earlier, in my neighborhood, until a couple of similarly-bullied friends and I ganged up on him - threats only, and he left us alone after that). Didn’t have much of a social life, especially with the ladies, because I fell hard for a girl in 7th grade who I considered out of my league, so I never talked to her; it was a monogamous crush from afar. Same thing happened in 9th grade, with a different girl, for whom I fell infinitely harder and who was even “outer” my league. Ah well…
What about more than one?
I was a weird hybrid of serious jock (lettered 3 years in both football (Center/Defensive tackle) and track & field (shotput & discus) ) and nerd (in all the available advanced/AP courses except math, and on the school’s quiz-bowl team), so I was the big, intimidating friend of the nerds, as well as a peer and friend of most of the jocks in my grade and the grades above and below me. But… I got picked on a lot by other jocks 2 grades ahead, as I was a mouthy sophomore, and they were seniors, and I wasn’t always as nice to the less nerdy, less jocky kids as I could have been; at the time, if you weren’t a serious nerd, or you weren’t a jock, you didn’t fit into my conception of how the world worked.
I’m still fairly convinced that the fact that I was friends with the jocks, and friends with some of the nerdiest, oddest guys in school meant that the nerds didn’t get picked on nearly as much as had they not known me and sort of piggybacked off of my reputation and respect.
So I guess at various times during high school, I was a bully-defender, a bully and a bullee. Not too much of a class clown though.
None of the above
Stoner
Bullied in the first year, nameless rabble the remaining years and through high school.
I was the sullen kid banished to the library.
Since I was voted “class clown” in our 8th grade yearbook, I guess I have to go with class clown.
Class nerd with glasses and a C average. A natural target for bullies, but they left me alone – the C probably helped . I guess I must have had a few admiring protectors. There were a couple of masters of the art of weakling that saved me from that honor. Borderline smart-aleck. Notorious atheist and communist, refused (meekly) to say the Pledge of Allegiance, but would have buckled under less than waterboarding…
It was 1950, pre-Beaver,the concept of trivia had not yet been invented, but I was on the cutting edge – the go-to guy if anybody wanted to know something other than what would be on the final exam.
None of the above. We didn’t have much bullying (and the teachers wouldn’t allow it – I remember a gym teacher taking me to task for implying one of the other boys wasn’t any good at the sport he was doing).
Cliques existed, but there were conglomerations of like-minded people, and rarely did anything to outsiders. There were no “cool kids.” Our cheerleaders included two future valedictorians and one salutatorian, plus one or two more members of the Honor Society. The top athlete in the school was in the Honor Society.
I hung out with a group of C students and also the Chess Club and Debate Club. I was also on the tennis team.
I won’t say bullying doesn’t exist (I know of one kid who suffered it; when the same group tried to bully me, I replied with a single word and they left me alone*).
The culture assumed here was completely alien to my HS experience.
*They called me “Jew,” just to get a rise out of me. I turned around, smiled sweetly, and said, “Jealous?” They never bothered me again.
I went to Catholic school and it was arranged K-4, 5-8 and high school 9 - 12.
So the typical junior high school years were:
7th - I was still in school with the same kids I knew all my life, and there were only 30 per class. Not much bullying going on that I knew of, except teasing from the public school kids.
8th - skipped
9th - freshman in high school; shy nerd with other smarter kids as friends
I really only got bullied in later years by one particular asshole who fixated on me for some reason. Because of him I can understand shooting up a school.
I was a class clown just to impress the girls in a Catholic school. After Jr. High, I was off (along with all my friends) to an all-boys Catholic High School. I dropped the class clown shtick then. I’m still in favor of segregating the sexes in high school. (Might take care of all this transgender squabble too.) Kids learn and all their bullshit is mostly avoided.
Went to a small Christian school-- 7 kids in my eighth grade class. We just all sort of “were.” I’d check “none of the above” if that were an option.
Now high school, on the other hand, bullied. Shy aspie kid who never had to learn social skills beyond the 6-10 others that I had known since kindergarten, being tossed into a 1,200-student public school-- recipe for disaster.
College was like a breath of fresh air for me.
So do the transgender kids go to the school they look like or the one they feel like?
Are there really that many transgender kids?
Of the listed options, I was probably closest to a bully fighter. By Jr High, I’d figured out how to handle those people, but I mostly did it in a non-aggressive sort of way. (Example: one kid tried to start a fight, so I walked away. He jumped on my back, and I kept walking, but now headed in the direction of the teacher watching the yard until he got off my back and went away.) I can think of a couple of times when other people were being targeted and I stepped in and made myself the target.
Mostly, though, I was just a nerd. I ate lunch with the chess club. I sucked at sports. I got lots of A- grades in honors classes because it wasn’t worth putting any effort into classes when I could do real learning in the library after school. (At a high school summer camp one year, I was reading a college-level quantum physics textbook). I earned a reputation as the best gamemaster around (you know, the old-school pen-and-paper games). I wrote a lot of science fiction, though I rarely bothered to show it to anyone else, but it looked like I was taking notes in class and that made the teachers happier.
I was the weirdo new kid. Very small rural school. Most of these kids had known each other all their lives. I was probably the first new kid since third grade. I had lived in a city and and recently lived out of state. Most of my classmates had lived in the same house their whole lives and their grandparents lived across the street. Everything I did stood out.
What I wanted to be was invisible.
6th grade: Changed from a private Christian school to a public one. I was petrified, and conspicuously different, but kids mostly just ignored me.
7th grade: Worst year ever. Abused at home, bullied at school (a different school than grade 6). Bullied on the bus as well. I remember two good things that happened that year, one was that I read a good book, and the other was that one day I found a quarter.
8th grade: Home problems continued, at school I made two friends that were just as lowly as me.
It’s all been mostly uphill since then.
NOTA. Shy wallflower guy. I was relating to my wife recently that I don’t know why I ever went to my JHS dances. All I did was stand around, talk to a few friends, wishing I could dance with a pretty girl but too scared to ask.
I think I thought, back then, that asking a girl to dance felt like asking, “Hey, wanna dance, and then shortly thereafter we’ll get married and have kids?” Sure felt that way, looking back on it now.
Crap… answered for high school. Junior high wasn’t much different, except that I wasn’t ever much of a bully, but did get picked on a little, up to the point when I stood up for myself and gave the 8th grade bully a black eye that he had to wear for a week or two with everyone having full knowledge that a 7th grader had given it to him.
Right? And could there be any worse torture imaginable to a jr. high kid than asking a girl to dance and her saying no? Better play it safe and not even bother. Jr. high is so funny. I never asked a girl to dance unless it was a lead pipe lock that she would accept, which usually means she sent her friend to my friend and they would negotiate dance terms on our behalf. And then he’d come back and say, “Jane says Mary wants you ask her to dance.” And I’m like, ok I’ll have to think about that.