Sticks and Stones

Posted on March 12, 2006 in Childhood

This study makes sense to me. When I was in the fourth and the fifth grades, I was forced out of “civilized” Catholic school society because of my emotional problems. Not that my parents helped. You see, I cried when people called me names. My parents joined the kids and the teachers in calling me “baby”. And my grades dropped. The teachers and my parents blamed it on me, but a psychologist persuaded my parents to take me out of that school.

The ridicule I experienced over the years disconcentrated my mind. Though my reading skills soon regained their former position, my math skills suffered. My father believed that it was because I was getting back at him. I just couldn’t put things together so easily in math as I could in English. Perhaps he’d hit me one time too many, damaging the brain so that I could not make numerical associations. I know that I feel anxiety when faced with anything beyond +, -, x, /.

I faced despots at home and terrors in school.

Teachers and parents often resist programs to end bullying in schools. “Oh,” they say, “we can’t control kids” or “They’ve got to learn that the world is rough.” We culture the society of bullies which dominates our world today by not checking them in their youth. What second rate talents have risen on taunts and abuse? What good minds have been lost? I showed promise early on. And then I spent more time watching my back than on my studies. I just squeaked in to a good college. Was this for society’s better good that this happened? What about the others who lost their faith?

Maybe this new finding will spur teachers and schools to end the reign of the playground tyrants.