Bullying

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.