The Glade 4.0

Was the teaching and administrative staff effective in controlling bullying in your school? Again, please differentiate "picked on" from "bullying". Also, in THIS poll, unlike part I, please note that I'm asking about bullying in general, not that pertaining to you personally.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I can't think of anything that would lead me to say no. I think everything I laid out in part one applies. By Sixth grade we'd gotten to the point where you just sort of knew everyone in your graduating class", and odds are you had band/choir/teammates/older siblings watching your back in the upper classes. A baseball freshman got a wedgie one time, but I don't think that counts and he kinda deserved it.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I said they were fairly effective, but this may be skewing things since I wasn't particularly bullied.

My middle & high school had a fairly severe bullying problem. There were about 10 kids (Of which I was one) which were the perpetual target of bullying by just about everyone. (Yes, I got my butt handed to me by a girl at least once) I had my nose broken on 2 occasions. It was customary to punch the kids in the arm as hard a possible as a 'greeting' (My arms were perpetually black & blue )


That changed because of a single incident.

Near the beginning of my sophomore year in high school one of the kids had enough. When one of his tormentors began flicking him in the back of the head in the middle of class, he pulled out a thermos full of gasoline and poured it over the bully. He tried to light him on fire but couldn't get the lighter to light. He pulled out the handgun from his bag, jumped to the front of the class and after threatening to shoot the bully he put the gun to his own head and asked "Who wants to see a bloody mess?"

The teacher managed to talk him out into the hall and eventually convinced him to surrender his gun. There was a (local) media firestorm over the incident with a lot of focus on the fact that it was a bullied kid who was simply pushed too far.

I can't remember a single incident of bullying at my school after that.

Wow.

We did have a problem occasionally with girls who would do that, pick boys they didn't like and attack them relying on the fact that they were a girl to protect them from retaliation.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You need a N/A option.

The vast majority of any bullying that I saw was always done out of the sight of teachers to where there was basically not much of anything they could do most of the time.

Sorry, I should have stated in the OP that I was talking about bullying the staff was aware of, and including in their effectiveness assessment to what degree the even tried to be concious or aware of it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I went to two high schools, the staff at the first was totally incompetent at it, the staff at the second was very good at it. I should probably point out that the administration of the first was totally incompetent at basically everything else, the student body had absolutely no respect for them whatsoever. I'm honestly still baffled at how a school administration can be as incompetent as my first high school one's was, especially since it wasn't a poor area. They had plenty of money. It was worse than some movie-portrayed exaggerations of incompetent administrations.

Lack of accountability. It doesn't matter how rich your district is if there's no motivation to excel or means to give you the boot for not performing adequately.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I was severly bulllied in a catholic school in 7th grade the entire year. All the girls hated me because I had red hair. Catholic schools don't have the man power or knowledge how to handle these situations. I wanted my mother to put in public school so badly, but wouldn't because this would upset my grandparents. I hated school in middle school grades and when I got to high school I just turned into your emo kid and ignored pretty much everyone. Well except for my little emo art kid group Eventually, I kind of became the bully and retaliated against everyone and told everyone to f-off even when they told me to have nice day. Then at 17 I began to date a 24 year old body builder. We worked out alot together and I took my anger out in sweat. Eventually, I was the cause of him to get a divorce from his wife. Oh well.

Know I take my knowledge and impart great wisdom into my students about bullying DAILY! (Sarcasm off) Nothing really works, They have to grow out of this phase and regret the mistakes they make on their own like I did in high school.

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"None is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people safe as they are the
ultimate guardians of their own liberty."- Thomas Jefferson

"Yeah, I'm rehearsing my poker face. I don't handle stupid well. *sigh*" - Farsky

Being a girl didn't help me at all. It was hard being the only one 'different' in class. 6th through 8th grade was pure hell.

This

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"None is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people safe as they are the
ultimate guardians of their own liberty."- Thomas Jefferson

"Yeah, I'm rehearsing my poker face. I don't handle stupid well. *sigh*" - Farsky

Ironically, some of the stupidity started as a response to the fact that they were losing students by the truckload to the local Catholic school. The first thing was the new grading system, they axed the standard 90/80/70/60 A/B/C/D 4.0 GPA scale and replaced it. The new system was that 94-100 was an A, 87-94 was a B, 79-87 was a C, and 70-79 was a D. In "exchange" for this they put everyone on a five point scale. (an A was worth 5.0) This let them advertise the fact that an A at their school was "harder" to get and therefore the school must be better, even though they didn't change anything but the scale. Of course, this change also had the effect of torpedoing the college chances of the entire student body, as colleges would generally not bother to research this system and would just look at the letters. Many people got Bs and Cs but thought they were doing great because their "GPA" was 3.5, and a 3.5 is really good, right? Nope, now you can't get into a good college, sucks to be you.

