matching tracksuits

The question:

Why do people try to irritate, anger, frustrate, or annoy other people? What motivation drives people to be almost-bullies and/or bullies?

My response:

Teasing and poking fun at someone can often be harmless: if everyone is good with the ribbing, few feelings suffer. This is why, when we're making new seating groups in class, I always ask "Who wants to get picked on this time?" I always have a lot of students to choose from to use as an example kid that one might not want to get stuck with. "We all know someone will get stuck with Bob," I begin, "But what is our reaction to being grouped with someone we're not crazy about?" "Nothing!" comes the chorus reply. Yet despite this there are still some moans and complaints about the groupings, though to their credit, the students are almost always complaining because they're with some of the same students they were with in the last seating arrangement. Sometimes, though, the ribbing and joking don't feel like jokes, especially when they're not the product of mutual consent. Yet some people knowingly, even intentionally, cross that line. They do annoying things because they are annoying, and the more we ask such a person to stop, the more likely they are to continue.

The journal prompt from school:

You had a lesson with Ms. I or Mrs. T about bullying. Write a summary of what you learned. What is bullying? What’s the difference between bullying and teasing?

I've begun answering the questions, too -- what's good for the goose and all that:

When I was about fourteen, I went to a three-week church summer camp in Texas. It was held on a college campus, and we campers stayed in the college dorms. I don't remember much about the time we spent in the dorms, but one thing stands out: our mistreatment of a boy named Sam.

Looking back on it, I realize Sam was likely on the autism spectrum, but autism wasn't a word any of us had even heard of, and to many campers, Sam was just strange. As one might expect, that led to Sam being picked on. I'm not sure any of it was malicious: we were just trying to be irritating and perhaps occasionally infuriating. And yes, that use of "we" does constitute a confession: with much shame, I admit that I took part in the hazing as well.

Today's prompt has got me thinking about whether or not we were bullying Sam. Given the fact that we weren't trying to intimidate or to frighten Sam but just trying to annoy or even anger him, I would be tempted to argue that it wasn't bullying in the strictest sense. But some of the boys took things so far that they undoubtedly made life miserable for Sam. Some of the things we did hurt him emotionally. I'm sure he hated the entire camp experience and likely begged his parents to let him come home. However I label it (and my reticence about calling it bullying is not an effort to diminish my own culpability but rather an effort to apply the term accurately), it was an awful thing to do, a source of shame for me all these decades later.

But more than my cruelty haunts me still: why did I even part in that? Several of the boys leading the hazing were a couple of years older than I was, and perhaps that explains some of it. It felt good to be accepted by the older kids, even if it was acceptance of a dubious nature. Yet I, too, had been picked on mercilessly at times in school, and I knew how awful that felt.

I wish I'd had the guts to stand up for Sam or at least the common decency not to participate. But I didn't.

I've been reading the first batch of journals from my sixth graders, and much of it is what you'd expect: cutely amusing from the girls; generally fairly lackluster from the boys.

And then I read Z's journal. Her family went through some tough times a couple of years back, and it caused her to be very insecure, she wrote, and she confessed that that manifested itself in a meanness that most would never expect from her. She worked her way through it, but it made her into the person she is today, she concluded. She is, in her words, someone who "give[s] grace to mean people" because one never knows what they've been through.

That's a lesson most adults don't seem to learn let alone an eleven-year-old girl.

When I began working at Hughes nearly twenty years ago, one of the first things I had to learn was a number of different procedures and protocols. What does one do on hall duty in this spot? How many grades do I have to give during a quarter? Where do I take my students during a fire drill, and what paperwork do I need to complete once the drill is over? What is the procedure for afternoon dismissal? How do I handle late work? All of these things were already in place when I began, and while the new principal (who started the same year as I did) made a few tweaks in the program, he wasn't inventing out of a void: he was merely changing existing procedures.

Yet when founding a new school, none of that is in place. Last year we had to decide on all of those things and more. Then this year, moving to a brand new building, we had to re-invent most of it. Four weeks into the new school year and we've finally got most of this settled. Class changes follow certain guidelines and procedures. Lunch and recess play by rules that we're constantly adjusting to smooth transitions between the two.

No procedure has given us more grief, though, than afternoon dismissal. We have approximately 750 students that we have to get out of the building and into cars as quickly as we can while maintaining strict safety protocols to prevent any mishaps that might result in injury. The first time we ran the carline with all students in attendance, it took well over an hour to get everyone into cars and heading home. We have in place protocols now that have reduced that time. I thought of the tweak we're now implementing that has made things go so much faster, but it was a tweak that we had to implement carefully and thoughtfully. Run carelessly, our procedure could be problematic at best, but we've worked out an entire system of checks and redundant protocols that ensure everything will run smoothly for everyone. It's a whole system involving verbal communication, non-verbal communication in the form of color-coded signs and groupings, adults in specific and strategic locations to keep a careful eye on everything. Taken altogether, the new procedure has reduced the time to just over half an hour -- an acceptable time for a magnet school, which has no buses for students.

This is just a small version of what we have done as societies and cultures for millennia. Why do we drive on the left side of the road in most of the world? Why do we stop at red lights and go on green lights? Why do we implement this particular punishment for that particular crime? Indeed, why do we decide something is a crime -- or more strikingly, is a crime in some situations but not in others? Nothing novel about these thoughts -- college freshmen taking Sociology 101 cover these ideas in the first few lectures of the semester. Yet I've never been in a situation where I'm part of the creation of procedures that, in coming years, will be something that new hires must learn and master.

A-Day students began with a quick agenda check to make sure all students were caught up with their agendas. I've allowed students to work on their agendas without much input from me, but we will now begin regular agenda checks.

After completing the check, we finished our first SMART goal beginning with a look at three example goals. As with yesterday's work, students worked to identify the various SMART parts of the goals.

• I will raise my math grade from a C to a B by the end of the semester by completing all homework, asking two questions in class each week, and studying for 30 minutes after school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
• I will increase my reading level by one grade level by the end of the school year by reading 20 minutes every night and completing one book report each month.
• I will improve my science test scores from an average of 70% to at least 85% within the next two months by reviewing notes for 15 minutes each night and meeting with my teacher once a week for extra help.

We finished the day by pulling together all the elements of our SMART goal planning guide into a cohesive, comprehensive goal for the first quarter.