"We Won't Do That Here", Bullies pt. 2

On the first day of school with a new principal, all of us who work in the school (I was a social worker/counselor) are anxious to hear about the new boss and his/her philosophy. This usually includes  how they became interested in teaching, where they have taught before, how honored they are to be working here at Alfred E. Neuman School, and so forth. Helene was a bit different. Young, with a June Cleaver outfit and pearls, she told us that she had become pregnant early and was left to fend for herself and her child. During those difficult years she finished high school and went on to college, raising her son on a combination of ADFC (welfare) and foodstamps. Along the way she encountered some of the contempt and disdain many people have for "welfare moms", including from teachers at her child's school. In a very sweet but clear voice she let us know "We won't do that here."

We were a nice group of people, but with that one sentence, Helene let us know she was going to be working on the culture of our school. The following strategies are some that we used, at that school and at others I worked at, and strategies that have been used to combat bullies in schools in some areas of the US. These measures do not eliminate bullying, they are not magic bullets, but especially for kids 7 through 12, they have been studied (Department of Justice) to be effective.

The first part of the process has to start with the adults and raising awareness of what bullying is and what it is not. There is some controversy about whether bullying has increased or not in the years since I went to school. Part of that is due to the fact that statistics on bullying only recently have begun to be kept; the other part is that there are differing ways of describing bullying. Most definitions of bullying include a power differential. So I would not call two 10-year-olds fighting bullying each other if they are the same size and ability. I would call it bullying if a large 10-year-old is threatening smaller kids who are not likely to fight back. Or popular girls making fun of unpopular girls who aren't as well-dressed. The whole area is one for discussion, but consensus can be reached.

As a side note, a friend wonders whether the shooting of Trayvon Martin points to a change in our society's tolerance for violence. His killer may be able to be shown to have acted legally and that, in itself, is what has people upset because it could signal a possibly awful cultural shift towards the use of force. 

But I don't want to get side-tracked. The point is that to stop bullying, the adult culture needs to be one of cooperation and mutual respect. The adults need to treat each other decently and model non-coercive  behavior to the students. Then they need to come together and convey to the kids that they will work together to make school a safe place.

Think of a group of students witnessing a bully mocking a child who has just dropped all her papers. Or who has been shoved into a locker. You have the bully, you have the kid being bullied, and you have the onlookers. One study found that 85% of a school's population generally does not bully and generally does not feel bullied although they are aware of it.

So they are the onlookers, the 85%. They do one of 3 things. They laugh, so the bully thinks he's cool. They do nothing which enables the bully to continue. Or they walk away, feeling sorry for the victim but also powerless. They usually don't tell an adult because kids don't want to be thought of as "rats" or "snitches" and they have been told by their teachers not to be "tattletales". 

What we did at one of my schools was to have a school wide meeting and a series of smaller classroom meetings in which we defined bullying behavior, told the kids we were going to work with them to stop it, and that it would no longer be cool to make fun of kids or physically threaten them at our school. That telling on a bully was not "ratting" or "tattling". Anti-bullying programs give the 85% tools to use: Get an adult. Don't laugh at what a bully is doing. Befriend bullied kids. Say out loud "That's not cool." Say out loud "We don't do that here". 

The adults work to listen to what kids told them, to hold kids accountable for their behavior, to pull parents in, to raise awareness of cyber-bullying, and to increase supervision in places like the halls and bathrooms.

And I would love to say things changed overnight, but of course they did not. But at my schools (kids up to 12 years old) and at a number of schools using similar strategies and studied through a DoJ grant, kids reported feeling safer, and there were fewer reported incidents of bullying and related aggressive behaviors. 

In my head I have a picture of cute little Marissa P. saying in a loud voice to a somewhat aggressive and larger child "You must be new. We don't do that at our school." He stopped dead in his tracks and walked away.

Anti-bullying programs (described here with minimum detail) do not and should not turn kids into the kid police or put them in danger. They should teach kids how to stay out of harm's way. They should do is make it "uncool" to bully someone, because most bullies are performing for an audience. What they also should do is to raise kids' awareness of loner kids or kids who might be likely to be targets. And teach them pro-social skills. 