I'm not sure whose idea the collective punishment thing was or why they did it, but the administration decided it would be a great idea to use it for EVERYTHING. It got to the point where individuals were not even penalized for tardiness, instead each class had an allowed amount of tardies for everyone and if the class went over everyone got punished. As a side effect of doing collective punishment for everything, they stopped caring about finding out who was actually guilty when rules were violated. They just blamed the closest person whenever they got there and then justified it to them by saying they'd get the same punishment anyways regardless of who they found to be guilty. This led to a massive amount of contempt by the students for the administration, and there was absolutely massive amounts of vandalism. One week, the fire alarm was pulled 20 times. The library got set on fire in another incident, and once some students broke in at night and put crazy glue in the locks of every door in the building, forcing the school to replace all of them. They tried to respond to this with their collective punishment tactics, but since it was a public school in a fairly wealthy area there wasn't a whole lot they could actually DO to the students. First they tried closing all the bathrooms. As in, students were not allowed to use the bathroom on campus while school was in session. Next in response to the fire alarm thing, they made the entire student body stay after normal dismissal. This might have worked except one official thought it was an incredible idea to not allow students to leave even if their parents showed up to fetch them. I swear I am not making this up, they had teachers take him from his regular class and moved him to another room so his parents could not find him. They had to drop the "detention for the entire student body" thing after the fallout from that.

I never actually got to see how this ended, we moved away when the stupid was still in full force. I've heard that the school and administration are much better now, but I have no idea how it actually started improving.

On a related note, I said something mean about a girl... 21 years ago, to someone else who told her what I said.

Basically, it was that I did not think she was very pretty.

I still feel very very bad about this.

I don't want to bring it up again just to make myself feel better about it, but would it make her feel better to apologize 21 years later? I'd have to track her down. It's not something I could undo, just apologize for. Let it go?

Go watch Billy Madison. It is never too late.

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Excerpt from a message I received on facebook a few years ago.



I honestly only vaguely remember the incident, and certainly this guy wasn't one of the worst offenders--this was sort of a daily thing, so this one incident didn't really stick in my mind.

But its nice to know that someone few up a little.

This was a conversation between me and a female friend that went something like this:

I think so and so likes you, you should ask her out.
Really? I don't think so.
Why not?
I don't think she's very pretty.

In my naivety I assumed said friend would not tell her, but apparently she did and the girl got very upset. There's also a slight risk that she was told something different, and still got upset.

But it's not like I was picking on her. So, it would end up being like this:

Hi, remember me? 21 years ago, I let it slip that I didn't think you were pretty. Sorry I said that.

Our teachers were pretty good with bullying and some kids got into serious trouble for doing it.

If there was a fight, however, it was more play ground rules. After you're done tumbling it out, then both people got in trouble.

This isn't accurate from the college standpoint. Your numerical grades are sent to the college and the college calculates a GPA based upon its own system. At least major schools do, since they attract students from around the country and the decimal scale is hardly universal, so its the only way for the universities to normalize the grades for comparison. Whats more, its been my experience that GPA has minimal impact compared to ACT/SAT scores.

The GPA your school used was only relevant and used at your school for things like class ranking, honor systems, etc.

Whats more, the logic of your conclusion doesn't hold up, since the higher value of the grade more than offsets the smaller grade range and actually inflates people's GPAs compared to the actual earned grade.

And for the record, my school district growing up used a scale similar to the one you posted (A was 100 to 93, B was 85 to 92, C was 75 to 84, below 60 was an F) with a 4 point scale (AP classes were worth 1 point extra, so an A in AP English for example was worth 5). Our class had no problem getting into colleges.

This was not my experience in the application process. That was 10 years ago so I doubt I remember it perfectly, but when I talked with guidance counselors the information they printed off only had the letters on it. I specifically remember that twice I was told that I should take Calculus again because I only got a "C" (84%) in the class in high school. I also tended to get assigned to the remedial English class they put people not "good enough" for College Composition I in. The college I eventually went to (University of Missouri - Columbia) did let me take the classes I wanted, but they made clear they were doing this with great reluctance due to my "bad" grades and only because I was insisting and had 1470 SAT/34 ACT scores. I remember always thinking it was ridiculous that I got automatically admitted due to my SAT score but then they wanted to put me in all remedial classes to start.

I remember that my school didn't know its *** from a hole in the ground when it came to what colleges valued.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."