@sylvan8798 To answer your question, yes my children received plenty of these lesson growing up. My younger son has a slight speech impediment and has been bullied as a result. He is also not a gifted athlete although he loves any sport you name and will gladly step up to play even though he may be the last kid picked or the last one off the bench. We have had some difficult discussions with him around his speech, abilities, actions of others, etc. and now as he is a freshman in high school he is not only the most confident “nerd” you will ever meet, he is probably the most confident kid you would ever meet. He is friends with everyone, has older “popular jock girls” pursuing him, and volunteers his time at a teen center. I credit much of this to the hard lessons he learned through being bullied and finding a way to make lemonade from the lemons he had been given.
My older son is not a stellar student which made him stick out in our high performing high school. Our high school very much celebrates academics and it is very clear who is not being celebrated. The school held a class wide meeting to go over an 8th grade standardized test and announced that anyone that scored below a certain score had no hope of going to college, he fell below this threshold and it led to an absolutely hard lesson, at the hands of the school administration. This led to teasing (bullying I guess) but he learned from it. Once he realized he could control his future he used the lessons learned from those events to find his niche, graduate, go on to a Big Ten University and is thriving, now that he found his passion. This is what I have been trying to say, no one owns the “poor me” I was uncomfortable scenario as they hit everyone, from the jock, to the nerd, to the burnout, etc. and to try and “legislate away” every uncomfortable aspect of school does kids a disservice. There is something to be learned from every situation, not just those that make us feel good, or smart, or proud, etc. I think the movie The Breakfast Club makes this point nicely.
@eb23282 --“if you’re getting hit in the face in dodgeball, clearly you’re playing it wrong. Stand in the way back where half the throws will barely reach you. Unless of course you’re playing this girl…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8StxnSe1cCM”
We obviously played it wrong.
We had 80 kids with some power players throwing BASKETBALLS (hard as a brick) at others close range as hard as they could. Most times guys against girls.
Consider how fair or safe or fun that sounds and report back to me. Or what it teaches.
I really want to know.
Yeah, I played it right…I walked off the court immediately. You wouldn’t be safe in the back. Not exactly a fun time to spend an hour of torture figuring out how to avoid getting hurt.
(If given a chance to play with nerf balls? I think it would be fun rather than terrorizing.)
@Magnetron ‘s post hit home. Our PE was single sex and I always wished I could hAve the guy teachers. Our women’s phys ed teachers were mean and not very nice women.
@eb23282 – " What kind of masochist teacher did you have?"
Yeah, I don’t know. I definitely knew we had some. I think the word though is sadist over masochist , LOL.
I think it was written in the PE teacher handbook at the time.
At the time I just concluded that PE teachers were definitely the stupidest clods on earth and not worth my time or energy. And then just "do what you gotta do to get by"as a mantra helped.
(Except for a very few bright spots of fabulous coaches/teachers that redeemed my faith.)
Stupid though, isn’t it?
Why should I even remember or dwell for two split seconds on this cr*p after so many years when I’d rather forget it?
Why in the world do I remember a stupid dodge ball game that had NO lasting effect on ANY part of my life?
I thought I put those memories behind me but obviously I’m not the only one who has dredged up old memories from this thread…
I won’t call it abuse…more along the lines of “coulda been MUCH better.”
And things for the most part are getting better. Probably based on all those memories just like this thread.
Some personalities might benefit from being publicly humiliated as described above. But some personalities will learn a different lesson. And you can’t control which kind of kid you get. I’m surprised at the opinion that that kind of adversity is good for all kids.
Why is it surprising? Just as different people take away different “lessons” from identical circumstances, some people think that everyone should have whatever adversity they endured. Maybe they feel it made them stronger, more resilient, more ???
I personally am not of the “one size fits all” school and feel that if you have lemons and CAN make lemonade, that’s a good thing. I am glad that many others did not have to have the lonely and unpleasant childhood I had where grade school was a pretty miserable experience–can’t see why I’d wish it on others, myself.
When I was in the 6th grade, I was kicked out of the chorus because I couldn’t carry a tune. I was the only kid in the whole grade who was kicked out for that reason. (A few others were kicked out for misbehavior.) I had to sit in the back of the auditorium with the behavior problem people while everyone else rehearsed for the graduation performance. Over and over. For months.
I can’t think of any situation quite as humiliating in adult life.
I think the argument here is that having bad experiences in PE can lead to a lifelong aversion to physical activity, and that’s a health hazard. Having a lifelong aversion to geometry (or singing) is not.
I think they definitely are. And what about the kids who kill themselves because they can’t take the bullying? Maybe they are just the weak people in a Darwinian “strongest survive” world? Culling the herd and all that?
For all the problems H and I have had, at least we agreed full stop that we would not tolerate our kids being bullied. Fortunately, that seems to have been kept to a minimum for both of them.
Some of the posts on this thread have expressed support for experiences that may “toughen up” a kid. Some of those experiences fit today’s definition of bullying. They may not have fit the narrower definition of bullying that prevailed a few decades ago.
I don’t think anyone supports bullying or public trauma. What I am not sure about is how far parents sometimes push that-So that anything that makes their child uncomfortable should be avoided or better yet prohibited. Many children, including mine, were stuck in their comfort zone, and might not ever emerge if not pushed into it. It can be easier to avoid situations that make us anxious but that may not be in the child’s best interest. One of my kids was truly traumatized by being required to perform in a drama class-endless tears, etc. The school insisted. Four years later said kid was a communications intern for a Congressman, giving speeches all the time. Maybe it would have worked out that way anyway, maybe not.
My school had bad, orchestra or choir. I chose orchestra and was pretty bad. The instructor put up with it but the better players were dismayed about my lack of aptitude. I never improved but since there was no real bullying it was tolerable.
I think there’s a difference between being forced to doing things that are uncomfortable and things that involve assault and/or battery (like having heavy, fast objects hurled at you).
It saddens me that some folks developed a permanent or at least long-standing aversion to exercise and physical activity due to what I feel is/was cruelty. I don’t really see an upside to that aversion.