Nothing really prepares you for teaching. This is a multi-faceted remark that envokes more than just one person's philosophy or pedagogy. It was obvious I needed more fine tuning of my classroom management when I first began teaching more than 10 years ago. I also had to work on my delivery, as yelling was my preferred method of control. Now many years later and I do not recognize the teacher I have become. I barely recognize the students.
My first teaching assignment was at Broadleigh Elementary. It is an east side school here in Columbus, nestled between the airport, a ghetto, an affluent Jewish community and a trailer home for immigrants and their families. It was a unique school environment, one in which provided the training ground for my methods and attitudes to be tested. My biases had to be melted away one by one. There were no teaching manuals or skills sessions that could have prepared me for the barriers we all faced.
When most problems arose, I yelled. When students stole from one another, I yelled at them. When they misbehaved in the bathroom or in the halls, I chewed them out. When they got into fights at recess, I got into their faces. I'm sure the Lord was looking at me and thinking, "I wonder if Reynaldo understands the irony of the situation." Especially when it came to bullying.
My first experience with bullying was with a student from Mauritania. He knew no English and had no background in schooling. Back home in his country, when students went to school, he stayed in the village and played soccer or ran with the boys. He could scribble, bob his head up and down and used a variety of simple phrases to get his point across. Two boys in room decided he was a vulnerable target. They harassed him in the bathroom and teased him at recess. Once I finally got wind of what was going on, I handled the situation like I handled all the others--I yelled. I made sure the bully boys had an audience when I did so. It was a rant so epic that I had one of them in tears. Teaching a bully not to bully by being the biggest bully of them all. Now that takes some special training! In a strange twist of fate, one of the boys in question moved. I used it as a way to conveneintly assert my authority. "Oh, you know what happened to Sam? He was expelled for bullying. Don't let it happen to you." I even had a student who contradicted that claim, saw Sam at the mall or something. "Mr. C, he said he moved." "When you get expelled youre not supposed to talk about it with anyone." Case dismissed.
So now what do I do in these situations? Just like then, the word bullying and the actual act of bullying resides in that grey area that's hard to pinpoint or evaluate. Everyone thinks they are being bullied. I always thought bullying was a continual and habitual teasing and threatening of someone over a course of time. I never considered what the kids do today as bullying. When you're making fun of one another's mothers, or your sarcastic comment about someone's shoes is met with the same sarcastic comment, it's not bullying--at least not to me. LGBTQ advocates used the word "bullying" as a way to garner sympathy to the effect it was having on gay and lesbian teenagers who were committing suicide at an alarming rate. What were we doing or saying to these children that was causing them to seek suicide as a solution? Christians took some heat too, as if we were the reason why these particular subset of kids were killing themselves. Had we been using the Bible to scare kids into conformity? Were we saying all the right things but secretly our fear and ignorance was being displayed on social media platforms. These kids who would normally go home to their safe environment were now being harassed 24/7.
Every counselor earned their pay on anti-bullying campaigns, posters, assemblies and lunch groups. There were Bully Free Zones set up in schools nationwide. People were beginning to have the conversation, and much of it was met with excuses.
Kids just need to have thicker skin.
I was made fun of when I was a kid and I did alright.
These kids today are pansies. Pussies. Faggots. Whiners. Anti-American pinko commies.
But kids were still killing themselves. And it wasn't just the gay kids. It was kids who you never thought would have been the target--popular kids, athletes, "normal" kids. It wasn't just the overweight girls we picked on, or the junior high girl who was called a slut just because she had a cup size, or the geeky spaz, the nerd. You know I was raised on a culture of movies that made it seem like making fun of nerds, spazzes, geeks and fat girls was okay. Revenge of the Nerds. Porky's. Ferris Bueller. Sixteen Candles. They all had their moment when we laughed at Joan Cusack (she seemed like she was in all of them!) for wearing a back brace or head gear for braces. But these students of mine have not seen these movies. Those movies are foreign to them. So why is the teasing and bullying so prevalent now than ever before?
Last week I reached out on Facebook on behalf of a student who has been a target all her life. She's the type of girl I would have made fun of when I was a kid. Listening to her story, I sensed more than just the usual they-won't-leave-me-alone phrases. I sensed a girl who was really hurting.
Mr. C, how can in just ignore it when it happens everyday?
My mom says their just jealous, just tell them "jelly" and walk away, but it doesn't work.
What was I to say? All the books and manuals are silent when it comes to these conversations you're having with a 5th grade girl, holding her hand while she cries. There's no chapter for that, no appendix. A girl who understands that fighting back isn't the only answer and that sometimes there are ramifications for those actions. Tough people like to tell me, "Let them fight it out. One punch to the bully's face and it'll stop." They were not raised in an environment where kids film other kids getting beat up on the street corner. They weren't raised where parents are not monitoring what their kids are doing, or simply don't care enough to realize what's really happening.
I looked at a blog almost two years ago. It barely mentioned one of my group lessons on staying neutral during conflict. I helped the kids understand that when Hitler came into power during WWII, there were those that suffered tremendously, too long, until other countries stepped up. Some countries joined Germany, like Italy under Mussolini. Japan took advantage of the situation to usurp their dominance by bombing Pearl Harbor. Other countries were helpless, like Poland. Other smaller European countries were waiting for England and America to pick up the fight. But Switzerland was something different. They remained neutral, but historians have proven that Switzerland had an interesting role. They refused Jewish refugees and continued to hold bank accounts for Nazi's. In a sense, these actions and inactions allowed Germany to reign with an iron fist.
I know this is a simplistic view of a complicated situation. But the point was made. When your classmates are being made fun of, are you remaining neutral, are you joining in or are you fighting back? So many of today's kids laugh when someone is made fun of. When my girl walks up in line, I have seen pockets of them move away like she smells, or that her presence alone is something of a disease. At lunch, they act like sitting on her row is something akin to washing a leper's feet. And all the while, the Switzerland's of the class watch it and do nothing. They know it's wrong, but to say something, especially when some of the hecklers are friends, would mean they too would lose something.
This conversation opened up the floodgates. Many of my Switzerland's wrote me notes and objected to excluding them from the Bully Free Zone lunch table later that afternoon. How many times has your classmate been made fun and you sat there and did nothing? My bullies claimed to be made fun of themselves. One bully said she didn't want to be one any longer, cried at my desk. Other kids wrote me letters that they had been teased too, thought about suicide. My principal thinks my students haven't made adequate progress when it comes to their test scores, and I'm in a sea of depression, wondering how I can counsel them through this time.
This saga is not finished. After posting on Facebook, I have several options I can now bring to the table to help this young lady. There's martial arts courses, church groups, middle school options and peer groups. The fight isn't over but I feel like I have more to offer. Yelling at the bullies isn't working anymore, if it ever did. These are a new breed of kids, ones who don't have work the empathy of their predecessors. If I can change the heart of one student, and provide a path to salvation for another, I can sleep at night. No test scores will matter in the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment