Reasonoid Nick Gillespie takes to the WSJ to let America know there’s no such thing as a bullying crisis in schools and neighborhoods as he rips into the new film “Bully”.
Now that schools are peanut-free, latex-free and soda-free, parents, administrators and teachers have got to worry about something. Since most kids now have access to cable TV, the Internet, unlimited talk and texting, college and a world of opportunities that was unimaginable even 20 years ago, it seems that adults have responded by becoming ever more overprotective and thin-skinned.
Kids might be fatter than they used to be, but by most standards they are safer and better-behaved than they were when I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s. Infant and adolescent mortality, accidents, sex and drug use—all are down from their levels of a few decades ago. Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans. But given today’s rhetoric about bullying, you could be forgiven for thinking that kids today are not simply reading and watching grim, postapocalyptic fantasies like “The Hunger Games” but actually inhabiting such terrifying terrain, a world where “Lord of the Flies” meets “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” presided over by Voldemort.
Stop whining. Life is Darwinian. Deal with it, you little ferrets.
When it comes to bullying numbers, long-term trends are less clear. The makers of “Bully” say that “over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year,” and estimates of the percentage of students who are bullied in a given year range from 20% to 70%. NCES changed the way it tabulated bullying incidents in 2005 and cautions against using earlier data. Its biennial reports find that 28% of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied in 2005; that percentage rose to 32% in 2007, before dropping back to 28% in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available). Such numbers strongly suggest that there is no epidemic afoot (though one wonders if the new anti-bullying laws and media campaigns might lead to more reports going forward).
The most common bullying behaviors reported include being “made fun of, called names, or insulted” (reported by about 19% of victims in 2009) and being made the “subject of rumors” (16%). Nine percent of victims reported being “pushed, shoved, tripped, or spit on,” and 6% reported being “threatened with harm.” Though it may not be surprising that bullying mostly happens during the school day, it is stunning to learn that the most common locations for bullying are inside classrooms, in hallways and stairwells, and on playgrounds—areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.
Everything’s fine. You know, except for the kids driven to suicide for being gay or fat or different or getting shot for walking down the street with an iced tea and a bag of candy, that is. Jesus launch the helicarrier. It’s funny how these guys believe in the free market so much until it comes to the flash mobs actually getting called on ruining a kid’s life, but I guess that’s just culling the weak, right?
dr. luba
You know who doesn’t think bullying is important? Bullies.
Corner Stone
It starts in Kindergarten. I see it clearly when I go to have lunch with my 1st Grader. Schools simply can’t deal with it. There’s a kid who goes to see the Principal every day. Sometimes it’s for violence against another child, sometimes just disruptive behavior.
Fuck this fucking guy.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Shorter Freedom Fonzi: There’s no Bullying Crisis, because that would imply that Bullying is bad.
Litlebritdifrnt
Copying this from the last thread which is now probably dead.
Oh and may I say that giving your significant other home IVs sucks. DH has pneumonia he is on daily treatments of IV antibiotics, they sent him home with two IV treatments and instructions for me to do it. At about step two of the instructions I noticed an air bubble in the IV, which freaked me the fuck out, cause you know I have seen all those movies where putting an air bubble in the IV kills people. So I called the Doc’s wife (the nurse) and said “OMG, OMG there is an air bubble” she calmed me down from the twenty seven feet above ground level that I was panicking at and walked me through the rest of it. Damn.
Linda Featheringill
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Hang in there, dear. And it’s okay to get scared. You’re allowed.
And good luck. It just might turn out all right.
Xecky Gilchrist
Does the film also point out that plenty of bullying is done by teachers and administrators? Bullying is a way of life in the U.S., in school and after, all the way through adulthood.
I think a big part of what cons find threatening about universal healthcare is that it would make people better able to leave shitty job situations, making it harder for the boss-bullies to do their thing, and that’s not how the culture is supposed to work in rightieland.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Litlebritdifrnt: Oh, no – I’m so sorry. I have my fingers crossed for you and the SO.
gmf
I know this douchebag is divorced – does he have any kids?
I’m going to assume he doesn’t? If he doesn’t, what the fucking fuck does he know about the subject?
I don’t know if bullying is any worse now than it was 20 years ago – but it happens and is frequently ignored by schools and therefore is a problem (my kids see it often enough to come home with stories about it).
What an asshole.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Corner Stone:
That you hop right on this thread and make the sort of comment you did is just the best sort of irony.
Don’t you ever let your kid read your comments at this site.
Litlebritdifrnt
Thanks guys, not to belittle it in any way shape or form but DH gets pneumonia at least once per year. He has been hospitalized twice for it, the rest of the time we catch it early and he is fine. Usually he gets it during Football season which absolutely sucks, cause he has to spend time out on the football field on cold damp nights, at least this time he gets it in Spring which is much less fraught than Football Season.
Question for the medical types here, apparently as well as pneumonia he was horribly dehydrated, how can you have pneumonia (which is basically fluid on the lung) and be dehydrated at the same time? Also, too, he drinks a boatload of caffeine free diet coke (basically flavored water) and bottled water every day. How does he end up dehydrated?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Xecky Gilchrist:
We are what we are.
David Koch
Nelson Muntz just filed a concurring op-ed, “there is no bullying”.
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Presumably, you’re an adult. With the ability to make adult decisions about your environment.
We’re all equal here, with the exception of the bullying attempts by certain FP’ers. There’s no disparity of power between what I say and what you say.
Children are a different matter, as any reasonable adult should recognize.
I’m sorry for you that this was your first response on this thread.
Narcissus
You know Gillespie was mercilessly bullied for being, y’know, Nick Gillespie, and is now upset younger generations might get to avoid that.
David Koch
Natural selection, bitches.
David Koch
Bullying wouldnt be happening if Obama used the bully pulpit.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): We are what we are.
As may be, but I see no reason to make it a feature of institutions. I consider myself a liberal because I believe humanity can be better than its biology.
gelfling545
@Litlebritdifrnt: I was told by my MD the last time I had pneumonia that anything with caffeine will make dehydration worse & that pneumonia usually included a low-grade fever even before you realize you’re pretty sick making you sort of start out behind in the hydration area so drink water, water, water only.
Maude
@Litlebritdifrnt:
When I had pneumonia I was dehydrated. It could be he isn’t eating that much.
If he is sweating, that’ll do it.
Hope he gets better and I hope you get to relax.
cmorenc
It would be improper not to speculate whether Nick Gillespie was among the verbal bullies in high school, sarcastically browbeating kids he thought were among the weak or to-be-scorned classes of people, or else whether he was among the bullied victims. My seat-of-the-pants guess is, he was much more likely among the former, or at the very least was securely among the third group of kids not perceived by the bullies as vulnerable enough to verbally attack.
chrismealy
Libertarians are assholes. They’re always assholes. That’s their whole fucking deal.
butler
28%+ of kids consistently reporting getting harassed isn’t a problem? What the hell qualifies as a problem in this guy’s world?
butler
Acceptance of homosexuality is up, especially among younger Americans.
No thanks to the type of people Reasonoids team up with during election season, who are happy to try and twist any effort to not have kids endure undue mental anguish for their orientation into yet another example of “liberals persecuting Christians”. Fucking hateful liars.
Cluttered Mind
@butler: Taxes.
Litlebritdifrnt
@cmorenc:
All he drinks is caffeine free diet coke and water, I KNOW he is eating properly because I am the one that feeds him. The whole pneumonia (liquid thing) and dehydration thing had me really confused.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Corner Stone:
No, a reasonable adult would see how adults have increasingly been failing to give children coping mechanisms to deal with bullies, as well as setting bad examples as bullies themselves.
slag
Glibertarian…I can’t imagine a more perfect moniker for these guys…except maybe with the addition of Douchebag.
Narcissus
Scratch a libertarian, find a sophomore being stuffed into a garbage can.
Scott
The world would be a better place if someone would occasionally catch Fonzi and the other we-love-bullying fanboys outside late at night and hit ’em a few times with axe-handles.
Oh noez, Moore Award!
Xecky Gilchrist
@Narcissus: Scratch a libertarian, find a sophomore being stuffed into a garbage can.
Hee hee
and yet, they think anti-bullying measures are bad. Stockholm syndrome or something?
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): You’re not making much sense, I’m afraid. You’re equating an adult themed political-esque blog to how people interact with school age children? Or maybe with other adults at work?
I’m assuming you’re indicating I interact with different individuals and situations in a universal manner? Or other people here you have a problem with?
