Did you experience bullying as a child either as a victim,
witness, or as the bully?
I can say yes to all of the above. I grew up in a low income
apartment complex outside of Dallas, there were several kids in the complex. As
I reflect back, I feel as if we all had our spot in the food chain or were in a
specific pecking order; this was decided usually by age, ability in sports, or
possessions.
How did you survive that experience and what did you learn
from it that is helping you now as teacher?
For the most part I feel like people are bullied because it
was a way to be superior, get other’s attention, and make them laugh. For the
most part, most of the bulling was beneficially in making us tougher, and
taught us how to stand up for ourselves. It was when it was taken too far did it
become detrimental to the bullied.
Since the age of about 17, I have made a commitment to step
in whenever someone is being bullied and feel like they are actually being hurt
by the situation and are unable to help themselves. Usually the situation
de-escalates. Only twice has it led to me having to be involved in a physical
altercation. One ended much better than the other, haha. In one of those two, a
small kid was being beaten up by a much larger trained kid, over 50 people
stood around watching it before I jumped in and stopped it. This just leads to
my conclusion that most of our population are cowards with no integrity in
these situations, which makes it much easier to stop the bullying as third
party.
At some point when I was stationed in Japan and had a lot of
time to self-reflect and find out who I was, I identified one person whom I felt
as if I treated them very poorly with respect to bullying. I reached out to him
and sent an apology, he read it but I never heard back from him. I still feel
pretty crappy about it.
As for being bullied myself, I am a skinny white guy that
didn’t grow up around many white people. I received quite a bit of bullying,
but I really only feel as if two of the guys had intent to hurt me, or at least
no regard for how they treated others. I have ran into both of them a couple
time since those days as a kid, they have grown up and were nice. I still
wouldn’t want to involve them in my life, but I harbor no hard feelings towards
anyone. I think it is important to have your own self-confidence and discount
the actions of other ignorant people.
