Some days

[attackfish]

We were talking about bullies and I listened to my fellow teaching students just not get it in so many kind, well meaning ways.  And then my teacher asked about our own experiences with bullying, and everyone in the class talked.  Most said they had never been bullied, the rest mentioned isolated incidents, and talked about how standing up to the bullies really worked!  And I looked around at this room of earnest faces, and realized none of them had a clue.

Most people want to become teachers because public school was a place of joy for them.  I feel a little alone right now.

Comments

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Ignoring the bullies, which is another well-meaning piece of advice that adults often give you, actually did work for me eventually when I was finally able to get myself to try it long enough. But I think this probably had something to do with the fact that I was being bullied because I was perceived as weird (I read books in the schoolyard at lunchtime), but not as being particularly physically vulnerable, and in fact was taller than many of the boys who used to follow me home from parochial elementary school catcalling and then chase me if I started to run. (I was the tallest girl in the class until Nydia Pinero got left back, and the only boy who was taller than me was a shy, tongue-tied guy who never bothered anybody.)

This was back in the mid-1960's when you never heard of "nice" middle class kids doing anything really horrendous (although of course that doesn't necessarily mean that it never happened). So when I just kept plodding along pretending that they weren't there while they made various allegedly teasing remarks and, I think, even tried throwing a schoolbag at the back of my legs (which didn't work nearly as well as the time one of the bags had hit me in the back of the knees while I was running, making me fall down and bloodily skin my knees), after a few days they just gave up and wandered off, disappointedly saying, "She doesn't run and scream anymore." This seemed to validate my parents' claim that if I just kept ignoring them, the boys would get bored and leave me alone. But in retrospect I wonder if it would have been that easy if I'd been smaller and looked less as if I could inflict a fair amount of damage on them in return if they'd been emboldened to try escalating things further and I'd fought back. (I actually had thrown my schoolbag back at them at least once, although that didn't seem to discourage them much.)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

My grandmother was a high school student in the 50s in a nice little farming community. She was hounded out of school by bullies. But of course she was a slut who got pregnant, and it was an open secret her family was Jewish, so that was okay.