What is bullying?
Growing up, I had a very wholesome childhood with my family.
My parents provided a very stable home for me and my brother. I was a very good
student, and sometimes I will be teased, and bullied because I always wanted to
do what the teachers asked. When my
classmates bullied me, I used to ignore them, and quite honestly I never cared
what they thought about me, I knew how to choose my friendships and my best
friends were at church. On the other hand, I was popular, school queen, and
valedictorian, so their words didn’t really affect my high self-esteem lol. The
peers that used to instigate me were bad students, who had problems with
teachers, wanted to copy my assignments, and had troubles at home. This experience taught me valuable lessons
very young, and I am glad it never affected me, and that I knew how to handle
it. My experience was nothing compared to by brother’s experience he was
bullied even by upper grade level students. On one occasion, I was playing
volleyball and I heard one person call my brother “non-living”. To my surprise,
it was one of my classmates, therefore I decided to stop the game and chased
him down, I told him to never again call my brother names. I didn’t think much
of that event at that time, until years
later my brother confessed he had been bullied a lot, and that he was
depressed, and that at some point he believed what the other kids were telling
him, he even cried telling the story as an adult. I was in shock! I had never
seen my brother cry, I couldn’t believe how affected he was by it. My brother said
that something that helped him overcome those hard times was going to the gym
with me, because he got buff and muscular, and the bullying stopped soon after.
As a teacher, I am concerned of how bad bullying is becoming
in public schools. Specially, with the shift of middle class families in
society. For that reason I don’t have an online forum for students, because I don’t
want them to use technology for that. In
the news, there are a lot of cases of cyber-bullying. That is a behavior that
has to stop. Parents don’t understand what bullying is because they only hear
their child’s version. As a teacher sometimes you can see how it goes back and
forth, and many things children say are either from TV, media, or what they see
at home. They are calling each other names, bringing each other down, instead
of lifting each other up, and getting out the best of each other.
