Today’s post will deal with a topic that, unfortunately, sooner or later every teacher will have to deal with. I actually hoped that there wouldn’t be a need for me to post on bullying, but today I must.
As an elementary and middle school student I have been bullied. Not in a spectacular way, but classmates did make me feel different. I can relate to the feelings of bullied students from experience. During teacher training, I promised myself that whenever I would witness bullying in my classroom, I would stand up for the bullied student and make it stop. Now I know that the thought of being able to stop bullying just like that was naïve.
I have a student in my class who is being bullied. There are a few reasons that I don’t know what to do about it:
1. The student can be nasty to other students as well. During the three hours a week I teach him, I can’t see whether this is only a response to the bullying, or a misbehaviour in and of itself.
2. I don’t know who the bullies are. I do have suspections, but I never caught them on the spot.
3. I realised something that I didn’t think of during teacher training: if I stand up for the student during class, this will probably make the bullying worse. It will isolate him even more.
I am very concerned about the situation. Recently I found out that racial issues are involved. Although all bullying is abjectionable, racial motives take the bullying to an entirely different level. As as a social science and history teacher, I don’t care if my students remember in what year the Conferention of Munich took place, not even whether they can name the presidents of the SU in the correct order. What I want them to know is to what horrible situations racism and prejudice can lead. I want them to understand that, in the end, there is no difference between the propaganda of Nazi-Germany, the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans, and racism in the classroom.
This morning, after discovering graffiti about this student that one of the bullies wrote on a table, I went to the mentor of this class. I told him that we need to take action. It turned out that last night, after school, the student already took action and attacked one of his bullies. I am so afraid that the school will only punish this act of defence, and not the months of bullying that lead to it. I offered the mentor to design a program together to combat bullying and racism in our school.
Yet I feel hopeless. Hopeless for witnessing senseless hatred in my classroom, hopeless because apparently the system did not provide the bullied student with enough care and support, leading him to think that he needed to solve the problem with his fists.
How can teachers protect the bullied student, and combat bullying, without setting the student even more apart and without causing the bullying to shift from the classroom to the schoolyard, or the streets?
