Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most • Hacker News Board

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#21

Post by ticviking » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #11

From my limited experience - bullying is prevented by having friends. Groups of people don't get bullied, loners get bullied. Once you develop a little circle of friends, you'll largely be left alone. So the key is to give people enough time to develop friendships - in Russia, I had the same classmates, give or take, for years. The students were separated into gradations of capacity where those who got straight As (i…

This is largely untrue. It is prevented by having "ingroup" friends. I had a circle of 5-8 fellow "weirdos" who I had a grand time playing with.

Collectively we were the target of bullying. Our academic excellence (and thus copious free time) was the direct cause of being targeted. When you pound out the 50 problem worksheet in 20 minutes, and have the remaining 30 min to draw, imagine stories, and live in a shared fantasy world with that small group it's REALLY easy to be targeted.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#22

Post by ticviking » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

alanwatts wrote: post #15

The way this problem is framed is as if bullying were limited to school children and should only be addressed within the narrow scope of the classroom. The reality is bullies grow up and becomes adults and help run society. You cannot separate children from the influences of society at large. Bully: a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker. synonyms:persecutor, oppressor, tyrant,…

The unfortunate answer to that question is, "Yes".

Civilization is largely the product of a set of norms and institutions that allow the collective might of those willing to cooperate to be greater that that of bullies.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#23

Post by yakult » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 7:11 PM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #18

yakult wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I recall of highschool here in Australia, students are deliberately rotated and mixed up as much as possible to prevent cliques and long-term rivalries from forming. A teacher once told me this makes it easier to assert control. While I would have preferred the other way back then as a student, I wonder what the statistics say, in terms of outcomes. My gut feeling is that it reduces the outliers in student…

What you refer to as cliques - are actually friendships. Friendships and socializing, are hugely important. When you keep having to make new friends every year - you only learn to develop shallow relationships. This is a huge problem with consequences no anti-bullying campaign or work-etiquette pamphlet is ever going to solve. As for rivalries and cycles of revenge - can you give an example of what that'd look like?…

>What you refer to as cliques - are actually friendships. Friendships and socializing, are hugely important.

While I don't disagree, the effect is the same from the school's perspective:

1. they are hostile to group outsiders 2. punishing any member makes the whole group hostile to the teacher 3. they're a basis to spread peer pressure 4. they can form rivalries with other cliques

What I'm saying is, the positive effects do not benefit the school directly, while the negative effects do, and are difficult to deal with.

>As for rivalries and cycles of revenge - can you give an example of what that'd look like? I personally haven't experienced either.

Neither have I - possibly because of the mash up system - but I can see a failure mode like this:

student X quarrels with student Y; Student Y gets his friends together and beats up student X; student X gets his friends together and beats up a friend of student Y; etc. Now you have the start of a gang problem.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#24

Post by alexashka » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

ticviking wrote: post #21

alexashka wrote: post #11

From my limited experience - bullying is prevented by having friends. Groups of people don't get bullied, loners get bullied. Once you develop a little circle of friends, you'll largely be left alone. So the key is to give people enough time to develop friendships - in Russia, I had the same classmates, give or take, for years. The students were separated into gradations of capacity where those who got straight As (i…

This is largely untrue. It is prevented by having "ingroup" friends. I had a circle of 5-8 fellow "weirdos" who I had a grand time playing with. Collectively we were the target of bullying. Our academic excellence (and thus copious free time) was the direct cause of being targeted. When you pound out the 50 problem worksheet in 20 minutes, and have the remaining 30 min to draw, imagine stories, and live in a shared f…

I hear you. Where I grew up (Russia), those who excelled were put into classes where you were challenged.

To give a simple example: when I came to Canada, I was in grade 7. I didn't learn a single new math concept until grade 9, where we spent the entire semester learning 'slope' which I got the hang of within a week.

That's the Canadian school program being 3 years behind in 5 years. A disaster, and I'm not that smart.

Furthermore, I was sent to math competitions twice a year where I couldn't solve a single problem - those who could solve those problems, were sent to special schools where the brightest were again, challenged.

That's a systemic solution Russia had that I'm in favor of. In terms of making it work within the system you grew up in - it sounds like you found a group of friends.

You make it sound like the reason you were targeted is because you had free time. If you had been part of the soccer team for instance, would that have also been the case?

When smart kids complain about getting bullied solely for being so smart, I have to wonder. I am the smartest of the dummies or the dumbest of the smartest but I was also quite alright at sports, so I had that going for me.

I'd say the problem with smart kids who do find a group to be a part of and still feel like they were in a tough spot - your parents should've put you into a sports team or some form of athletics and that would've likely alleviated a lot of the problems.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#25

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 7:49 PM UTC

There's too much cultural baggage (in the United States at least) about bullying for anyone to be able to discuss it rationally. There must be a thousand movies and a million television episodes (most from the 80s) where all sorts of absurd lessons are taught. The bully is misunderstood and bullied himself (not always true), if you stand up for yourself it will stop (never true, often never possible), etc.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#26

Post by alanwatts » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

hnmcs wrote: post #20

alanwatts wrote: post #15

The way this problem is framed is as if bullying were limited to school children and should only be addressed within the narrow scope of the classroom. The reality is bullies grow up and becomes adults and help run society. You cannot separate children from the influences of society at large. Bully: a person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker. synonyms:persecutor, oppressor, tyrant,…

Honest, critical feedback. I can't put it any other way. Based on reading multiple posts by you over the past few days. You're not nearly as quality of a communicator as Alan Watts, not nearly as good of a thinker, not nearly as insightful as he. Since you're still green, I recommend just making a new name, and then continuing to do the internet forum philosophizing you do under some other name. That's my best honest…

The menu is not the dinner. The username is not the user. Who do you think you really are, hnmcs?