As I said, this is, in some ways, a very basic description of a complex program that can take a year or two to put into place. I almost want to say something like "Don't try this at home." You have to have school-wide buy-in. But the successes I saw has me hopeful that we can change things for kids, and, somewhere along the line, change things for society as a whole.

Afraid to Go to School: Bullies, part 1

A post or two ago, I made a statement that my high school may have been free of bullying because it was an all-girl school. I was wrong. Flat out. One of my readers pointed this out to me and I thank him because it led me back to consider my own experiences.  I was a school social worker with a Master's Degree who, over the years, worked in more than 15 schools, kindergarten through high school. I was also a student in one school where I experienced bullying and one where I did not. It led me to challenge what I experienced with research about bullying and anti-bullying efforts that are in place in some schools in the US. 

I want to do a post about what I believe to be true about bullying and how we can work to stop it. If it gets too long, I will split it up. I am doing this because I am reminded often how bullying can ruin a child's educational experience and, in fact, a significant part of childhood. For much of the last century, it was thought that not much could be done about bullying. It was poorly understood and measures taken against bullies were ineffective and, sometimes, counter-productive. Kids who "told" on a bully were bullied even more and considered snitches by classmates. Kids who didn't tell suffered silently or avoided school. Some kids dropped out, considered or committed suicide. Often nothing effective was done. Often that is still the case.

Bullying is a phenomenon of power differential, physical aggression and verbal humiliation. In a school system, the culture which encourages or discourages bullying starts with the adults; with those in power. Schools can have a culture of bullying that may start in the administrative offices or the principal's or headmaster's office or in the faculty lounge. If you look at how the adults in a school treat each other, if you look at what they feel is acceptable behavior, you will get a good idea how much bullying goes on by the students. There can be all sorts of reactions to a given incident, such as a teacher losing her lesson plans, and different cultures might define "kind" or "unkind" behavior differently. The more the adult culture values kind interpersonal behavior, the more likely it is that the kid culture can be led in that direction.

It's really not very hard; nasty mean-spirited adults aren't going to work too hard to prevent bullying. They might even enjoy it. I remember being in 7th grade art class when a kid knocked over a paint tray, wrecking his picture. Two of the girls at my table laughed at him; to my dismay the teacher was laughing with them. I didn't know what to do, so I didn't do anything. I've seen a fair amount of that as an adult working in schools and it is pretty typical. The bully laughs, the adult ignores the child's distress, and the onlookers just stand there.

A lot has been said about the self-esteem of bullies; self-esteem is a vague word and I'm going to try not to use it too much. But many bullies (not all) have relatively high (if not healthy) self-esteem. They think the world of themselves and have contempt for others. Often they are popular, well-off, physically attractive, and gifted in one way or another. They are often members of high status groups in the school. When they want to be, they can be charming as all get out. It depends on who they are dealing with and what they want.

Bullies can charm some teachers in the school setting. These teachers are the ones who say things like "He's not such a bad kid; I rather like him." Or, "She's just a kid with a quirky sense of humor. People take her too seriously." Sometimes one teacher will take a bully under his/her wing. Sometimes she feels she can reach the child where nobody else can and it might be a feather in her cap. If she (or he) is able to form a relationship with the child that causes the kid to change his behavior it is a laudable thing. More often, if the teacher is naive or unaware, she (or he) will be played by the savvy bully, and the victimizing behavior is reinforced. Think of the star athlete protected by the football coach.

Other adults feel helpless and bullied themselves, particularly smaller adults in secondary schools. If the adults feel helpless in the face of the bully, they will be unable to effectively intervene. As complaints against the bully mount, the victims start to be perceived as weak and whiney, as "setting themselves up" for being picked on. That is when bullied kids start to hear the following unhelpful pieces of advice: "Ignore them and they'll stop." "Learn how to stick up for yourself." "They're just trying to get under your skin." "He's teasing you because he likes you."

The facts are that they won't stop if you ignore them, they will try harder. It's good for kids to stick up for themselves, but they need help finding strategies. Bullies are damned good at getting under people's skins. They tease because they enjoy seeing distress.

