Classroom Bullying...Not What You Think

Since we just started discussing this topic, I was perusing some random sites on bullying and I found one that I was really interested in. [http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/bullying-teachers.html] Teachers being bullied and DOING the bullying. After reading the article, I remembered hearing stories of high school students bullying a new teacher, making her cry usually every day and it lead to her eventually leaving the school. (Although I believe she was “asked to leave” b/c she was a horrible teacher as well.) But I feel that most everyone knew that this was happening to this particular teacher and yet no one did anything to try to help her through the stressful time. Conversely, I’ve had teachers who called students out for doing/saying really dumb things in class or made them say their grades aloud to the class. I really didn’t categorize this as bullying but this article highlighted that they were doing just that: someone of power taking advantage of that power.

I think it is really important that during our future conversations about bullying, we keep adult bullying in mind because those of us who are going to be teachers are going to be in situations where we have enormous power over a large group of students. Things that may seem inconsequential to us may be very personal and hurtful to a student and an off-hand comment could very well stick with them for a long time. Children model what they see adults do; therefore, teachers must always be mindful of how their actions and words affect those around them. I think that learning how to spot “bullying” in ourselves is very important because we need to correct ourselves and our actions so that we don’t teach bad habits to future generations.