First of all, there are situations that teachers can create without meaning to, that lay the foundation for bullying, or even if it's not explicit, hurt a child's self-esteem. For instance, when I was a kid, in gym class the teacher would pick team captains (usually the two best male athletes in the class) and then leave to them to choose their teammates. I was always picked last (unless by the some miracle there happened to be a morbidly obese kid in my class - then I was picked second to last). Obviously, being picked last every day can do nothing good for a child's self-esteem. Clearly those gym teachers were not considering the fact that child/adolescent athletics are supposed to help build up a child's image of themselves, not cripple it. Thankfully, I have heard that this kind of thing is no longer a common practice in schools. I assume it has been replaced with the teacher picking teams at random. But I imagine that had my gym teachers picked the teams (or let us pick out of hat or something), that whoever's team I ended up on would still have responded with obnoxious sighs, or comments along the lines of "Ew!", "Damn it!", etc.
So what is to be done in a case like this? I began to picture myself relegated to a team, and one of my oh-so-cool peers expressing his distaste for it.... If I were the teacher, I would have given us BOTH detention. But not just any detention - a special detention. I would have said to the bully - let's call him "Seth" - "Seth, thank you for comments. Going forward, for the rest of the year, whatever team you are on, Jaime will be on as well. In addition, you will both spend a half hour with me everyday after school for the next week, wherein Seth, you will help teach Jaime how to play [insert sport here] better, so she can be a more valuable teammate to you." In doing this, Seth is going to have to get to know Jaime, and actually be forced to help her. After this, unless Seth is a total sociopath, he will no longer be able to look Jaime in the eye and bully her - in getting to know her, he will no longer be able to objectify her, and once someone is a person, rather than object of amusement, bullying loses all its fun.
But what about Jaime? She didn't do anything wrong, right? Why does she have to have detention with someone she probably can't stand? Well, as a girl who was tortured by the students in her class growing up, on a constant basis (to the point of contemplating suicide), I can tell you that as an adult, I came to realize that even the bullied are not purely victims. A bully/bullied relationship is a two way street, and there are always two sides to the story. It is almost never simply because the other kids are "just jealous" - that's just what Mom's tell their children to make them feel better.
So what did I do to bring on this bullying? To bring on the contempt from my peers. Well, for one, I was desperate for them to like me, and this was as obvious as it was pathetic. At the same time, I also believed in a way that I was better than them. They were stupid jocks, and I was really smart. My attitude also displayed this - a sense of social inferiority, but a belief of inherent superiority. They were horrible to me, but I wasn't kind or respectful to them either. I remember in the 8th grade there was this one kid who was friends with all the guys who bullied me, but he rarely made a comment himself. One day, I got up from my desk to go up to the front of the class and his desk was blocking my way a little bit so I just pushed by it, moving his desk while I did so, and not even looking at him. "You can say 'excuse me'!" he chided. There he was, a soldier of the enemy, accusing ME of being rude. ...but he was right. Of course, I didn't get it then. It never occurred to me that perhaps if I had made an effort to be kind to these people, to feel compassion for them instead of defensively assuming myself to be far superior, perhaps things could have gone differently. My point in all this is that despite appearances, the bullied is usually unconsciously a co-conspirator in their situation, not purely the victim. And as such, they too can benefit from getting to know their peer, who they surely also objectify as "the enemy", "the stupid jock", etc.
This method can also obviously be used in situations outside of gym class as well. For instance, let's say a student is being bullied in Chemistry class. If the bullied child happens to be a good student and the bully not, the consequences could be that they have to tutor the bully until a certain test score is achieved. If they are both average, make them study together after school until a grade a certain grade is reached by both. Or make them work on a project together. Whatever it is, the idea is to simply to move them from seeing each other as objects to knowing each other as human beings. And if there are multiple bullies, just do this with the leader - and there is always a leader.
So that's my two cents - may it be in some way of service.
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| Me (9th or 10th grade) |
