No one is born to bully any more than someone is "born to be wild." It's not nature, it's nurture. Bullying is a learned behavior.
Once again our Southbridge Middle/High School has made the news; this time it involves a student who has been expelled for cyber-bullying a teacher.
Face-to-face bullying is certainly a problem in schools today, and laws and procedures to combat it have been written and enforced with varying degrees of success. Even more insidious is the act of cyber-bullying because of its capacity to form relentless anonymous gangs who can so demoralize, debase, and dehumanize individuals that it literally makes them sick. Stories of tragic endings of victims of cyber-bullying have become all too common.
So why do people do it? Psychologists and others have been speculating about this for a while now, and various theories have been offered. None that I have seen say that it is in the nature of someone to bully.
Opportunities for people to witness and participate in cyber-bullying abound on the internet. The article in The Telegram and Gazette about the latest incident in cyber-bullying mentioned a website where the high school student posted his password to his English teacher's website. I had never heard of 4Chan.org so I visited the site. Perhaps there is something of value here, but you have to sift through a dunghill to find it. One thing I did notice on my brief visit to the site is that nearly all the comments are anonymous.
Clearly people, and especially young people, have become more and more sophisticated on the use of the internet and cyber laws are behind, often introduced in reacting to situations rather than anticipating them. This is the norm. The misuse and abuse of new things are often the catalysts for legislation.
But what is to be done in the meantime? On the one hand teachers are encouraged to embrace all new technologies in their task of teaching this generation of students, but on the other they can fall victim to cyber bullying just as the Southbridge Middle/High English teacher apparently has.
Though I have encouraged teachers to use technology and to have web sites, this cyber bullying situation is certainly a strong argument against that. And it is a growing problem as this news from North Carolina shows:
North Carolina Criminalizes Cyberbullying of Teachers.
Teachers have been subjected to some of the most vile accusations on some of these sites; virtually all of these are done anonymously. Some students whose identities have been revealed say it was all a joke, or they were upset with a grade, so they made up a story. In the meantime, a teacher's reputation gets trashed.
I wish I had an answer to this. Some say stronger discipline is needed. Actually if the Southbridge student had only waited two years, he would have a whole new set of laws to protect him from the disciplinary action taken by the school:
Student Support, Career & Education Services Chapter 222 of the Acts of 2012, An Act Relative to Student Access to Educational Services and Exclusion from School.
As to the anonymity, we are at a time when people believe that they can say anything asserting that is their First Amendment free speech right. This incivility is hardly confined to the younger generation. This is one place that they learn that cyber bullying is okay.
Here is a video about cyber bullying as it relates to teens against other teens. I would like also to hear a future discussion from teens about cyber bullying against teachers.
C2012
Brent, Teaching is a hazardous profession nowadays.
ReplyDeleteSorry to be a negative voice on teaching as a career for a young person, but I would not put myself through such torment again if I had it all to do over again. I left teaching and retired at age 58, after having a heart attack from the stress. It took me approximately 6 months to begin to feel normal and at ease around others. Then, life became wonderful again, and my health greatly improved.
Everyone in the education profession is "under the gun" so to speak. Conservatives targeted education as being ineffective and tried to make it even more ineffective to dumb down the population.
Also society's goals have changed from caring and being our "brother's keepers" to super competition and forcing one's will upon the surrounding world with force, and this means also forcing one's will upon people around you.
Also the idea of revenge at those who do not meet your goals and expectations is being imparted on young people.
Go to Netflix and type in the word "Revenge" in search, and you will find large numbers of revenge movies there.
So we are teaching our young to "get" opponents, and to enjoy doing it as a form of good fun.
I just saw a story on "My life is a lifetime movie" TV show where a young idealistic female teacher made the mistake of texting with a football player and his buddies as just fun, and she was picking with them. She made no overt sexual offers, but the guys texts hinted at sexual desires for her.
Then, suddenly these guys began spreading rumors that this young teacher was having group sex with them, and she ended up in court faced with prison. Luckily, she had a skin graft on her body that the kids didn't know about that proved to the jury that they had never seen her without clothes. The publicity, however, even though she was innocent, destroyed her career and future while the kids walked away claiming that they were only joking and having fun.
I was once suspended for wrongdoing because a kid made a pot pipe in my classroom during lab. I reported it to the administrators, but was suspended anyway because the kid said I knew about him doing it. I sat home for a week hoping that the truth would come out. Of course investigation showed that the kid just did it for his own amusement. However, my paid leave time was administration's way of punishing me for not keeping the class under better control, and for reporting something they would have to deal with.
This stuff goes on all the time with teachers who are increasingly walking a super stressful tightrope. However well-intentioned you are, at some point if you are a teacher, you will find the cards stacked against you.
Kids will do just what parents and schools and society allows them to get away with, and that's a lot nowadays in a world that teaches aggression, super competition and revenge.
Cell phones and texting and computer websites just open up new avenues for the bullies to get at those who are limited in how they can deal with them, and other kids will go along because it's the thing to do.
Nowadays teaching is not a job for the faint-hearted.
Unless you are a super aware person who can control your surroundings and also have a super tough skin, I would not recommend this job to you.
That said. Thank goodness that there are loving, caring teachers still around even if it costs them greatly in their personal lives.
Often they are all that stands between people making good or bad choices in their lives. Some little something a good teacher might have said might make the difference to someone.
That is our hope.
It has to be Carefully TAUGHT; and won't even be attenuated (much less ended) until we reign in our Bushist Bully PUPPET-'n- thief and his regime of Company "men"!
ReplyDeleteI guess I don't understand your comment.
DeleteI can only comment on the first part. Anonymous cyber bullying is TAUGHT by example. And those examples abound. It is civility that needs to be taught, in my opinion.
A monster has been unleashed in the form of technology enabling immature people to say slanderous things about others with no adverse consequences. There are already too many immature adults with this access - adding warped 15 year old minds to this # is insanity squared. I have been a public high school teacher for 29 years. I do quite well in keeping class control and things moving forward, despite inadequate backing from administrators. But I would NOT advise any young person to go into the profession. There are just too many factors working against you now. Many parents are clueless about what kind of son/daughter they really have - and they support their child's point of view when it comes to school discipline. Here in CA we have an average of 37 kids per class X 5 classes = 185 American teenagers every day, most of whom have (culturally induced) A.D.D.
ReplyDeleteIt's no wonder that 40% of all new teachers leave the profession in their first five years. The wonder is that it isn't higher. There are still students who want to learn and are willing to put in the effort necessary to succeed, but the percentage of such kids is going down. What most of do best at is texting gibberish, watching junk TV/movies/videogames, and eating junk food.
We have smart phones, and dumb students.