Clime Acts
So am I seeing here that Max McGee is accusing CS of being a cyber bully?
Giggle.
pdf
Doesn’t anybody think it says something about kids today that they can be driven to suicide by mean emails? I don’t mean to sound like a prick, but seriously – I graduated high school in 1990. In junior high, I was “bullied” – kids insulted me, occasionally shoved me in the halls, told other kids I was an asshole and a nerd and a psycho. I had maybe two friends, who were just as ostracized as me. But none of us committed suicide or went on rampages. Nobody brought a gun or any other kind of weapon to school. We just went on with our shitty lives.
As a 40 year old, I’ve got to wonder why we’re so fixated on bullies, and why we’re not more concerned with trying to toughen up the bullied kids?
Corner Stone
Personally, I think it’s a larger societal breakdown issue. Which we could go into at length, given the time.
The troubled child I mentioned earlier clearly has issues with his homelife. Public schools just can’t correct or mitigate that behavior. They’re strapped by wingnuts and the anti-revenue jihad.
HRA
As others have said here, it’s not very difficult to assume Nick Gillespie was a bully.
Being different is the main cause or even prime cause of being bullied. I had the experience when I came as a preteen from Canada to the US.
Now when I think about it, I have to admit it was the other students who were different that helped save me from bodily harm. I lived in their neighborhood which was later called the hood. I can never forget them.
Corner Stone
@Clime Acts: It’s not the first time. He pipes up saying things similar to this once in a while. It’s a little strange, to tell you the truth.
Corner Stone
@pdf:
Probably because no one wants to see their child, or another’s child, live through some kind of torment for no good fucking reason at all.
You’re 40 now and still able to vividly recall what that felt like. Think it makes sense to just let that go another few generations?
Anonymous
One reason why this is worse than you give it credit for is that there’s nowhere to hide. Through email, Facebook, texting, etc., there is literally nowhere you can go — save cutting yourself from the world — to escape the bullying. That’s very different from what I grew up with.
aimai
It is not high status kids being bullied by low status kids. Its generally high status kids bullying outsiders. Those of us whose kids have been bullied work plenty hard to “toughen” our kids up but its not relevant. A school is a total social institution with its own rules, hierarchies and prison like features. You can’t get away from the hierarchy which permits bullying and even, in a sense, values it. It happens in every school where the teachers don’t intervene harshly on behalf of the classroom and the bullied child. And most schools won’t/can’t intervene that harshly because the bully is seen as in some sense also a victim and also a client. My child has been bullied and ostracized in a high status/high liberal school not for being part of an identifiable minority, or gay, or anything else other than the need of kids to create a hierarchy with an in group and an outgroup so that some kids can fel extra specially powerful. The school can’t figure out how to “level” the hierarchy and basically contents itself with not seeing the harm to half the class at letting the other half arrogate to itself the power to determine who is in and who is out.
aimai
Xecky Gilchrist
@pdf: Doesn’t anybody think it says something about kids today that they can be driven to suicide by mean emails? I don’t mean to sound like a prick, but seriously
…you sound like a prick. In particular, the prick this post is calling out.
Bullying sucked then, it sucks now. Suicides happened in our day because of it (I’m a bit older than you), and there are not lots of them happening now – just that the ones that do happen are more publicized because in recent years we’re starting not to accept the “suck it up and deal with it” horseshit … that you’re more or less advocating.
And nice scare quotes around “bullied” for what happened to you. You *were* bullied, no snarky quotes about it. You didn’t deserve it, and neither do the kids today.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Anonymous:
Seriously. It’s not like cyberbullying happens in a vacuum. The whole point is that its usually indicative of a larger pattern, and how what used to be outlets and safe havens instead perpetuate the bullying and make the victims feel even more closed in and ostracized further.
Corner Stone
@aimai: And as I indicated, it starts in Kindergarten. Go to a school lunch (the general “you” here, not personal). You’ll quickly see the bully wave kids off from not being able to sit at certain seats at the communal table for the class. He’s marked the territory for the ingroup.
pdf
@Corner Stone: Yeah, I’m 40 and “still able to vividly recall what that felt like,” as you point out. But I’m a professional writer – it’s my job to be able to access that sort of thing. If I didn’t do it on purpose, I wouldn’t be waking up in a cold sweat at night, dreaming about shit that happened when I was 15. I figured out several things pretty quickly as a kid:
1) Other kids are assholes. Be wary.
2) Adults/authority figures are not going to help you solve your problems; they will probably make things worse.
3) What happened yesterday can’t be fixed or changed, so it no longer matters.
When I encounter people who are still hung up on their school years, I feel bad for them. Whether it’s because life was awesome for them back then, or because it was horrible, they really should have had something more interesting happen since to take their mind off it, is my thinking.
I don’t have kids, but if I did, the three things I listed immediately above would be among the most important lessons I would teach them.
ShadeTail
@pdf:
You may not mean to sound like a prick, but you certainly do.
Anyway, as Anonymous pointed out above, you literally can’t get away from it now unless you are completely disconnected from modern society. And as Xecky Gilchrist pointed out above, those suicides and whatnot did happen back then. They just didn’t get attention, partly because people simply accepted it as normal, but also because the news media hadn’t yet turned into a nation-wide 24-hour circus.
Also, I find it interesting that you imply that if you did have kids, you’d tell them flat out that if they had problems, they wouldn’t be able to count on you for help. I *do* have kids, and if they had problems or were being hassled, I’d give their tormentors such hell that they would swear they’d personally met Satan.
Svensker
We ended up taking our kid out of his middle school, not because he was getting bullied but because one of his oldest friends had become the school “goat”. Our kid would come home crying every day because he was given the choice to bully his friend or get bullied himself. The stuff being done to his friend was just astounding, it was really Lord of the Flies stuff, as if there were no adults in the building. We went to the principal with the parents of the bullied kid and she basically blew us off. Both of us pulled our kids out of the school. A kid in the next higher grade tried to commit suicide that same year because of the bullying.
Toxic school environment, asshole entitled kids (not that poor kids can’t be bullies, as well), parents working round the clock, no one home to see the state the kid is in when he/she gets home. I think it’s way tougher for a lot of kids now than when I was growing up.
Ed in NJ
@pdf:
It’s much different today because of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, cellphones, etc. I was bullied all through school, but thankfully I was a big kid who was quite able to defend myself. But I had some issues in my family that kids were ruthless about, but their comments were limited to their social circles, and I only knew about it when I heard it for myself. That’s a bit easier to ignore than having your personal business plastered all over Facebook.
Lojasmo
@Litlebritdifrnt:
A little bubble is extraordinarily unlikely to hurt. In most people, it would take a large volume of venous air to cause trouble. Don’t sweat it
/nurse
slag
@aimai:
Sometimes, the teachers are doing the bullying themselves, unfortunately. School is very often an incredibly negative environment, and I think a lot of the negativity starts at the top and works its way down. Kids can be mean, no doubt, but from what I’ve observed, if everyone could focus a little more on creating a positive environment for them, then the kid-on-kid action would probably diminish substantially.
__
Shit. That sounded very Pollyanna. Fuck that glibertarian douchebag for turning me into Pollyanna!
Spaghetti Lee
areas ostensibly patrolled by teachers and administrators.
Yeah, gotta get in the dig on those dirty lazy stupid teachers, don’t ya, Gilly? Hey, how about you follow up with one of your brilliant ‘Pro-Liberty’ ideas about firing enough teachers to reduce the teacher/student ratio even further, or lower qualifications for who gets hired as teachers, That’ll help.
I’m also kind of impressed that he got a “You peasants all have cool techie toys now, so SHUT UP” libertarian meme in there, even when it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Nobody brings the smug like Gilly. Can we put aside our anti-bullying feelings long enough to stuff him into a garbage can?
Lojasmo
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Pneumonia is a bacterial lung infection. Pulmonary edema is fluid in the lung (caused by heart failure) Pleural effusion is fluid around the lung (usually malignancy). Three very different animals.
Anne Laurie
@cmorenc:
I have no doubt Gillespie was the guy standing just behind the big, physically fit bullies, feeding them “smart lines” to use on their victims. This made Gillespie feel like a WINNER, almost as if he could physically bully those weaker little geeks all by himself, and punish them for expressing all the horrible non-Randian traits he saw & loathed in himself.
