This year I’ve been reminded that bullying is a terrible experience. I have students bullying me the same way that I was bullied in school growing up. I used to hate my last name because being called Miss Thirsty or being asked if I was Thirsty was plain torture. And leave it to my students this year, to start calling me that out of the blue.
It’s one of the reasons that this year, I have decided to pull out my old Anti-bullying unit and dust it off. I have to adapt what I had adapted to my 8th graders back down to a 6th and 7th grade level with available resources. If you’re interested in using it, I’ll have it up in my TpT store by the end of next week. I didn’t realize how much I needed to change until I found some of my links were broken. I’m thankful that I had hard copies of most items. My goal is to implement it starting next week. Definitely by October. The sooner the better!
I’m not sure why we have a sudden uptick in bullying incidents this year. It’s unprecedented. In fact, some students, when pointed out that they were bullying they stated they didn’t know that was bullying. They have some other idea of what bullying looks like.
One morning, during duty, a teacher caught a bullying incident and brought the students involved over the side. He told them that they needed to put their name in the place of the other, and if they wouldn’t like it, then perhaps it was something that they shouldn’t be saying.
There bullying has been in the forms of harassing, teasing, name calling, throwing things at, pushing/shoving, taking things, gaslighting, humiliating, and tattling. The biggest one that gets me is the gaslighting. Hello, future narcissist. How are you?
Our “No Contact Order” list is growing exponentially due to the students lacking conflict resolution skills. What happens is that a conflict arises, and they run to get a No Contact Order placed against the student. Then they secretly torture them through multiple means to get them in trouble and violate their order. Or they get the No Contact Order and the other student has no clue what they did wrong. They don’t know how to correct it. Most of the time it is just a jealousy thing and the other person wanted them out of the picture in case they take their friends away.
Either way, this is becoming a huge problem.
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