Glad you asked. I’ve been teaching high school and adult vocational classes for almost 17 years. The high school students I interact with are some of the sweetest, kindest, happiest and most comical people I know. Those same kids that exhibit that behavior (toward me) are the same kids that are also the most devious, deceptive and cruel people I know. Devious and deceptive comes with the territory I guess, and I suppose it was a part of my childhood too (I don’t remember that though, I just remember being a little angel), but the cruelty is usually reserved for certain cliques who engage in it to varying degrees (this is like giving a chemistry set to a 4 year old, because they don’t know the level of damage their cruelty is doing).
This is where the deception comes in. I rarely see ongoing cruelty and bullying going on, I usually see it in the form of an obviously distraught, crying student sitting with the SRO and the counselor, and that’s if we’re lucky and the kid doesn’t bottle it up and try to deal with it themselves.
At this point, in case you didn’t know, I’m talking about bullying. And the kid who’s getting bullied usually doesn’t want to be a snitch, and the bullies aren’t going to snitch on each other. Remember, “snitches get stitches”. That is the root of the problem, from my perspective. The solution? A long, difficult slog back to teaching children to interact with love and kindness and snitching.
To my knowledge, every one of these school shooters going back at least to Columbine, has been bullied, ostracized or otherwise treated differently from their peers. This is cruel on its face and can certainly engender hopelessness in the victim.
Most of these kids have a very small circle of friends. These kids need to understand abhorrent behavior among their own peers. it’s simply not normal to drive around shooting people with BB guns, cutting up your own face with a knife “for fun”, and posting pictures of guns that you own on the internet. And that phrase “I didn’t think he was serious” has got to go.
I need to say it again: the bullying has to stop, even if it means making an example Of the bully’s. Children are cruel.