It makes Gillespie
sadangry (Real Men Don’t Get Sad Dammit!) that future larval Gillespies might be cheated of the “rush” that comes from never knowing when Boris the Brute might stop hitting the designated class geek and turn on Gillespie.There’s an anecdote about a post-Victorian English lord who told an anti-caning advocate that he was beaten in school, “and it didn’t hurt me.” To which the reformer replied, “Well, it turned you into a person who thinks it’s okay for adults to beat children…”
jcricket
I was bullied, not obsessively or all the time, but on and off in elementary school and junior high. It helped that I was smart and athletic, so I had a bunch of nerd and athlete (albeit, swimmers) friends to hang out with. I never thought of suicide.
But to this day I have a visceral reaction when I see kids getting bullied. Or I see videos like that overweight kid in Australia (?) who body slammed the shit-squeak who was bullying him and trying to film it for the LULZ.
But the worst part, that I remember, was the administrators and parents. I got beaten up one day in Junior High (he punched me, I walked away, after class he punched me again, I tried to hit him, failed, and then curled up in a ball while he wailed on me). The Vice Principal then tried to pull one of those WaPo “both sides do it” BS that we all know and love. Yeah, the kid with straight As who ended up on a ball in the ground is as much at fault as the kid flunking out of school, smoking in back, who got into fights every other week (I know, sounds like a stereotype, but it it what it is).
Even worse, was once in high school when I’d had enough and these two douchenozzles (different than the one in Junior High) tried to squash me in the hall (although it’s odd the people calling me a fag would be trying to sandwich me, but no matter). I grabbed a chair and smacked em with it. Waah, bullies go down.
We all end up in the principals office a few days out. I remember my dad being contrite and telling me to be contrite about it. The dads of the bullies? Nope, they blamed the principal, bitched about random other shit in the school, etc. It was my first exposure to the fact that bullies usually have assholes for parents (entitled assholes, violent assholes, racist assholes, doesn’t matter).
This shit will stop when administrators treat it like assault – which it is. I’m not advocating zero tolerance, but c’mon here, no one’s even trying right now.
And if anyone bullies my kids, and then defends it (parents, administrators) – I will fucking destroy them. Legally, financially, and if I have to, physically. It’s only fair, right? No real harm done, right?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@slag:
I’ve heard this from other teachers. There are people in charge still working out their own high school issues, still desperate to be liked by the cool kids when their the thirty-something in authority. Kinda scary.
and what’s already said about Facebook. What a fucking abomination. All that humiliation made public not just for the whole school but for the kids own friends and families? I can’t imagine going through middle school with that thrown into the mix.
OzoneR
@pdf:
Here’s the thing, when you left school, the bullying…stopped.
These kids are bullied in school, when they get home from school, when they’re off from school, it doesn’t matter; thanks to the internet and social media.
I was bullied too, pretty badly, but at least I had 3 months of the year in the summer when I didn’t have to deal with any of that bullshit. I can’t imagine if I had to endure it every single time I put on my fucking computer.
Besides that, the one thing I had was the parents of the bullies. The bullying would stop if there was a risk that mom was gonna open up a can of whoop ass.
Nowadays, they don’t even have that. I have a friend whose a teacher who said one of her students was a bully and was actually ENCOURAGED by the parents, who told HER to “back off, my son is a warrior”
At best the parents just don’t even fucking pay attention.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Xecky Gilchrist:
I don’t think bullying a feature of institutions, in the US or anywhere else, at all. What does set us apart is that we here- and, more importantly, now– pamper ourselves and our children to no end. We are so used to being catered to that when we don’t get results that are tailored to us individually. we don’t know how to cope. We shut up, depressed, or we go ballistic.
Bullying goes back to the dawn of time, and we’ve dealt with it until recently. What’s the big deal now? Think malls, multiplexes, cable tv, schools of choice, dvd players and tv’s in every child’s room, video games and cheat codes, participation trophies. We’re shutting ourselves out from others, and we’re losing the ability to compromise.
RossInDetroit
Yeah, that’s what they told me in grade school when I was getting my ass regularly kicked. “Fight back” they said. So I did. Shortly word got around to my parents that I was ‘a bully’. So when we’re all bullies everything will be fine. And won’t that be a happy world?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Corner Stone:
Do you mean to tell me that when you’re losing your shit on-line over a bad performance by the Texans that you don’t verbalize that at all in front of your kid? That all of your anger is focused to your fingertips, stored up until the kid isn’t in the room at all? I find that hard to believe.
Shari
@RossInDetroit: And when the kids grow up, they can all get concealed carry permits and stand their ground against the other bullies. That should turn out pretty good too.
slag
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Seriously. It’s a thing.
__
But beyond that, even just constant negative attention will do the trick. Even if it’s not intentionally mean. I’ve been doing some cursory research on what Behavioral Psychologists sometimes call “positive behavioral support” and have been pretty astounded by what I’m learning. In some school systems, the average negative-to-positive interaction teachers are having with students is 13-1. Thirteen negative interactions for every positive one. That’s utterly insane to me. I almost can’t believe it.
__
But in cases where interventions are made to reverse that ratio, the effects on student behavior have been amazing. Kids improve on every single measure–including productivity. From what I’ve read, they get along better; their behavior in the classroom improves; they do more work. So, we should ask ourselves…why are we doing things this way? What’s in it for us? (and I mean “us” in the societal sense–I’m not a teacher by trade)
__
The fact is that we’re the ones fucking it up for these kids. So, it’s incumbent upon us to fix it. It’s that simple.
Robert
I can tell you from first hand experience that principals are pressured to not file disciplinary reports that mention bullying or bullying like action. The incidents we would call bullying pull down school rankings on a statewide level. It’s, sadly, better for a school to say that two students were fighting and suspend them both than to say one student beat another student to a bloody pulp just because.
The anti-bullying legislation encourages teachers to look away lest they lose their jobs if a single mistake is made on gigantic reports they have the rest of the school day to turn in. In NJ, for example, the only person who can get in trouble if the parents aren’t satisfied with the action the school takes is the teacher who filed the bullying report. They’re the ones who get thrown out on their butts, tenure or not, because little Billy decided to rearrange little Timmy’s front teeth just because. Better to not file the report and keep your job than file the report and be fired the next week. The epidemic is going down in studies because schools/states have found ways to repackage bullying as kids will be kids.
Zandar
@pdf:
Try being black or Latino and “fighting back”. Good fucking luck with that, too.
pdf
@Zandar: Why do you assume I’m white? Or heterosexual, for that matter?
slag
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Allow me to take a moment to observe that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and should seriously consider learning a thing or two about an issue before you spout off about it. Just a suggestion.
Anya
@Litlebritdifrnt: Thinking about you and sending your way positive energy.
Kirk Spencer
@pdf: Actually, there were suicides back then. There were more then (in the 1970s and 1980s) than there are now, though the rate has been declining since around 1990.
As to the rampages, two points.
a) They’re not victims of bullying.
b) School shootings happened back then. 1978 had that 15 year old in Lansing Michigan, and 1982 had the Deer Creek Jr. Hi shootings. Just for examples.
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): This is amusing to me. You think my passionate response to a professional sports team translates in any way to my now 7 yr old?
When I’m frustrated with him we discuss why, and we talk about expectations and outcomes. And choices.
If you think for a second I direct abuse or inappropriate language at him/around him because of the Texans then I wonder about your developmental environment.
You’re the kind of guy who can’t discern between the role of an actor and the person who is the actor, right?
Anne Laurie
@pdf:
As Xecky pointed out, there were suicides or at least suicide attempts, even in the 1960s/70s, but they didn’t get discussed outside the community (usually along the lines of ‘Victim “accidentally” fell on the subway tracks, or “found” his cop father’s gun). More often, in those days, the kids being bullied past the point of endurance just dropped out of school as soon as they could, which really isn’t an option any more. There was also more social pushback, because not only could teachers punish kids with a lot less pushback, but when bullies went “too far” the parents of the victims would go to the bully’s parents. And — surprise! — usually the really committed bullies were the offspring of mean, damaged, physically abuse individuals who’d taught their kids all their worst habits. So “don’t make my dad talk to your dad” had a resonance that just doesn’t apply any longer.
Also, as others have pointed out, it can be easier for the school administrators to dismiss bullying with both-sides-do-it rhetoric than to take time they don’t have keeping the bullies in line. Part of that is our increased “social mobility”… kids, even in the upper-income groups, are shifted from neighborhood to neighborhood, between two or several sets of parents & stepparents & caregivers, and teachers are busy filling out paperwork mandatory for this year’s hot Race-to-No-Child-Left-Alone theory. It’s easier for the vulnerable kids to fall into the cracks in the system, and harder for the adults who should be responsible to spot & monitor troublemakers.
