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CAREERS special
O PINION
April 18, 2018
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It’s Up to Grown-Up to Stop Bullying, Not Kids
If only my
teachers
intervened
J ill r iChardson
Bullying’s been in
the news a bit lately, in part be-
cause of the Parkland shooting.
In response, some people sug-
gested that school children them-
selves should befriend kids who
get bullied to prevent school
shootings. Others say this is vic-
tim-blaming.
I’m not thinking about it too
much as a national issue, howev-
er. It came up in my life in a more
personal way. I suffer from the
lasting impacts of childhood trau-
ma, mostly anxiety and migraines.
This past week, I realized that
the school bullying I’d experi-
enced must have made a far deep-
er impact on me than I’d thought.
It happened between about first
and third grade, and again in ju-
nior high. I’ve spent most of my
life trying to just bury those mem-
ories and not think about them.
Deep down, bullying made me
feel like there’s something wrong
by
with me, and if I got too
close to another person,
they’d discover it and re-
ject me. It’s made me feel
mistrustful, and powerless.
My parents comfort-
ed me — and sometimes
scolded me for being an
atively unsupervised spaces, like
when we walked to school or
played outside. But so much of
the bullying happened in the class-
room.
Why didn’t the teachers ever do
something? I hold the adults who
watched and did nothing far more
bullies said about me and they
believed it. I thought as soon
as anyone heard the awful truth
about me, they wouldn’t be my
friends. Like a cancer metastasiz-
ing through the school and result-
ing in an inevitable social death
for me.
They have no memory of people picking
on me. They remember getting picked on
themselves. Each of us was in our own
private hell, entirely oblivious that everyone
else was in their own private hell.
easy target — but they rarely took
action to stop the bullying. Final-
ly, in eighth grade, they asked the
school to keep a particularly nasty
boy out of my class.
The bullying went on under
several adults’ noses: my teachers,
soccer coaches, and Girl Scout
leaders. The adults didn’t inter-
vene.
Some of this took place in rel-
responsible than the seven and
eight year olds who perpetrated it.
This week, I decided to change
my own narrative. I reached out
to people I was friends with as
a child. Most aren’t my close
friends as adults, but they grew up
to be good people. I asked them,
what do they remember?
Back then, I felt like every-
one in our grade heard what the
Instead, the people I went to
school with told me that they got
bullied too. I had no idea.
They have no memory of peo-
ple picking on me. They remem-
ber getting picked on themselves.
Each of us was in our own private
hell, entirely oblivious that every-
one else was in their own private
hell.
One person told me she felt like
a huge dork, and she thought I was
cool and wanted to be my friend.
Oh. Really? Because I definite-
ly thought it was the other way
around, and she was the cool one.
Talking about painful elemen-
tary school experiences with old
friends has been eye-opening and
healing. I thought I was the freak,
the reject, but it turns out I was
just one kid among many, all get-
ting picked on.
Where were the adults? Why
weren’t the teachers intervening?
So much less bullying would have
happened if only our teachers
didn’t stand for it.
Why didn’t our parents contact
the school? Or call the parents of
the kids who did the bullying? It
seems everyone just took it for
granted that little kids were going
to pick on one another, and they
let us get on with it.
Kids are going to be kids.
That’s why they’re under adult
supervision. It’s the adults’ jobs to
stop bullying.
OtherWords columnist Jill
Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food Sys-
tem Is Broken and What We Can
Do to Fix It.
Students of Color Need to See More People of Color
There’s no
reason for me to
be alone
n ate b oWling
I spent most of
my first year of
grad school sitting
in the back row
of class with my
hood up. There were nearly 40 of
us in the cohort. Two were black.
My hoodie was an act of silent
dissent. Today, I completely under-
stand when my students want to
do the same, even with me in front
of the room. Academia and public
schools are spaces where people of
color often feel underrepresented,
unwelcome and unheard.
From third grade through high
school, I was a student in a series
of neighborhood public schools.
Afterward, I went to community
college and then on to a public
liberal arts college where I earned
my bachelor’s and eventually my
master’s degree. Each phase in my
educational journey shared two
characteristics:
1. The further I progressed, the
fewer black and brown classmates
I had.
2. As I progressed, regardless
by
of the demographics of the student
population, the faculty and admin-
istrators were uniformly nearly all
white.
That needs to change.
An organization I am part
of, the National Network of
State Teachers of the Year, re-
cently released videos designed
to provoke conversations that
will lead to this kind of change.
Called Courageous Conver-
diagrams overlap in a largely
white and female workforce.
At the same time, because of
higher birth rates among immi-
grant populations and the “myste-
rious phenomenon” of dispropor-
tionately high numbers of white
children in private schools, the
majority of the population of stu-
dents in public school are students
of color, and those numbers are
headed even higher, based on en-
The lack of representation is
an equity issue, and to resolve it
we can look to lessons elsewhere
in our society. During the Viet-
nam War the Pentagon realized
that majority brown platoons of
soldiers and Marines wouldn’t
take life-or-death orders from a
uniformly white officer corps.
The Pentagon thus underwent an
intentional effort to diversify the
officer corps. Since then, the Pen-
The lack of representation is an equity issue, and
to resolve it we can look to lessons elsewhere in
our society. During the Vietnam War the Pentagon
realized that majority brown platoons of soldiers and
Marines wouldn’t take life-or-death orders from a
uniformly white officer corps.
sations About Race in Schools, the
videos provide an effective start-
ing point for real discussions that
should be happening in schools-par-
ticularly in colleges and universi-
ties-across this country.
Research tells us that upwards
of 80 percent of U.S. teachers are
white. Different research tells us
that nearly 80 percent of teachers
are female. Obviously, those Venn
rollment numbers in lower grades.
Schools systems need to do a
better job of attracting and retaining
effective teachers of color. Students
of color need to see more people of
color in positions of expertise and
authority, and teachers need to be
conversant and literate in the cultur-
al traditions that are present in their
classrooms. None of these state-
ments should be controversial.
tagon has submitted amicus curiae
briefs in every major affirmative
action case before the U.S. Su-
preme Court because they under-
stand that representation matters.
The word “disruption” gets
hurled around frequently in busi-
ness and increasingly in education.
Usually, it’s about handing Sili-
con Valley tech bros a metric-ton
of venture capital to sprinkle the
#EdTech fairy dust of the moment.
But I’m going to argue that when
it comes to teacher diversity and
representation in schools, we ac-
tually need disruption.
In my neck of the woods the
numbers are especially grim:
There are only about 800 black
teachers in all of Washington
State. In my 12-year teaching
career, I have never worked with
another black male general educa-
tion teacher.
There’s no reason for me to be
alone. We see talented students
of color all over higher education
because universities know how to
recruit them. As Jeff Duncan-An-
drade says, “Look at any college
football or basketball team and
tell me colleges don’t know how
to recruit black talent. When I was
a kid I thought Georgetown was
an HBCU.”
But it can’t just be student ath-
letes. We need to bring in students
who can increase teacher diver-
sity. It’s imperative-and it’s well
within our power.
Nate Bowling is a high school
government teacher in Tacoma,
Wash. who was named the 2016
Washington State Teacher of the
year and a finalist for National
Teacher of the Year. His blog is
called A Teacher’s Evolving Mind.