Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Bully

I once visited a campus where bullying was not supposed to be a problem. We asked a focus group of students to close their eyes, and then raise their hand if they had been bullied. Out of 20 or 24 kids, one raised his hand. There are schools where you hear about bullying all the time. And then...there are the schools where the bullying is very rare and buried deep, but if you are one of the rare targets, the situation is pretty heinous.

Sadly, one of the big issues with bullying is that it rarely happens where teachers can see it. Once, a parent asked the school what they were going to do about the bullying. When we called the student in, I asked, "Where is the bullying happening?" It was happening at the bus stop nearest the student's home. The principal said she'd talk to the bus driver, but I'm not sure how much that helped.

At the beginning of my teaching career nearly 10 years ago, I heard on NPR that the bullies in upper elementary school are often the most popular kids in school, that those kids bully in order to fit in, to be part of a group, to define themselves as insiders. The report said that teachers often dislike the victims of bullies, since they tend to be withdrawn and moody.

So a year and a half later, I had to wash my hands in the girls' bathroom (the sink in the teacher's bathroom wasn't working), and I found a new immigrant cowering in the corner. With the help of another student who spoke Spanish, I learned that one of our soccer stars, a good student, had passed the new girl a note (in Spanish) threatening to get her when she left school. When I learned who the bully was, I was shocked! I never would have found out about it if the sink in the teacher's bathroom had been in working order. Telling a teacher what's going on is usually the last thing a victim wants to do!

It's because bullying usually happens when teacher's aren't around, because kids usually won't tell, and because bullies tend not to pick on kids that have a social support system that one response is to encourage kids to get more involved, in the hopes that it will lead to them making friends. Personally, I think we should encourage kids to have a social support system so that they're not miserable.

There are several programs that specifically address the problem of bullying in schools. A more global approach like Tribes also seeks to create a supportive school and classroom environment in which students feel free to take risks and share an answer in class that may be wrong. A side effect of such a program is that students are more likely to tell teachers what's going on (if someone is planning to bring a gun to school, for instance).