And when the worst happens, and tragedy becomes a media event, the perpetrators are “rewarded” with a ton of attention and “fame”. I personally suspect that one or more of the queen bees and jocks who pushed Phoebe Price into a very public death will end up on the local news within the next ten years, stunned to discover that their teenage “celebrity” doesn’t serve as a permanent get-out-of-jail-free pass when they’re arrested for date rape, spousal battery, workplace hazing, or child abuse. And then Nick Gillespie or Emily Bazelon will explain that hey, luzers gonna be luzers, no skin off the winners!
Corner Stone
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again):
Goodness gracious. You have absolutely no clue, do you?
Raven
I’ll take that as a no.
Corner Stone
@pdf: This is some truly disheartening commentary. I would never teach my child these things. It would break my heart to tell him I was leaving him for hours a day, every day, in an environment he had to live in fear or ignorance. And that I cared for him so little that I couldn’t even bother to engage other adults there.
“Hey son. Love you buddy. I know shit happens. Deal with it. See ya at 3:00!”
OzoneR
@pdf:
Well here’s the problem with that.
When you’re 4’11” and weigh 100 pounds and up against four guys twice your size, it really doesn’t matter how “tough’ you are.
Corner Stone
@slag: God. You’re such a Pollyanna.
Hey everybody! Look at slag! He’s a fucking Pollyanna!
Ha ha!!
Capri
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Dehydration is really a too little in/ too much is lost equation. Pneumonia doesn’t cause dehydration, per se, but if you feel too crappy to drink and are sweating a lot because you have a fever it can sneak up on someone, even if they are trying to take in enough liquids. Drinking something with a little electrolytes in them such as Gator-Aid or even fruit juice, replaces the stuff that’s lost through urine or sweat in addition to pure water. It might really help to drink that in addition to water. The caffeine free Diet Coke probably isn’t the best choice that way.
Hope he feels better soon.
Jewish Steel
Funny, I can’t think of any right wing tough guy I’d rather teach the true meaning of bullying to.
slag
@Corner Stone: I’m rubber and you’re glue.
Raven
@Jewish Steel: You may want to just keep steppin past this thread.
beergoggles
@Litlebritdifrnt: Try giving him/her pedialyte. Yeah they say it’s for kids but it works just as well on adults – mostly in cases where people have fever or diarrhea and don’t take in the necessary electrolytes along with water. Hydration is more than just drinking water (and it is possible to drink too much water). It’s keeping your internal electrolytes in a state where it keeps the balance with the fluid in the cardiovascular system, lymphatic system, tissue fluid and your urinary system.
butler
@pdf:
As opposed to kids “back in the day” who were driven to suicide by mean notes passed in the halls?
Your post is a gross oversimplification without much grounding in fact. Kids killed themselves because of bullying back in your day, and back in my day, and back before either of our days. It maybe wasn’t as bad, it maybe wasn’t as visible as it is now, but it did happen.
Obviously not very many went that far, but then again not very many today go that far. As the post says, over a quarter of kids today report being bullied, and yet (thankfully) only a tiny fraction actually have it so bad that they end their lives or attempt to. Of course, any number above 0 is unacceptable, so any efforts to reduce the number are good. Adolescence is stressful and confusing enough for kids without the added torment of bullying. The one suicide in my high school class was a guy who was not being bullied, but rather had (at least from all outward appearances) a pretty sweet, happy life with lots of friends and a loving family.
Also, its not just “mean emails”. The poor kid at Rutgers killed himself because his asshole roommate secretly taped him in an intimate moment and outed him to his family and the whole world as a result. Kids today can potentially be hounded 24/7 through social media, cell phones, etc. Sure they could disengage totally to avoid this harassment, but that’s not fucking fair to tell someone they can’t live a normal life because some other kid decides to bully them.
Libby
Nick Gillespie is an idiot. Galling that he gets such a big microphone.
slag
Back in my day we walked to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways. Nowadays kids ride their bikes. Fuckin’ pussies.
Peregrinus
@slag:
I am a teacher by trade, and this is the kind of thing that I’ve been trying to introduce into my classroom – just attended a seminar for it on Tuesday. My views on it are kind of twofold, especially as I teach in a parochial school.
On the one hand, I’ve researched PBIS before, and there’s a reason I’m trying it out myself. I think it works well when applied properly and consistently, and more than anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that I’ve got far more energy at the end of the day if I haven’t been yelling at kids and giving them detention. PBIS helps because it takes away the draining aspect from the interaction – if the kid won’t go along to get along, you haven’t lost energy on that problem.
On the other, I think the population I’m dealing with is harder to work with on these terms, because they know full well they can’t get away with real disruptive behavior. I teach in a pretty expensive school, and most of our kids are pretty entitled and pampered (though a consultant once implied it was our fault that they came to school without any breakfast). Most of the kids, sometimes, seem like they haven’t had enough negative interactions – like their parents have rewarded whatever little effort they make to not act like shitheads – but they know that if they were to do something really stupid, no amount of parent involvement would protect them from punishment. So their act-out issue is fundamentally different.
And on the third hand (substitute another limb if preferred), the rest of the school is firmly traditionalist here. Even if I apply positive support, and I don’t intend to give up doing so this time, it seems like the result is that you’re judged as being a “weak teacher” who’s not willing to punish harshly, whereas other teachers are. As a first-year teacher, and a young one (I got hired right out of undergrad and I teach eighth- and ninth-graders for the most part) I need all the help I can get on this. Most of the people with me have stepped up.
beergoggles
@pdf:
Possiblity 1: Some of us care more about our kids than your parents did?
Possibility 2: Since not all kids are evenly physically matched, we should give all kids a loaded gun when they enter school premises so that can Stand Their Ground like tough little men
Martin
Well, I don’t know all of what they’ve done, but both of my kids schools have remarkably little bullying. One thing that is clear is that eliminating bullying is their #1 priority, and both schools have reported higher test scores and higher attendance as bullying reports have dropped. Thats also brought more funding to the schools. The vice-principal at my sons school told us that knocking down the bullying problem helped almost every other issue.
And consider where the ‘standing up for yourself’ leads. I grew up in NY in the 70s. The bullying against me resulted in being shoved into traffic (thankfully unharmed) and one trip to the hospital. The next time I ran into the two bullies (each much larger and older than me) I was armed with my dads pipe wrench and beat the fuck out of both of them – put both in the hospital, one for quite a long time. There were the usual parent-parent conversations leading up to it but at the end of it, it came remarkably close to me being killed and me killing two other kids.
Standing up for yourself really only stays small in scope before the emotional trauma really sets in – and almost nobody advocates standing up then – and how exactly do you stand up to Facebook harassment and such? One you push a kid far enough that suicide enters the equation and suggest ‘stand up for yourself’ you’re going to get serious violence.
pdf
@butler: What’s “a normal life”? I swear, people act like there’s happiness to be had in childhood/adolescence, and if only the bullies would stop being mean, every single kid would skip to and from class, all smiling and learning and growing together. It’s fucking infuriating. Here’s something to remember: The bullies aren’t happy either. That’s why they lash out at other kids.
Life is pretty shitty most of the time, folks. Especially when you’re a kid, utterly powerless to affect your environment or circumstances in any meaningful way. Rules seem arbitrary (because most of them are), things that seem awesome are out of reach (physically and metaphorically), and there’s not a damn thing you can do to change any of it. What the hell are people trying to accomplish by trying to make kids’ lives pain-free? Even if you turn your kid’s life into a fucking paradise of safety and emotional support and nurturing opportunities for intellectual and social stimulation, he’s eventually gonna walk out your front door into an adult world that doesn’t give a flying fuck about his feelings. The sooner kids learn about the arbitrary-unto-malicious horrors that await him as a member of adult late capitalist society, the better. I’m not pro-bullying, but I am pro-conflict-as-life-lesson.
Corner Stone
@slag: And what’s worse is my kid is a real wuss. I walk him into the school lobby every morning when I’m home.
He’s gonna be a real Pollyanna. When he realizes what that means.
Jewish Steel
@Raven: You eyeballin’ me, mister?
Ha! I kid. Cheerio!
Raven
@Jewish Steel: Nah, this thread is just a fucking bummer.
slag
@Peregrinus:
This problem does not surprise me at all. I know I was a real skeptic when I first heard about this stuff (and the skepticism inspired the research). For me, it’s the data that did the convincing. Maybe throw some science at the problem? These people are supposed to be educators. They’re supposed to believe in that shit.
