Middle School Terrors: Help Your Child Deal With Bullies

If you look back on your younger years, you remember progressing from elementary school to middle school, and eventually up to high school. You will probably also remember going from happy-go-lucky, to really scared of that first transition. This transition pulls you out of your separate classes with the same people and throws you into the middle of a crowded hallway trying to figure out how the hell to get your locker open. This fight with your locker is only the first (assuming there wasn't anything completely out of the ordinary on your bus ride) of many battles experienced upon the initial transition into middle school.

Okay, so the fight with the locker is over, what next? Well, you have never been in this school before, except for orientation (where they didn't even let you walk around, so it was basically pointless anyway), so this is where you learn to find your way around the school-or at least back to your homeroom. These hallways are a scary place. In many schools, they are barely monitored at all so basically anything goes (until you scream at the top of your lungs because some kid twice your size came up behind you, knocked you books out of your hand, and tried to steal your lunch money...then I guess the teachers kind of have to pay attention). Oh, and lets not forget the dreaded locker room situation, where everyone has to change into their gym uniforms. Then there is being forced to join either band or chorus...like people want to share their non-existent musical talent. Then it is back into the hallways, which basically spawn cliques.

Upon entering middle school, and maybe even at the end of elementary school, labels are assigned to every person in the grade-jock, punk, nerd, loser, suck-up, prep, etc. It is the middle school hallways that allow this hatred to spread. Time between classes allows the gathering of cliques, which inevitably leads to rivalry between the groups. This advanced, self-esteem lowering name calling continues in the lunch rooms. It's like rats in an experiment-throw a bunch of them in a room, give them some food, and just watch them go at it.

No one teaches these children not to judge others. Sure, teachers preach respect, but do they actually get into any hands-on, "lets try it out" lectures. No.

My sophomore year of college, I took an Introduction to Education class. In this class we had to make up a lesson plan for a certain age group and present it to the class. One of my classmates made up (at least I am assuming it was original) the best lesson I have ever learned, and it was actually aimed towards middle schoolers. The class was divided into groups of four or five students, with each student possessing their own index card, which had a "stereotype/clique" (prep, jock, etc) on the front of it and tape on the back of it. The student could not see their own card, but had to put it on their forehead. The students would then take turns treating each member of their group how they would treat a person in that specific clique, and then you would have to guess what stereotype/clique you were. After doing this within your group, the class would reassemble, and the whole class would give an example of what someone said to them, guess what they were, and find out if they guessed right. Everyone kept saying to me "You go to any frat parties lately?", "How many girls did you sleep with last night?", "You got so drunk the other night!". I had no idea what I was, so I guessed alcoholic. Turns out that my card said I was a fraternity brother. The main point with this is that this lesson really made me look at stereotyping and cliques in a whole new light. No one really understands it until they experience it for themselves.

Bottom line: labeling is the biggest problem in middle schools today and someone needs to teach these kids that what they are doing is wrong and it hurts people (not to mention a waste of time).