Here a bully, there a bully, everywhere a bully-bully.

I just came across this topic, and I haven't finished reading everyone's posts yet. My wife, who's legally blind, asked me to read the first few posts. Then she made the following observations:

"Bullying" means you pick on the ones you perceive to be weak. "Being mean" indicates you're mean to most people. The people who want to equate these two patterns of behavior do a disservice to the truly bullied kids.

Yes, I think we all understand that.

My point is that meanness is often called bullying these days and meanness isn't bullying. I think the real kids that are getting bullied are falling through the cracks because nowadays everything is considered bulying.

"He took my pencil" = bullying.
"S/He said something mean" = bullying.

Meanwhile nobody notices the Almas because everyone thinks everything is bullying. I'd like to see the word bullying reserved for those who are really being bullied.

My son is in Special Ed. Right now he's going though testing so he's taken from class to do these tests. There is a small group of boys who are giving him ten tons of **** about it.

It's nearly impossible to cut through the bully static because so many kids are being "bullied" by pencil stealers.

We told our son to stand up for himself. What happens? He gets called a bully.

It's messed up.

But he's as guilty as the rest for calling minor infractions bullying. It's the culture of the school.

Set, that story breaks my heart.

I knew I loved you for a reason besides your stunning good looks.

and his furry unibrow...

I was bullied by a girl when I was eight.

she can prolly still kick my ass...

A few years ago, in the hot tub of a summer resort, an 11 year old boy appealed to me for protection
from a girl his age who had scratched him with her fingernails. He displayed fear. The girl was only playing nicely.





David

I guess I'll have to say I never knew anyone I'd call a bully. I was a very sensitive child and can't imagine seeing someone picked on because they appeared weak. Obviously, I didn't (appear weak).

Your wife makes a good point, Bill. I agree.





David

My wife's a very smart gal. That's one of the reasons I married her.

Bullies have always been a problem and like any problem there can be extreme examples. Not enough to actually justify hysteria, but enough to explain it.

I don’t believe bullying is, generally, any more of a problem now that it was when I was a kid, but how can we know? It’s a new practice to record incidents plus there’s a lot of behavior that is classified as bullying today that wouldn’t even have been remarked upon years ago. The number of documented incidents in the last five years probably exceeds the number in the prior 25 combined.

I think there is a combination of reasons for this trend. (In no particular order)

1) Teachers do not want to make value judgments about discipline and behavior. The fewer the number of value judgments, the less opportunities there will be for the teacher to be second guessed. Zero-tolerance policies eliminate the need for teachers to make personal judgments. The greater the perceived problem the louder the calls for zero-tolerance policies. Teachers who don’t want to make value judgments have an incentive to exaggerate the problem.

2) Teachers want more authority and less accountability. When you have a job with authority it means you have a job with responsibility that requires good judgment. Jobs that require judgment usually pay more than jobs that do not, and they are more compatible with egos that don't like to be told what to do and how to do it. Jobs that require judgment require second-guessing in the performance assessment process. Second-guessing is subjective in nature and could be influenced by personality.

If your job consists of a series of judgments rather than tasks, you will never really know how you have performed until someone actually judges your judgment. If you’re required everyday to manufacture 35 widgets that are 4” X 4” in dimension, at the end of your shift you can know how you performed that day. Far less anxiety involved then having to wait 6 to 12 months for your supervisor to second guess a sample of your judgments and then tell you how you performed over that prior period. Unless you seek or your supervisor provides you with daily feedback (extremely unusual), you will have a difficult time working on performance problems until they are revealed to you at a periodic evaluation session.

You can identify the folks who want more authority and less accountability. They are the ones who complain about second-guessing, define empowerment as having the power not to meet standards, and are always insisting that their supervisor just tell them what it is they specifically want from them. They are also the ones who prefer to talk about mistakes as learning opportunities and feel the best supervisors are the ones who try to catch people doing something right.

3) More and more parents don’t want their children to learn anything the hard way, and they certainly don’t want to have to assist their children in learning hard lessons. They prefer the school to solve the problem quickly and with as little involvement of their time as is necessary.

4) Bullying is perceived as a very masculine behavior. Never mind that girls can be every bit as dangerous a bully as a boy, bullying connotes the flow of testosterone. The US has become much more feminized over the past few decades. Behaviors that are perceived to reflect an ugly aspect of masculinity are more highly targeted for eradication than before.

5) I doubt there is any evidence to prove this, but based on my experience, the education profession contains a higher percentage of adults who were themselves bullied as children than most other professions and so from personal experience consider the problem more significant than might adults who were less bullied or not bullied at all as children.

6) As someone suggested, it is no longer permissible to send an older sibling out to deal with an older bully who is harassing a younger child.

(Sidenote #1: The worst bullies I ever met in corporate life were people who I could tell must have been bullied a lot when they were kids)

(Sidenote #2: It is not, by any means, just teachers who want more authority and less accountability. A lot of people in private industry bitch about teacher’s tenure and compensation not being based on performance, but they would love to have such policies instituted at the company where they work)

Very many adults had experiences with bullies when they were kids, and I doubt any of them look back on those experience with nostalgia, but it is amazing how many will tell you that they eventually learned a life lesson thanks to their experience. For some kids bullies can make certain times of their life simply miserable, and while there’s often something good that comes from tough experiences there’s no reason why a kid should ever have to dread an entire school year or become so afraid and despondent that they consider drastic and terrible solutions. When such extreme cases arise it is first and foremost the responsibility of the parents to see that they are resolved. If they need to involve the school or even the authorities, then they should but if it’s a situation that can’t be left to the kids to resolve themselves, then it certainly shouldn’t be left to a third party.

There seems no similar student bullying surround me in my student period. They will fight with each other, But surely out of some reasons, mostly minors. I can't regard a simple conflict as bullying.

That 's a GOOD reason.

AGREED.





David

Bull, we have become weak and squeamish, and ignorant. Kids used to be a lot better at looking out for themselves, at standing up for themselves against bullies. Once a person gets it in their head that they need mommy (or the government) to solve their problems then they are useless.

How wonderful for you. Why are you telling me this? The post you replied to simply links to the results of a survey carried out among more than 7000 students. Why don't you go tell those students that their complaints are groundless, and why you think so?

Gosh, hawk, you really do sound harsh. We can only speak from ourselves. Whatever has made you so cold? They become useless? Really? What makes you so useful? Probably that you have freedom , can come & go as you wish with no bully hanging about?

Good sex and good living both require being hard at the right time and in the right places. Being harsh is not a negative necessarily.

From our experience and observations, yes. Your point is?

What you call cold I call prudence. Americans are too soft and too stupid, I call for moving away from that

. Yes, People who can not look after themselves, who are dependent upon their parents and the government are useless. Parents and governments who work to instill this dependency are guilty of abuse.

Being smart, not afraid of work, and during my life being observant enough to have a clue what is going on around me.

A lot less then I had a couple of decades ago, things are looking pretty grim on the individual liberty front.

I encounter people who want to boss me around all the time

Bullshit, there are a LOT of bullies in America right now, it is one of the primary power plays that work right now because too few people have the wisdom and the ability to stand up to bullies. I do.

I agree with boomer, qua the re-definition of bullying,
based upon the circumstances that she explained.





David