Anonymous
@pdf:
Kids are killing themselves. We are not trying to make their lives pain-free. We are trying to stop them from killing themselves.
Paula68154
What kind of society fails to protect its children?
Fonzie believes in social Darwinism. I don’t read him and I don’t listen to him. He has no solutions. His glibertarian views are flawed, boring, and irrelevant. He reminds me of a teenager who refuses to mature.
Ignore him. Ignore him. Ignore him. Maybe if enough do, he’ll go away.
Raven
@Paula68154: Every society so far.
slag
@Corner Stone: You’re such a bad parent. You should be smacking him around yourself just to toughen him up some. How else is he gonna learn?
Shari
@pdf:
I’m sitting here thinking how glad I am that you don’t have children.
Spaghetti Lee
@pdf:
I swear, people act like there’s happiness to be had in childhood/adolescence, and if only the bullies would stop being mean, every single kid would skip to and from class, all smiling and learning and growing together.
Wow, that’s funny, because I haven’t noticed anyone fucking acting like that.
Corner Stone
@pdf: There’s about a fuckton to unpack here.
For whatever it’s worth, I hope your writing career is successful, so at least something comes from all that pain.
I’m never going to teach my child the lessons you think have value.
LongHairedWeirdo
@pdf:
There’s a huge, *huge*, difference between trying to make kids’ lives pain free, and taking a stand against bullying. We don’t expect kids to know calculus coming into school, and we don’t expect them to figure it out on their own – we teach it, when they’re ready.
But when it comes to learning to live in a healthy society where people should be free from arbitrary injury and assault, we do exactly that, and call it part of growing up.
There *will* be conflict. There will be odd kids out, who won’t be popular, and won’t be included. There will be teasing and cliquish behavior. There will be plenty of good learning opportunities, plenty of good chances to learn that life is really fucking shitty, even if schools teach kids that bullying behavior is unacceptable.
(That said, I will grant that some parents, and some communities, *do* try to sugarcoat life too much, and one can go too far in trying to protect children. If a kid can’t get teased, ever, yeah, that’s bad. If a teacher notices that this one kid gets teased all the time, that’s when some kind of intervention should take place. I’ll even grant that *sometimes* that intervention should be with the victim of the teasing – helping the kid to learn to play with peers, to shrug off mild teasing, etc.. But “Life is a shit sandwich, so it’s okay if we let kids crap on each other” is a really bad and dangerous attitude. )
Corner Stone
@slag: Well, I smack him around during the Texans’ football games. Whenever they have to attempt a FG instead of scoring a touchdown he learns that life is hard, no one can save him, and Daddy’s a mean drunk who really loves him but it’s all arbitrary.
You don’t wanna know what happens when there’s a turnover.
slag
@Corner Stone: Daddy? Is that you?
butler
@pdf:
Are you serious? What’s “normal”? “Normal” in this context means you can go to school and walk down the street and have a facebook page if you like and not have to withdraw and hid because you are being preyed on by other asshole kids. I didn’t think what I said was so hard to follow, but now you’re just deflecting and spinning because we didn’t swallow your bullshit “kids today” theory.
Did I (or anyone) ever say that life isn’t full of pain? That life would be just grand if we got rid of bullying? Did I ever say that the bullies aren’t in pain themselves, that they aren’t often sick, pained, abused souls themselves lashing out at in desperation and rage? What the fuck comment thread were your reading? Kids are dying. Is it such a bad thing to think “hey, maybe we should try to stop kids from dying?”
Peregrinus
@slag:
I’m the other way around – the research came to inspire the skepticism, when I realized this problem. It came as a bit of a culture clash, since, as I told them, my dad’s public school kids wouldn’t have dared get away with half the crap they throw at me on a good day. Even controlling for differences between my background (native-born Puerto Rican) and teaching in the USA, though, there’s clearly something more there.
The main problem is that, as a first-year, I don’t really have much pull. I didn’t study education, and as much as my fellow educators will claim that all those degrees taught them was to never spend money on an education degree again, I think they would suddenly become very worthy endeavors if I were to bring this up. That’s not an excuse, but when I don’t even have a set curriculum plan to follow, I need to focus on that first. That keeps me employed so I can do the other stuff.
I think the middle school is slowly coming around to this, though they’re strong on both ends – the new Dean is very much a positive-reinforcement type, but he’s also usually tougher than I am with consequences. As a “greater good” type deal, I admire that; but when I have to contend with the same behavior every day in the classroom, it tends to annoy me.
OzoneR
@pdf: All I have to say is, as someone who was a victim of intense and long-term bullying, my adult life, however miserable I am as a pawn of capitalist society that cares not for me, is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better than my childhood.
mclaren
America is a sick twisted society that adore pain and suffering and despises joy and happiness.
To people like this asshole, bullying is a good thing. Thugs like this guy love bullying. He was undoubtedly a bully in junior high and high school, eagerly beating up the studious kids, the kids who wore glasses and who went on to get high SAT scores and enter Harvard and Caltech.
America is also a deeply anti-intellectual country that hates and despises anyone who seems smarter or more imaginative than the football jocks or the prom queens. Nothing makes an American’s heart leap up like watching a smart kid with glasses get his teeth smashed out on a toilet bowl until blood sprays across the floor and broken teeth swirl in the gurgling red toilet water.
Narcissus
@pdf: I don’t know about you dude, but my childhood was pretty idyllic. Hell yeah it was pretty happy. But then I was only bullied once or twice.
Corner Stone
@slag:
I never loved you boy. Your older brother was always my greatest hope to carry on the family.
Now git! GIT!!
Anya
@pdf: :-&
mclaren
@butler:
I’ll describe three incidents I personally witnessed in junior high school and elementary school. I wasn’t the victim: these were events I watched happening to other people. You tell me if this is “normal life.”
[1] A bully who had been harassing a small kid came up behind the small kid as the kid bent over a metal drinking fountain to get a sip of water. The bully slammed the small kid in the back of the head so hard that the kid’s mouth hurtled down onto the drinking fountain and his front teeth were smashed out, spraying blood all over the water and the drinking fountain. The kid fell to the ground screaming and gushing blood from his ruined mouth and broken nose while the bully stood behind him laughing uproariously.
The bully was never even suspended from school. The small kid had to have extensive orthodontic surgery. He disappeared from school because of the surgery. I never saw him again. The bully and his buddied yukked it up when they told that story for years, boasting about it to everyone who would listen.
[2] On a third grade playground I came across four kids holding down a smaller kid while a bully heat his head with a rock. The smaller kid was screaming hysterically. Meanwhile, a teacher walked past and ignored the atrocity. I waded in and kicked the kids who were holding the victim down, kicking ’em in the face until they let him go. I was the only person who did anything. The teachers completely ignored the situation, except to savagely criticize the smaller kid for showing up back in class with a ripped shirt.
[3] In fourth grade I came across two kids holding a smaller kid against a fence while another bully beat him up, movie style, whaling away with both fists. Nobody gave a shit, none of the teachers walking past even bothered to look. But when I picked up a rock and whacked the bully on the head to stop him from beating up the helpless victim, why, then the teachers became hysterical. Naturally, the bullies were once again never punished.
You tell me how people are supposed to learn in those conditions. Go ahead. Explain it to me.
slag
@Peregrinus: That’s interesting. I’ve been mildly experimenting with some of this stuff while tutoring a very different population of kids from yours–the kinds of kids Newt Gingrich wants to turn into janitors. And the results have been absolutely phenomenal so far.
__
After spending 6 hours in school, they’re now mobbing us wanting extra work. Seriously. We’ve been practically beating them off with a stick the last few weeks. And their interactions with each other and with us have improved significantly. I don’t know how long this phase will last, but even if it ends tomorrow, I’ve now got a few more tools in the box for inciting it again.
__
For me, it really is all about the control. I’m a control freak. And negative attention really doesn’t provide the same level of control as positive attention does, in my experience. Beyond which, as Martin alludes to above, the problems negative attention can lead to are also far more damaging.
slag
@Corner Stone: I’ve always suspected as much. It’s like you don’t even know me!
Jeffro
Wow. Just wow.
Reading through the comments, I’m appalled. Commenters, while I sympathize, your (anecdotal) experience is not data. The vast majority of school kids at any level go through their days and years without any bullying experiences at all. Kids are going to be kids and bump heads and say stupid/teasing things, sure – I know that’s hard to believe but it’s true. But it ain’t bullying, it’s called being a kid/pre-teen/teen. Bullying: It’s a very exciting 24/7 media story that’s started and is now, I’m sure, going to be a recurrent theme, but it’s just not reality.
