"I believe athletics can teach valuable lessons, but the adults in charge need to keep their eyes open. "
Yes, adults need to keep eyes open. Not for just bad behavior but the good also.
My D befriended a foreign girl (spoke close to no English coming into the school) in 5th grade. Great kid and so were her parents but it’s very hard to make friends when you don’t speak the language. My D (a born underdog champion if ever there was one) took her under her wing and they became best pals.
The Vice Principal noticed and gave my D a “special” award for citizenship at the end of the year that she created specifically for D–just for being a caring person. Nobody else knew why D got that award except for us. Just a one time award for being nice.
I really didn’t need the bullying to teach me to be a compassionate and good person. One thing it did was make us sure not to allow our kids to be victims and bullied. H taught D to fight H’s k in kindergarten, when she was victim of teacher sanctioned bullying (everything was a “mistake,” even tho it was always same aggressor and same victim). D’s hitting back was the only thing that stopped it. She also shoved the coaches S back in league basketball after being tired of his repeated physical attacks—coach was shocked and she told him she couldn’t keep being a victim and he as coach was allowing his son to attack her. All the parents applauded and the kid never touched her again.
I guess the good thing from being bullied as a kid was we were able to prevent our kids from being the repeated victims we had been.
I think mean kids can change. I was bullied in 7th grade. I knew it was jealousy - I got moved to the honors track - she didn’t, but she made the year miserable. Several years later she apologized. It clearly had been eating at her. We went to different schools staring in 9th grade, so I only saw her in Girl Scouts where she behaved herself. Anyway, I’ve always thought some kids really just go a little nuts in middle school. Thankfully, we never played dodgeball together!
This entire topic is fascinating. I was never bullied by other students in school nor was I ever a bully. I was never popular but I was smart enough that people wanted not to alienate me in case I could help them with HW or the like.
However, gym class and the whole “sportsball” thing (as my sons call it) was enough to turn me off of physical activity for my entire life. I don’t have natural athletic ability and never found sports fun or interesting, although I did love a good game of Ring o levio, tag or mother may I as a youngster. Bizarrely, I also enjoyed dodgeball but it was never played at school.
When I was in HS, gym was still gender segregated. I don’t know what I would have done if I had to do gym class with actual boys. My freshman year, we had gymnastics. I was put in line for the parallel bars behind a (deities of political correctness, forgive my trespass) REALLY, REALLY FAT girl. She walked in between the bars and got wedged in at shoulder height. The teachers rushed to free her and, in the process, dislocated her shoulder. She was removed from the class by some male gym teachers, summoned from their lair next door. The teacher then turned to me and said: “Next!” I fainted. The next year, there were about 200 girls and 5 teachers in the class. I developed a pattern of going to one teacher each week and telling them I had my period. I was excused so much that year but the few times I did participate, I had my glasses smashed into my face (volleyball) and stomped on when they fell off (basketball). I know people say sports make you a better person, but I have never seen one example of that in my life. Gym class is an evil. I will say, in the defense of gym class, that while my kids were in the public school system (1995 - 2017), I saw vast improvements in the way gym class was run. None of my kids had the type of horrible experiences I had and they all actually even enjoyed some aspects of their phys ed programs.
As for mean girls, I really had no experience with it. I know there were girls in my junior HS class who were nicer than others, but there were only 7 of us total and I had 2 good friends in that group. My D had an experience with a mean girl. It was so bad that I went to the GC before 10th grade and asked that D and this girl not be in any classes together. They still had some EC’s together and ran in the same crowd. At the start of 12th grade, D said I am so happy to be graduating because I will never have to see X again. Fast forward to Thanksgiving of college freshman year. D comes in, throws her bag down and says :I’m off to see X!" When I said I thought you never wanted to see her again, D said, it’s amazing how going to college can mature people. It’s 10 years later, and D and X are still close friends who socialize often and have even vacationed together. People can change.
My 40th high school reunion is in less than two weeks. I have no interest in seeing the people who ignored me for years. I was not bullied, but many of the things that teachers & classmates did made me feel marginalized or less-than. It taught me nothing. I hated sitting in gym class, waiting to see how far down the pecking order I would be. I hated having to pick partners in class, because I so often didn’t have anyone to partner with & it was so awkward. I hated having to walk through the area at the bottom of the stairs where the cool kids hung out, because they would look at those who didn’t belong in a way that let us know we didn’t belong. I hated lunch, because I never seemed to have anyone I knew in my lunch period. None of this taught me anything.
I got over all of it, but I never forgot how it made me feel. In my real life, I would not put myself in a position where I feel like I did in school. Guess maybe I learned what I will not put up with as an adult.
I can’t be sure, but I expect not. I wouldn’t be mean, but this might be beyond the limit of my abilities. I’m okay with what that says about me.
I was a target of too many bullies, too many times, and a stricken observer of others being bullied too many times, and ignored when I tried to speak up for others, to feel I need to stretch my mental energies that far for that cause. I can live with that limitation.
The world has shown itself to be much more full of adult bullies than I would have believed.
