Bullying Stinks

There was generally not a lot of bullying in my elementary school. It was a really small school, so there was a pretty low student to teacher ratio. Also most of  the teachers were really good about maintaining a safe and positive atmosphere, and most students' parents were pretty involved in the school community, which helped. That's not to say people never got picked on, but it was the sort of casual thing that shifted around and was directed at whoever said something dumb/wore something ugly/cheated at a game or something like that and was forgotten by the next day.

The one exception to this was this one girl in our class whose personal hygiene was not so great. Her, uh, distinct odour got her stuck with the nickname "fish" for years, poor dear. I was never involved with the bullying, it was mostly the boys that did it, but I also never stood up for her or went to a teacher about it or anything either, which I feel bad about now that I'm older.

Most of my experience with bullying was in junior high. There was one guy in my class who bullied me a lot for three years straight. A few of his friends were in on it too sometimes, including two who were on my bus and used to make fun of me there, but he was definitely the worst one and the ringleader of it all. There were a lot of day-to-day incidents like name-calling and him going through my stuff and things like that, but the worst was in French class. Our teacher always made us do presentations in pairs that could be about anything, but we had to use a certain number of verbs conjugated in whatever tense we were working on, and sometimes he and his partner would put mean jokes about me in their presentations in front of the whole class. The worst part was that the teacher never did anything about it, and so I didn't see any point in going to a teacher or anyone about it, since he obviously knew it was a problem and just didn't seem to care.

Junior high was also the only time I can ever remember really being a bully, too. One of my friends had been acting bitchy for a while, so my best friend and I decided we needed to do something mean to her... junior high logic really does not make sense to me now. Anyway, we took one of those survey-questionnaire things that people fill out about themselves... you know, the kind of things people used to do facebook notes with all the time? Except at this point they went around through email. So we made a fake email account in her name, took one of those surveys and filled it out as if it was from her, but made all the answers really mean and embarrassing things, and then sent it out to everyone we knew. The next day she called everyone it had gone out to, telling them it wasn't really her, and asking them not to read it if they hadn't already. I remember how guilty I felt as soon as she called me and I heard how upset she was - and I think that was the moment I decided to try my best to be a nice person.

In high school the bullying stopped almost completely. The nice thing about going to a big school is that all the social cliques are big enough to live in their own little worlds, so I could more or less surround myself with people I liked and never had to deal with the people I didn't. The fact that most of my classes were IB probably helped to since most of my bullies weren't the type to be in IB classes. I really only had one experience with bullying in all of high school. A guy I knew broke up with his girlfriend because he wanted to be with me - although the major flaw in this plan was that I had absolutely no interest in dating him. I'm really not sure how he overlooked that very important detail. I almost feel like he used me as an excuse to get out of the relationship or something. Anyway, his girlfriend didn't seem to care that I wasn't interested (and I can't really blame her for that, even if she was wrong - I mean, I'd be pretty pissed too, if I were her). It also just happened that she went on my bus. So for a few weeks after that she and her friends would sit as close to me as possible and trash talk me the whole way home. I didn't really care that much since I hadn't even done anything and nothing they were saying was true, but I was upset about it for the first little while because I was concerned that it would start rumours and get spread around to more people. That didn't end up happening though, so basically it was the least effective bullying ever. All in all, high school was a pretty good time, and there was not a whole lot of bullying. Although there was some major public bullying directed toward the only openly gay student at the school, and it got pretty awful sometimes. Basically it all culminated when another guy threw a chair at him on Halloween because he was dressed up as a flapper. I wasn't there for this, but he got caught by a teacher and from then on all the teachers kept a close eye on things and as far as I know most of the bullying died down after that

And that is pretty much all of the bullying events I have ever had any experience in. That sort of thing seemed to get left behind pretty much completely at university, I guess people finally grew up.