Great Bullying Analogy for Students

A teacher in New York was teaching her class about bullying and gave them the following exercise to perform. She had the children take a piece of paper and told them to crumple it up, stomp on it and really mess it up but do not rip it. Then she had them unfold the paper, smooth it out and look at how scarred and dirty is was. She then told them to tell it they’re sorry. Now even though they said …they were sorry and tried to fix the paper, she pointed out all the scars they left behind. And that those scars will never go away no matter how hard they tried to fix it. That is what happens when a child bullies another child, they may say they’re sorry but the scars are there forever. The looks on the faces of the children in the classroom told her the message hit home.

Parents need to take more ownership and responsibility of Cyber-Bullying where it happens... At home.

Recently in Victoria Australia we have had mass media coverage over cyber bullying following the tragic suicide of a teenage girl in Geelong who was found to be a victim of cyber bullying; and worst of all she was the 4^th suicide from that school in the last 18 months alone.

Media outlets lapped it up including 60 minutes because it was yet another societal story of doom and gloom of epidemic proportions that did not involve the global financial crisis, Swine Flu, Iraq, Afghanistan.  What made this cheap journalistic booty so appealing to current affairs programs across the country was that it had a real fear factor for parents, suggesting their kids could be involved in this in their bedrooms late at night right now and we could quickly start shifting the blame to our schools for it as this is where cyber bullying manifested itself in reality.  After all this is where their teenage sons were all filmed as mourning friends, stressed and angry parents teachers and principals the next day.

As an ICT leader in a numerous schools over the years I have had a number of parents increasingly approach me to seek instant solutions when they finally find out what their kids are up to online at home and are looking for someone to blame and rectify a massive problem with a click of a mouse.  I have dealt with irate parents looking for someone to blame as they have simply too lazy to enquire or invest any interest or time into what their children are capable of at home on a computer. 

Click to read more ...