The mistake most schools make, particularly at the elementary level is confusing Physical Education with organized sport. Sport is where you learn to be competetive, to understand winning and losing, to learn that some people are better at some things. That’s what you have teams for and not everybody needs to play sport. PE is where you learn the importance of movement and activity in life long health. My kids were lucky to have an excellent elementary PE teacher. 6’5", 220 lb ex-marine. His goal was to get every kid in the class up and moving and having so much fun they wanted to come back the next day. They sometimes did teams, sometimes not, but the teams were chosen at random with a bag of red and blue balls. When they did do something competative the reward was always the same. The winning team got to pick the music and then they would all dance, the teacher too. They almost always picked “Monster Mash” to watch this ex-marine clump around like Frankenstein.
" My kids were lucky to have an excellent elementary PE teacher. 6’5", 220 lb ex-marine. His goal was to get every kid in the class up and moving and having so much fun they wanted to come back the next day."
Our middle school had one of those PE teachers also–but only the guys got to enjoy his teaching. The girls were always jealous of the fun the boys would have in PE. He did show up often at the teen center where he taught both guys and girls how to shoot pool and play basketball.
He also taught HS driver’s ed which took several years off his life I’m sure.
Still a PE topic and about bullying–I’m very happy that schools somewhere along the line over the past decades have gotten a clue that group showers and open dressing rooms are not necessarily the way to do things to make kids comfortable. Of course, they could have asked me 45 years ago and I could’ve set them straight.
I was really good at the gym class activities but was undersized, had a stutter, and was the last boy in my grade to mature back when showers were mandatory. The bullying was relentless; I was tackled during flag football, peed on in the showers and the bathrooms, punched and tripped and pinched when the teacher wasn’t looking, had my hair was set on fire. I knew all the best hiding places around the HS. One reason I live 3000 miles away from my childhood home is there are only a couple of people out here who knew me back in tenth grade.
My kids had fewer issues luckily, but I made sure they were willing advocates for the disaffected.
When I was in 8th grade, our school must have decided that some students had hygiene problems. So the (female) gym teacher would sit at a table outside the girls shower with a list and we had to come out in just towels and show that we were wet so she could mark us off as having showered. I can’t imagine that would go over too well these days.
This entire thread serves as a reminder to young people that there are a whole lot of folks who were bullied and shamed as kids but who nevertheless built happy, successful and satisfying adult lives. Life CAN get better.
I don’t think I got any positive lessons from the bullying in my childhood. I was very intellectual and weak on social skills. I skipped 3rd grade. However, the kids in the next grade weren’t any smarter and the material was still pretty easy so I ended up doing a lot of the work at my own pace – which didn’t endear me to my new classmates. So, I was different and smaller because of the age difference and hence a target for bullies, although the fact that I was not a bad athlete made things a little better. In addition, I was Jewish in a predominantly Catholic area, so kids wanted to fight me because they had been told that Jews killed Christ. Nothing about that built character though it probably made me identify more with my tribe (even if I decided at age 13 that I was agnostic if not atheist). For HS, we moved to a very WASP-y town (4 Jewish kids in my HS class of 400) – it was a town that had a gentleman’s agreement to keep out Jews. When I arrived, they skipped me another grade (but I undid that after two weeks as I was in my older sister’s grade, which was awkward for her). I was the shortest kid in my freshman class and again, intellectually oriented in a jock-oriented culture. No overt anti-Semitism, but I definitely wasn’t popular and the cool girls certainly didn’t talk to me. As I grew, I became a decent athlete and played on a varsity team in HS and started on a varsity team in college. I didn’t stop growing until the end of my freshman year in college.
Interestingly, I did go to a HS reunion a few years ago. It turns out that lots of people remembered who I was, which surprised me. – maybe I was the the smart nerdy kid so maybe they remembered me. When I was a HS student, I was definitely not treated with a great deal of respect but there was less overt bullying than in elementary/middle school. When I got into several Ivies, maybe that changed. Girls who had ignored me started to talk with me. I don’t recall having a date in HS, but one woman told me that we did go out on a date but she had to drive as I wasn’t old enough to get my license until after I graduated. Apparently, I was very apologetic. I have a pretty interesting bio at this point (probably at least as interesting as at reunions) and people at the reunion seemed eager to talk with me and to introduce themselves to me (I mostly didn’t remember them). But, I could have lived a long and happy life without the bullying.
I went to an all girls high school and had a great time there. I enjoy the reunions, and always discover great women I wish I’d known then - and our graduating class was only 80! Middle school though - you couldn’t pay me to do it again.
There is a family in my community that consists of two parents and eight kids. They pull their kids out of school after the end of elementary school (5th grade), homeschool for the middle school years (6-8) and then send them back to high school for grades 9-12. They started this when kids #1 and #2 were in 6th and 7th grade and struggling with bullying. The school (this was ~16,17 years ago) was not much help so they took what was thought of at the time, to be drastic action. It worked so well they continued it with kids 3-8. Over the years they reconsidered a couple of times and talked to other parents about what their kids were experiencing and each time decided to keep their kids at home. They consider the middle school to be a toxic environment and in some ways, I agree. Not a solution for everyone but it works for them and interestingly, a number of families have followed their example.
@Hanna, I really enjoyed the one HS reunion I went to. Definitely interesting from an anthropological (or sociological) standpoint. I go to my college reunions every five years. But, there I’m seeing friends and they have great parties.
Actually, for me, grade school was the worst and things kept improving at each new school as I got older. For my D, things were best in preschool, then HS and college. Mean girls can be brutal!