Schools can find themselves in a situation in which neither the adults nor the children have effective ways of stopping the bullying. In the face of this helplessness, bullying was an ignored phenomenon for a long time, in the US and other countries. Being teased or picked on, or even beaten up, was seen as a normal part of childhood, something that people needed to just deal with. Suck it up. Stiff upper lip. It gets better.

I feel like I have written enough for one session. It really does get better though, because we have learned some real strategies that really do change things. I have seen them and they are documented to have worked. 

We cried so when she left us . . .

It like to broke my heart...

I have been told to write. Just do it. So I am doing it. The person who taught me to write was a wonderful woman who abhorred, above everything else, the sentimental. She also had no patience for the cliché or unnecessary punctuation. And yet, though her strong red script adorned my papers, I came to love her, because there was no meanness in how she corrected us, or at least I felt there was not.

She wasn't my favorite teacher, that honor went to Patricia Nemec, for whom I have searched in numerous data banks, websites, social networking sites and so forth. Nemec is a very common name. Miss (there were no Ms.'s at my all-girl Catholic school) Nemec came up from Texas driving a blue 1964 Mustang. We were 15, she might have been 21. She taught us history with the wit of Molly Ivins and the steely eyes of Ann Richards. Fifth hour American History, junior year, is one of my fondest memories.

The last week of school we learned, I forget how, that Miss Nemec of Texas was not going to be at our school anymore. She hadn't done anything wrong, it was just one of those things that happen and students aren't let in on adult decisions. Anyway, she was leaving. We wanted to do something, Mary and Mary and Molly and Ruby and I. It is really not much to tell. Someone left campus at lunch time and bought (what else) a dozen yellow roses and when she came in on the last day we sang "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and gave her the flowers. Really, we were all the same age, girls in pastel colored uniforms and a young teacher who drove a blue Mustang. We cried.

She wrote us all a letter or two and that was it. I never saw her again.

I saw my English teacher many more times and some of the nuns. The school was a very nurturing place, maybe unusual for an all-girl Catholic high school, but the rich girls were boarding students (I was not one) and maybe they realized we all needed some tenderness in our lives. I have my yearbooks; I should scan pictures in. The grounds of the school were the old Studebaker estate. I got to go there because my parents wanted me to be sheltered from the cultural changes of the 60's and they did not like the other Catholic high school which was run by the diocese. It was a good place. Life changing you might say.

Ok, I have written, as I was told to. I hope you like it. I will write more, I promise.

The Event of the Year

"Hey look at this", my husband said. He held up a green piece of jalapeno. "It's a jalapeno." Yes, it was a piece of jalapeno. So I agreed. I even embellished. "Wow, a big piece of jalapeno." Not too remarkable considering we were having really excellent Mexican food. But these are the moments that make a marriage. I did not say any of the several things that popped into my mind because we are a couple, a partnership, and if he thought it was important to point out to me that our Mexican food came with jalapenos, I was not going to trash the moment.   

Before the food came I was looking at a picture of an old friend and a few other people my age, sent to me by email, with no text but with the subject "The event of the year." There was a caption on the picture naming the people, a man, his wife, a magistrate of the State of Iowa, and my friend and her partner, whom she labeled "my legally married partner". 

I wondered why she had sent this to me, since they had had their union "blessed" in church about 15 years ago, in Minnesota where they lived. Then, thinking about it, after our Mexican dinner, I understood. They had gone and done it in Iowa, where it is legal for people who love people of the same gender to be married. Not just blessed, but married in the eyes of the State, til death does them part (whatever). 

And yes, she looked radiant. She had flowers and a sea green dress. I'm so proud of her. 

One of the real hassles of getting old is that you get tired early, like 10:22. I was going to tie this in with the jalapeno moment and I didn't. I am sure I could say more but I won't. Live long and prosper, Ruby and Jessica. You deserve it.

Four years ago

My mother-in-law was in the hospital and she wanted to hear Barack Obama's acceptance speech. She was excited about it all day and made me promise I would not let her go to sleep. But in the end the pain and morphine got to her and she fell asleep. 

Tom and I tried to tape it for her so she could watch it the next day but we couldn't get the DVD set up in time. She was too tired the next day anyway. She asked if he was well received and I said that he was. She smiled. She knew she didn't have much longer. It was August 28th I think.