Peregrinus
@slag:
I’ve heard similar things from teachers who work in things like juvenile justice centers or in heavily disadvantaged schools – my thinking is that while there are very similar psychological bases, the way they’re expressed is very different due to societal pressure being exerted in different directions.
Put simply – the kids you’re tutoring, for the most part, are probably getting way too much negative attention elsewhere and so positive attention is a change that will get them to start seeing the good in themselves. The kids I’m teaching, for the most part, are getting way too much positive attention. Yes, every one of them matters, every one of them is special, and I measure my success by all of theirs, not just by how many got As at the end of the year. But if anything they’re seeing too much good in themselves.
The fun part is how some of the worst offenders in terms of messing around (never anything major) are kids whose parents have experience in public school systems. They’ve internalized that as long as they’re not as bad as “the public school kids,” they’re perfectly fine doing whatever they want.
mclaren
Incidentally, this study suggests that people who are less intelligent than the general population drift into conservative belief systems because the conservative beliefs make stupid people feel safer and more comfortable. And who are the bullies in school? The dumb jocks frustrated by their inability to get decent grades and enraged and inflamed by the smarter and more academically successful kids.
No surprise, therefore, that Americans adore bullies and indulge in rampant bully-worship. America remains a hotbed of anti-intellectual no-neck thuggery, and ever since the first American colonists raped and murdered their way across the continent, heaping up mountains of native American indian corpses, bullying has been one of the favorite pastimes of your typical Americano.
clayton
@Corner Stone: Yes, and it continues to this blog. Do you really think there are either 1) enough new readers or 2) enough idiots to fail to remember how you bullied FP AL to let you comment.
If that is not an example of bullying, I don’t know what is.
But you still get to bully . . . errr comment and call names and be a bigot.
That you have a child in 1st grade is a matter of speculation, just like everything else you say.
You could be jwest for all I know.
eldorado
i had a lot of difficulty with bullying as well, but i want to relate an absolutely true and depressing story. my 9th grade year, i took a couple of advanced classes that had me walking over to the (10-12th grade) high school. and the entrance i went in, that was where some guys hung out, smoking, and one of them made it his personal quest to bully me each day i had class there. that was really shitty and my life was pretty horrible that year etc etc.
and a couple of years after i got out of high school, and away at the university, i found out he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
i’m still not sure what to feel about that.
rb
@Jeffro: The vast majority of school kids at any level go through their days and years without any bullying experiences at all.
I appreciate your call for perspective, but this comment proves you have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. You have the nerve to invoke ‘data’ when you toss around bullshit like this? Physician, heal thyself.
mclaren
@clayton:
Let me get this straight: you’re unable to discern the difference, Clayton, between someone typing something you don’t like on an online forum, and a kid beating another kid’s head with a rock?
That disqualifies you from saying anything further on the subject of bullying, shit-for-brains. Go away. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Corner Stone
@clayton: Mona knows who I am. And she always asks me why you never stood up for her, or helped her out when she was getting bullied.
You don’t remember playing on those 1000+ comment threads on UT, do you? Who were you there? And why didn’t you help or protect Mona in the way she should’ve been helped?
Don’t come here and try and be all high and mighty after you played all over those UT threads and never did anything for Mona. Greenwald didn’t care about politics until 2005 but Mona did.
And she always asks me why you never helped her.
You should be fucking ashamed at your commentary and behavior on those UT threads. Mona is ashamed for you.
slag
@Peregrinus: Here’s the thing though: I still don’t see how negative attention solves your problem. Even if all that is true (and I’ve thought as much myself), how far down the well can you go before you hit bottom? The kids you’re working with may be future Nick Gillespies, for sure, but is there any amount of punishment you have the authority to dole out that will fundamentally alter that behavior?
Corner Stone
@Jeffro:
So..ummm…wow.
slag
@rb: Appalling isn’t it?
mclaren
@rb:
Jefro’s claim is 100% pure provably false horseshit. Video studies have demonstrated conclusively that teachers literally do not see bullying happening right in front of them.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, kids are diabolically clever. I have witnessed on many occasions several of a bullies helpers and followers creating a distraction to get teachers’ attention while the bully and several other toadies dragged victims behind a school building and beat the shit of him.
Second, teachers are simply not observant. Teaching is a tough job requiring huge amounts of time and attention, and by the middle of the schoolday, in my experience, most teachers were burned out and focused on nothing more than getting through the lessons for that day. They had no energy left to patrol misbehaving children during recess.
Third, teachers can’t be everywhere. When you’ve got hundreds of kids running around all over a playground, there will at any given moment in time be at least 3 or 4 different incidents requiring the teacher’s attention — one kid falls down and scrapes his knee and the teacher has to take the kid to the nurse; another kid is monopolizing the swing set or cheating at four-square and the teacher has to break up the fight between the kids; another group of girls are teasing the ugly girl and the teacher has to rush over and stop her hair from being pulled. Then there’s the four kids who are taking advantage of all that chaos to hold some runty kid down and rub mud into his braces and kick him in the head.
Spaghetti Lee
@mclaren:
You know, it’s like, even when you have a good point you manage to ruin it for yourself.
Speaking for my own experience (which doesn’t mean much, but no less than anyone else’s) the “jocks” and the “nerds” to the extent that those were two impermeable groups, were on pretty good terms. We didn’t invite each other over or party together, but there wasn’t any real hatred. The jocks didn’t live to punish us. We weren’t constantly seething with resentment at them, because we had our own groups and other stuff to do. Maybe things are just overall changing.
mclaren
@Corner Stone:
There stands the bully-worshiper, ladies and gentlemen. A kid beating another kid’s head in with a rock while four toadies hold the victim down is just “kids are going to be kids.”
Marvelous. Tell us more about yourself, Jefro, you pathetic excuse for a human being. Show us your craven moral bankruptcy, your lack of conscience, your socipathic indifference to suffering.
C’mon, Jefro, admit it…you really love watching and hearing about kids tormenting and brutalizing other kids, don’t you?
Let me guess, Jefro: you’re the guy who sits in the front row of the movie theater at HUNGER GAMES and jacks off furiously every time one of the kids kills another kid onscreen. When one of the kids in that movie dies, you’re the creep moaning so loud that the rest of the moviegoers have to shout “Keep it down in front!”
Chris
@mclaren:
I increasingly think you’re right, bro.
mclaren
@Spaghetti Lee:
Your personal anecdotes don’t constitute data. I cited a study clearly showing that less intelligent people drift toward conservative beliefs.
Moreover, your personal anecdote is contradicted by the available evidence:
Source: Teacher and student perceptions of bullying and victimization in a middle school by Dranoff, Robert, Ed.D., DOWLING COLLEGE, 2006, 202 pages.
Please provide us with some doctoral theses showing that bullies are not primarily athletes. I’ve provided scholarly evidence showing that my claim is correct: you’ve provided nothing but some vague “just so” stories.
Spaghetti Lee
@mclaren:
All I’m saying is that it’s not true for everybody. And I already know that anecdotes aren’t evidence, which is why I said as much in my first post. Just something I thought I’d like to point out. Some of my best friends are jocks, after all.
Peregrinus
@slag:
I agree with that, which is why I’m trying to implement more positive measures in the first place – especially because part of that means that I’m trying to model behavior for them, and when you’re shouting yourself hoarse at them, you can’t expect them to be quiet and respectful. A lot of it isn’t particularly difficult to remember – things like remembering to give them clean slates each day, using “I” statements, the practical stuff that you do to reflect what you’re already feeling. What I needed, and what that seminar gave me, was a lot of other ways to channel the anger into a positive interaction, or to redirect it. What is tough is remembering that they’re probably not going to see what you’re doing until much later.
I think the reason I’m annoyed is partly the remaining cultural shock – again, where I come from, the behavior I expect from them is just what you do as a student – and partly because I fucked up at the beginning of the year, let them have way too much free rein, and so I’ve had to slowly crack down on them. I don’t have problems giving positive reinforcement to kids, but I think I have problems recognizing when a kid has actually improved. It might just be a practice thing, though.
LesGS
I’ve actually never been quizzed by fellow liberals about why my spouse and I decided to home-school our daughters, lo, these many years ago. (They’re both in college now.)
But yeah, the torment we both endured from our fellow students in junior high and early high school, with no protection provided by our teachers, was one – just one of MANY – reasons we taught them at home.
We had no idea how this little family experiment would turn out. But it was very important to us that our kids NOT be “socialized” into conforming to the dominant junior/senior-high paradigm of what a valuable human being is.
We know we’re lucky, actually, not having to overcome any race or financial class issues to be able to afford this route, though we’re just squeaking by now. We have tried to do a little payback to our community by speaking out against bullying in programs organized by our UU church. We are, even here locally in south Southern California, still trying to push back. San Diego is gorgeous, but it’s no liberal enclave.
mclaren
@Spaghetti Lee:
And Josef Stalin was kind to children and little puppies. So he couldn’t have been a bad man, could he?
So much logical reasoning fail, compressed into so few words… I bow to the master of garbled reasoning and scrambled logic.
slag
@Peregrinus:
I hear this. I wonder if there’s a way to track it on a daily basis. Using hash marks or something.
Spaghetti Lee
@mclaren:
Well, you know, using the ‘some of my best friends’ construction is mostly humorous at this point. You, on the other hand, just unironically compared all high school athletes to Josef Stalin, so maybe I should tamp down the sarcasm when talking with you.
Peregrinus
@LesGS:
I would’ve probably quizzed you, but not for any of the usual reasons. Mostly because the one kid I knew who was homeschooled, a suitemate of mine sophomore year, did homeschooling no favors in terms of public relations – hardcore, sometimes-thoughtful-but-generally-incurious libertarian, and tended to be a pretty petulant kid in front of other people. Also incapable of peeing in the toilet bowl or of washing his hair more than once a week.
That’s neither here nor there, though – as an educator, I’m glad your experiment worked.
Peregrinus
@slag:
I used to do this thing where I gave them three strikes (participation points) a day. If they were fine during class, they got three points. If I had to call them (and only them) out once, they lost one point. If I had to call them out again, they lost two points and I called home. A third time meant a trip to the office, a call home, and loss of all three points. I could also dock more than one point at a time if something extreme happened – say, a slur.
The problem was that I did this at the same time as I was putting curriculum together, so I often didn’t have time to do the parent-contact portion and they quickly learned that part. However, even before they learned that, they knew that they could lose one point without much further consequence, and they used that to their advantage. (I found this out from a parent, whose kid had been observing this in class.) I’m still considering it for next year as I’ll be much more on top of things then.
Another thing I’m still getting used to is the fact that there are parents out there who trust their kids. I valued my honesty above almost anything else since I was a kid, but my dad was a teacher, and he knew full well that kids would sell their parents bullshit when they got punished. Therefore, whenever I told my dad what I’d done at school, he assumed I was probably sugarcoating my part in it. (Most times, he was right. The few he wasn’t, I still remember.) Now that I’m on the other side of that interaction, sometimes it’s really, really hard not to grab a parent by the shoulders and scream “YOUR CHILD IS LYING TO YOUR FACE.”
butler
@Jeffro:
Good thing we have, you know, actual fucking data as quoted in the post above. And yes, according to the data, the majority of kids are not bullied. Only between 28-32%.
So I guess that settles it, nothing to see here. Because the (reported) percentage is only between a quarter and a third of kids, this isn’t actually a problem at all. We should apply this logic to all of our supposed “problems”. Most people don’t get breast cancer, therefore we shouldn’t worry about that. Most people have never been carjacked or shot at or punched in the face, therefore these things aren’t really problems and we don’t need to address them. This is sure gonna free up a lot of time.
Some Guy
This thread has led me think of Corner Stone as a decent human being. Because, even though I disagree with him about pretty much everything, at least he ain’t one of these “bullying doesn’t exist/matter” assholes.
mclaren
@Spaghetti Lee:
The main difference twixt Josef Stalin and most high school athletes is that Stalin dreamed bigger.
If you think that sounds extreme, buckaroo, take a look at the rape and violence statistics for college athletes. They’re shocking. For example, peruse the article “Impunity for college athletes who rape.”
The child is the father of the man.
butler
@mclaren: Pretty sure you wanted to respond to pdf.
Scamp Dog
He may have a point there. It’s not really a crisis, it’s just the same level of crap that’s always been happening. Which means it’s an issue that needs addressing, and as somebody who had to endure a fair amount of it from 3rd to 8th grades, I’m glad to see that it’s finally getting some attention.
Non-Existent Patricia
It seems to me that other kids tend to look the other way when bullying is occurring lest they become victims as well. As the parent of two boys I struggle with trying to teach my sons to intervene when they see bullying happening. I think that teachers (especially in this economic /political climate) are overwhelmed and that the parents of kids who are neither bullies nor victims could do a lot to change the atmosphere in their schools.
mclaren
@Some Guy:
Bravo. Spoken like a mensch. The ability to disagree with someone without demonizing hi/r is a skill that American society appears to have lost in the early 21st century.
Petorado
Bullying can be a hell of a lot worse than any of us experienced in school. Camera phones, photoshopped images, and social media have all contributed to an even deeper level of hell for kids today than we saw at the end of a fist. Home used to be a refuge from a day’s bullying, but with social media it is no longer a safe haven.
Say what you will about bullied kids and their need to develop a thicker skin. By not addressing the bullying problem, we also nurture ever more generations of bullies with all their effed-up problems and tacitly let them know their behavior is acceptable. Bullying isn’t just a problem for victims, but for the rest of society that has to deal with the unleashing of some really screwed-up behaviors that all of us will have to deal with as well when we eventually certify these young bullies as educated adults.
My opinion is that Gillespie fears that all this anti-bullying behavior will decimate the future ranks of College Republicans and their special brand of dickishness that feeds their party’s ranks with future leaders.
Non-Existent Patricia
@Chris: America adores winners. And bullies are winning.
ETA: or WINNING, if you’re the Charlie Sheen type.
Jim T
Yes, bullying is a problem.
The deeply neoliberal idea that a movement on the rate of something throughout a population represents the desirable outcome, in this case that since statistically bullying is “down” we need no longer concern ourselves with it, is flawed logically and ethically.
While recognizing its futility, we should strive for ending bullying – regardless of whether it is “up” or “down” throughout our nation.
All of that said, and much of it might be said better, this:
“It’s funny how these guys believe in the free market so much until it comes to the flash mobs actually getting called on ruining a kid’s life, but I guess that’s just culling the weak, right?”
Is one of the most incoherent single sentences I’ve ever seen on this site. It’s difficult to read, poorly parsed, self-contradictory, and fails to follow any sort of internal logic. What the heck are you even trying to say? Honestly.
Anne Laurie
@Jeffro:
Well, people commenting on a political blog, on a Saturday night no less, are probably self-selected to have been the sort of smart, mouthy, attentive kids who got bullied, or at least paid attention when other kids were getting bullied.
But you’re wrong about “most kids” not having “any bullying experiences at all”. The whole point to bullying is that it enforces specific cultural norms — even the kids who aren’t the bullies or the victims can’t help noticing why some kids are picked on, why other kids are abusers, and how the adults in charge deal with (or, too often, refuse to deal with) the bullies and their victims.
The current anti-bullying initiatives are a way of saying that “we” think there should be a better way of interacting with each other than force, coercion, and threats. The pushback comes from people — like, for instance, Nick Gillespie — who are invested in keeping force or the threat of force as a primary social motivator. Pretending that bullying is just a “kids will be kids” situation is the equivalent of not voting “because all political parties are corrupt and/or failures”. Even if you want to argue that you’re objectively correct, you’re talking to the wrong audience.
Anne Laurie
@clayton:
NO, this is just backwards. I complained that it was wrong to use “the banhammer” as a weapon to let some commentors bully others into silence. Like all bullies caught red-handed, some of the offenders fell back on the “But it’s only CS, and everybody hates that guy!” defense. It’s wrong to insist that CS be banned because you don’t like what he’s saying, or the way he’s saying it, just as it would be wrong to say that ABL should be banned because other people don’t like what she’s saying.
Which shows to go how pervasive the bullying mindset really is — we’ve internalized it so much, that even the bullies can perceive (or at least present) themselves as righteous victims!
Non-Existent Patricia
@Anne Laurie: Conservatism explained.
Chris
@Non-Existent Patricia:
And yet, they claim Christianity for a heritage. You know, the religion founded among those perpetual losers of history (the Hebrews) by a carpenter who hung out with foreigners, prostitutes and lepers.
