For my last campus engagement, I
attended Taking up Space, which was a lecture about the bullying in
middle school and how if affects young students. Now, I'll start by
saying it was not what I expected it to be. I thought this was going
to be something along the lines of hearing people's stories and
feeling sympathy for them but it was an actual study. There were
hypothesizes, experiments, results and reporting--sorta reminding me
of what I do with my biology. This lecture leaned much more towards
logical than emotion and I found it interesting.
Now with that, the most emotional part
of this even were the interviews with parents. I remember there was
one women who was devastated by the way people were treating her
daughter and she was willingly to do anything to make sure she was
okay. And then there was the school officials who didn't seem
interested in conducting the study and simply wanted to ignore the
problem of bullying. The speaker, Pr. Santana, described how there is
a tug of war between the schools and the parents. The schools say
"well, if you're child is acting up at school, it's usually
because of the situation at home" while parents believe schools
are not taking care of the issues properly. I'll talk about something
that I generally keep to myself. When I was in elementary school, I
was severely bullied. And while I'm not going to go into details
about it, let me just say, there was two years of my life that was
pretty much a living hell. And this little tid bit into my life
serves as a connection between school and home when it comes to
bullying. There isn't one person to blame, it's a combination. When I
was a kid, both school and home were the worse places to be. My
school life was horrible and my home life was unstable. And what did
the school officials and my parents do? They just kept blaming each
other. I went to a school guidance council and after I told her my
home situation, my mother got mad at me for telling the school about
it. And then the guidance council would talk to students who had
bullied me and that just made it worse. So much worse.
This event, while interesting and very
well conducted, did not sit very well with me. It brought back to
many emotions, to many painful memories and thoughts of how I wish
things had been done differently. I would join the Young Leaders
Program if I had the time because I think I have a lot to offer to
young people because I experienced bully first hand. It's hard,
unnecessary, and can emotionally scar a person for the rest of their
lives. And while my schools days are far behind me and what students
called me doesn't necessarily hurt me anymore, there is that
lingering bit of anger and injustice. An open wound that will never
heal. I want something to be done about bully but at the same time I
don't want to have to deal with the issues and emotions that come
with reliving those memories.
Bad picture of me LOL but I was there
No comments:
Post a Comment