Bullies

[downtown]

Wait, what? Even if one kid is really smacking another around, you're not allowed to intervene? What are you supposed to do, call the principle and wait around for one kid to stop beating up another?

Yup, or call a security guard. Physically breaking them leaves teachers open for legal liability, or puts their safety at risk.

And their action has been?

Their focus has been mainly on administrators to try and get them to take the problem more seriously, and allow teachers greater disciplinary range. They have also given teachers best practices and workshops to help them monitor their students better, document problems quicker, and build classroom environments where the students build a culture would be discouraged. It's hard to do, but there has been a greater classroom focus on it in PD than there was say, a decade ago.

 

[Lone Wolf]

It seems that many anti-bullying measures have the opposite effect. It's difficult even to classify it properly. Some sort of teasing can be indeed dealt with by helping the victim to acquire a thicker skin. It becomes more difficult when it gets psychical.

And there are many bullies as well. Careless "playful" bullies, bully-victims, genuine sociopaths.

 

[Skwink]

I definitely think schools should be considerably more lenient on self-defense in the case of bullying incidents.

I've never really had a problem with bullies. But I TOTALLY agree with this. Just the other day one of my peers who has a medical condition and is very overweight was being made fun of by another, and this has been going on for years now, and he just snapped and attacked the billie. But of course, the billie got off without any real punishment and the self defender got suspended. Everyone is supporting the kid, as he went through this for years, and finally took on one of his attacks.

 

[jtb1127]

I have never really seen bullies in my education career. I think the mass amount of anti-bully coverage has lead to a great reduction in teasing or other harmful activities. I have a friend from India and the way he puts it is that kids in the US are sweethearts in comparison to those of his homeland.

 

[REDY]

I have never met with physical bullying. The best solution here is imho punch to face to bully or intervention of adults.

Much worse is it with psychical bullying. From outside its very hard identify bullying and who is bully and who is victim. I am still suprised that I have never been main victim but rather that guy who defended weaker, while I am total introvert...I think its because I allways liked heroes rather than villains....

The main goal was isolate individual from rest of class, the usual conversation was something like "how its possible that you are befriend of....why have you invited her?" While I was only trying to act fair and havent shared same hobbies, for some bullied I became best friend and I still hadnt became bullied or isolated, I think that very important factor is that 1st class people (intellgient or beautiful) werent bullies, it would be worse if they would be.

I am not sure how prevent it. I also met with kid who was psychically down and had illussion that other make fun of him. So he told to class teacher and some people were punished for nothing. The intervention of teacher was definately making thing worse and kid was later put under psychiatrical care.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Their focus has been mainly on administrators to try and get them to take the problem more seriously, and allow teachers greater disciplinary range. They have also given teachers best practices and workshops to help them monitor their students better, document problems quicker, and build classroom environments where the students build a culture would be discouraged. It's hard to do, but there has been a greater classroom focus on it in PD than there was say, a decade ago.

So their focus has been to bring attention to the problem, because, of course as well all know, the teachers have never noticed it before. Watching rather than doing; that's a certain recipe for improvement. [/sarcasm]

 

[Tee Kay]

The old saying that words won't hurt me is utterly false. WORDS DO HURT.

Ditto.