Petorado
Leave it to Benen to add another layer of political complexity to the bullying issue. From this morning’s Maddowblog:
LesGS
@Peregrinus: Thanks, yes, for us it did work. Lots of people think our daughters are pretty cool. And looking at your later comments on this thread, about honesty, I never felt a need to lie to my parents either.
But that was sheer luck on my part in my high school days because I was such a nerd and goody two shoes. Later, in my early forties, it was another question altogether. And I didn’t lie. I just waited, and then waited a bit more until I could safely come out
I have had to been excruciatingly honest with my kids about certain issues. After which discussing paltry things like recreational sex and alcohol and drug use in college pale.
Non-Existent Patricia
@Chris: You mean I’m supposed to actually read the book?!!!?!!!
ABL
@Anne Laurie: interesting attempt to rewrite what happened.
Corner Stone
@Some Guy: Whoa. Really man? You haven’t seen any of my more passionate exhortations regarding the rule of law, or equal rights for all?
Or did you just not agree with those positions?
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
what about this movie “bully” bullying the other movie called bully, the soft core rachel miner(naked a lot!) and brad renfro joint about a murder in florida?
who will stand up for movies that marry skinemax, lifetime, and an afterschool special level of quality ripped from the headlines melodrama?
Non-Existent Patricia
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick: You, to name one.
Corner Stone
@ABL: That’s an amusing comment for you to pick as an entree into this discussion, and the comments throughout that thread more than prove the point that was made before you stepped in it.
Face it, you’ve been a bully here since day one you got the keys.
gwangung
@Corner Stone: Heh hah ha heh.
Corner Stone
@gwangung: I see you. I know what you’re trying to put on. But it ain’t being put on. Because I see you.
Applejinx
The fact that rightwingers have descended to psychosis and lefties to desperation is causing their kids to echo those states.
Extrapolate the dickishness of a basically secure 50s racist fuckwad and the bullying of their kid, to a 2012 racist fuckwad filled with terror and hatred by Rush Limbaugh, and the bullying of THEIR kid: makes you wonder if the next move is attempts to legitimize murdering people’s children for being gay or black or whatever.
SINCE we have attempts to legitimize murdering a kid for being black in a hoodie with Skittles- the self-justification of taking that position WILL filter through into the world of their kids, and we’re probably gonna see an actual movement of kids of wingnuts prepared to murder their victims and not seeing anything wrong with doing that (and coordinating it with each other on Facebook)
Time to be drawing lines in the sand, because societies go this way sometimes and it doesn’t lead anywhere good- it leads to the greatest societal horrors of history, and they don’t last and bring terrible shame on the societies that allow them. Draw the lines in the sand NOW, not later.
Sheik Yerbouti
We’re not going to stop bullying until we recognize for ourselves that it’s who we are. The United States isn’t the world’s policeman, as has been repeated endlessly for the past several decades; the truth is, the United States is the World’s Biggest Bully: Our Way or the Highway. We breed bullies, because WE are bullies. Awwww poor widdle babies scared of a few secret targeted assassinations, boo-hoo.
Batocchio
Just when you thought that Nick Gillespie couldn’t be any more of an asshole… In his intro example, and the rest of the piece, he minimizes the suicides the doc highlights. Glibertarianism is mostly just PR for plutocracy and selfishness. It supports bullying, as long as it’s in the private sector.
Seriously, has Gillespie ever written anything decent?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Batocchio:
I don’t think he minimizes it at all. His point is that there’s too much “bullying” that isn’t bullying. When you compare Aaron Cheese getting teased because of his name, you can’t really say it’s the same thing as, ya know, gay-bashing.
There’s teasing…And then there’s bullying. When I got my first pair of glasses, I got teased, got called “four-eyes”. At some point later in elementary school, Barry Manilow hit with “Mandy”. I bore the brunt of it when a few stand-ups-in-training sang the song as if it was about me by dropping the “M” (also, see: “Angie” by the Rolling Stones). Was that irksome? Certainly. Was it bullying? No fucking way.
But if you want to call that bullying, then you’ve got to admit that referring to Gillespie (whom I view as the blind squirrel with this piece) as “The Fonzie of Freedom”, or to McArdle as “McMegan” and her numbers as “McMath”, is also bullying. And that’s Fonzie’s point, extrapolated.
Knockabout
@Jim T:
That’s because Zandar is an incoherent hack who pulls long articles and then replies with word salad in order to make himself look smart. Trust me, you’re not the only one to notice how wretched his posts are. Cole keeps him around because he doesn’t want to admit his terrible mistake bringing him on. If there were any justice, this moron would be back on his sub-10k a month page view blogspot hellhole with no one the wiser that he existed.
Matt McIrvin
I have no trouble believing that rates of both bullying and teen suicide have been dropping for decades, because in the 1980s when I was a teenager, bullying was omnipresent and panic about the teen suicide epidemic was all over the newspapers.
What’s happened is that, after decades of considering it normal, we’ve finally decided that bullying is a gigantic problem. That’s progress, and apparently it bothers people.
Even back in the Eighties, during the weird wave of jokey teen sex farce movies about science nerds, I remember a cranky op-ed about how it was supposedly becoming hip to be a nerd and it was tragic that you weren’t allowed to beat up nerds any more. As a high-school student who could testify that you were definitely still allowed to beat up nerds, I found this both baffling and infuriating.
(I think the general pattern is that nerd-dom has always been a liability for teenagers, but an accepted and indeed rewarded lifestyle for upper-middle-class white adults, so upper-middle-class whites always have the impression that the nerd stigma mysteriously disappeared sometime after they were in high school.)
slag
@Peregrinus: In my rush to problem-solve on these issues, I forgot to make one hugely important comment: Thank you for your service!
__
Seriously. I don’t mean to sound patronizing about it, but it really pisses me off how thankless teachers’ jobs often are. Especially in relation to how important those jobs are. It’s wrong. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of a tutoring session saying, “I don’t know how real teachers do it!”. I appreciate the hard work you’re putting in every day to make your these kids’ experiences more enriching. It’s a big deal. So, thank you. You’re a scholar and a gentleperson.
TTT
I have to stop reading threads about bullying – it’s too much of a trigger for me, even after all these years.
As far as I’m concerned, all bullies should be gassed and cremated.
BruceFromOhio
@Peregrinus: Thank you so much for your efforts. Reading between the lines, it seems there is equal forces balancing between hope for your students and despair for the hierarchy to which you currently belong. The positive-to-negative ratio is a simple metric easily calibrated for your environment, though challenging to effect in a sustainable manner if you are going at it solo.
I can only encourage you to educate and improve yourself as you strive to educate and improve your students. My two public-school-educated offspring have experienced what a positive-feedback environment can provide in a sustainable manner: LEARNING. Both are A students, both excel in their studies, and both hold (and are held) out as examples for others to follow. The key to their success, and the success of their many and fortunate peers, are the teachers who set the higher expectations, provided the kids the opportunity to excel, and then held everyone to those higher expectations.
It is incredibly difficult and, many times, thankless sweat equity. But how can I illuminate the payoff in a student life lived well, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and experience, a critical eye and ear and mind that drives that thirst, and the splendid experiences that result? I can only speak from the entirely subjective viewpoint of a proud parent, forever grateful to a public school system willing to give space to these wonderful teachers, and to the wonderful teachers themselves willing to strive to give these kids a chance.
When it works, even modestly, the difference can be life-changing. There are so many forces in opposition (austerity, anti-union sentiment, parental indifference or hostility, and on and on) that it seems almost foolhardy to swim against the tides. I hope you find the strength and courage to make it work in a manner that suits you, and fulfills that space that drew you to teaching.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
ps I really like reading this space, I hope you do, too.
Peregrinus
@slag: @BruceFromOhio:
Thank you both for your kind words, but to be honest with you, I’m not the person you want to be thanking. I teach in an expensive, parochial school where 95% of the kids could succeed academically no matter where they were, just because they’re being pressured and raked over the coals to do well.
I don’t mean to be ostentatiously humble: it’s not like I intend to give up on my kids or be less good at my job just because they’re not the bottom of the socioeconomic status barrel. But my job is not nearly as thankless as the average public school teacher’s. And I’m myself a former private school kid – but every day I have more and more respect for anyone who ever steps into a classroom as an instructor.
Thank you, nonetheless, for being aware of what real teachers do go through. And thank you, Bruce, for the link.
@LesGS:
I intend to be fairly honest with my kids about everything. I was the kind of kid who scared the air conditioning repairman by giving him the anatomical explanation of how babies were made. At the age of four. (True story.)