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#27

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

bediger4000 wrote: post #3

"Many K-12 school efforts to reduce bullying have proven not very effective, leading educators to wonder what bullying prevention approach works best." Could that be because the efforts have focused on having students, mostly those not subject to bullying, stop the bullying? My view is that only teachers and administrators can stop it, and further that teachers and administrators have informal policies that actually…

> Teachers and administrators know who the bullies are, they just don't do anything at all to stop them,

You can't stop them, not even teachers and administrators. Bullying is psychologically tormenting as much as physical. Even the "physical" can't be stopped... punished afterward, but the deterrence effect is minimal and by that time the damage is already done anyway. Next year it will be a different bully that hasn't had the deterrence effect kick in.

And the psychological? How are you supposed to stop gossiping or name-calling or any of the other forms? You could turn schools into prisons (haha, like they aren't already) and not stop that.

This isn't difficult to understand. If we fail to understand it, that's because we don't want to understand it.

You take every kid aged 5 to 18, drop them in an institutional building for 40 hours a week supervised by minimum wage workers who couldn't hack a real major, miseducate and propagandize to them... and you get bullying in there. It's not a function of any single one of these factors accept perhaps classroom size and school population size... but it's still a result.

The only way to prevent it would be to do away with public education. If each child was supervised by an adult, or ratios were tiny (say 3 kids per adult), you wouldn't much have this. But that ratio is impossible with a public school system.

And since you want the system, you can't do anything about the bullying. So we pretend that bullying is a problem solvable with half-assed non-solutions like this.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#28

Post by ticviking » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 8:14 PM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #24

ticviking wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is largely untrue. It is prevented by having "ingroup" friends. I had a circle of 5-8 fellow "weirdos" who I had a grand time playing with. Collectively we were the target of bullying. Our academic excellence (and thus copious free time) was the direct cause of being targeted. When you pound out the 50 problem worksheet in 20 minutes, and have the remaining 30 min to draw, imagine stories, and live in a shared f…

I hear you. Where I grew up (Russia), those who excelled were put into classes where you were challenged. To give a simple example: when I came to Canada, I was in grade 7. I didn't learn a single new math concept until grade 9, where we spent the entire semester learning 'slope' which I got the hang of within a week. That's the Canadian school program being 3 years behind in 5 years. A disaster, and I'm not that sma…

So I think you're onto something with moving kids to where they will be challenged in school. Systemically it keeps everyone engaged in the task of learning and I wish we would adopt it in the states.

I don't think that would stop bullying, only reduce particular kinds of it. Bullying serves the purpose of enforcing social norms. Putting people in a situation where ability is less of a way to break norms will reduce the bullying, but it won't eliminate it.

Quick clarification I'm not claiming I was bullied for being smart. I was bullied for being weird. Being challenged, or joining sports would have reduced that weirdness, and spare individual children some pain, but doesn't really change the problem of students electing to enforce social norms by humiliation and violence.

RE: Sports teams. We couldn't afford any of the organized sports available in my area(all of them had a few hundred dollars of gear and annual fees to participate in). By the time I was in middle school and had "free" access to sports I was so behind in developing the basic play skills that it simply marked me out as a newb

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#29

Post by CaptSpify » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 8:18 PM UTC

nicolas_t wrote: post #6

I was bullied in middle school (though not as bad as others) and stood by as other kids were bullied. When I saw other kids bullied, I just stood by because I was scared that I would be bullied more than I was already. I think in a lot of cases, most kids are bystander who are just afraid to do anything because of the fear of reprisal, the loss of status of associating themselves or defending someone who is less cool…

Not only that, but they are encouraged to stay out of it by teachers/administrators. Think about it like this:

"I can step in, and try to stop the bullying, and possibly get beat up. At the very least I'll get detention. Or I can just sit-back and watch."

And, IME, the kids that were bullied, were the "weird ones" (that was me!). So it generally doesn't improve your social status to help that kid. So bystanders have all the incentives to stay out of the bullying.

Re: Anti-bullying program focused on bystanders helps students who need it most

#30

Post by nanoverge » Tue, Feb 16, 2016, 8:20 PM UTC

I went to school in Vermont for three years, from age 10 - 13. I came from Sweden.

I was busy surviving socially and didn't have any resources to "step up". Every day I went to school was Terror on Elm Street.

Sure, friends would have helped. But friends are not made by an external party.

Today I know that it is guidence about who you are that makes a difference.

This can come in many forms. But just knowing that someone is thinking about you in school, for example, like a guidance counseler or a teacher, will make a world of difference. I see an indifferent or inexperienced class of teacher as a big part of the problem.

Being a teacher also means actually seeing your students, seeing as in making sure they are noticed, seen, talked to. That will give each student some form of strength to handle what's coming once he/she steps out into the school corridor.

It's your inner strength that will stop any bullying. Confident ppl are usually not targeted.