Re: Bullying

We recently watched "If You Really Knew Me" in our issues class. It is a show featured on MTV that follows a school for a couple of days and on the middle day they have challenge day. The show follows a few students, most of the time upperclassmen and from different cliques. It shows how they would act on a normal day, then it shows the challenge day, and then the day after affects.
Specifically Challenge Day is a day where about 100 students gather in the gymnasium and they go through a set of activies, where they are supposed to "step outside their bubble". One of the girls, when asked if she had heard anything about challenge day, says "I hear everybody cries, even if you don't have the intention of crying that day". Challenge Day in my mind is an in-effective idea. These kids are in high school and to be honest they will do whatever it takes to get on MTV and if that means cry and pretend be a nice kid for a day then they will do it because they want to be famous. When Deerfield had the Endiskize music video shot it was the same way, everybody was all nice to each other and would do whatever they had to to get on camera because the video was supposed be a huge hit (it still has not come out yet) but when that was all over the school just went back to the way it was. And I believe that is how most high schools would react to having cameras at their school. Sure challenge day might be affective for the school for a few weeks, but as noted in our class the school will just fall back into its old patterns after it wears off.
After catching up with Jamie Nabozny, the student who sued his school for not protecting him against bullying, I learn that he has returned home many times since the 1996 trial and that he is not afraid to go back there because the town is proud of him. On his first trip back he was very scared because he did not know how the towns people would respond to him, he learned very early in that trip that they were happy becasue the school was a safer place now. I have learned that he has now been able to make peace with most of the bullies that cause his problems and that they have reconciled. This is next visit is a special return for Jamie because they will be showing his movie tomorrow for the entire city. It will be the first time that he has been back since the releasing of his film, which is a documentry with also recreating of the scenes. It is narrated by famous Jane Lynch who stars on Glee and who is also a member of the gay community. The people of Ashland are very proud of Jamie and this will be a special trip back for him.
DHS does not really have a bullying problem, perhaps. There is some bullying that does exist at DHS but this is actually the "boys will be boys" kind of bullying. No one ever really takes it to heart and it happens to everybody. Everybody is bullied at some point in their lives at DHS, how they respond to it is what can make them sucessful here. Deerfield is a very sheltered community which makes it a much safer place for kids growing up and that attitude it carried over towards the school and the people in it. If there is bullying that does go on here, it is usually never seen, its just heard.
I think when it comes to potential solutions for bullying.... challenge day is not the answer. I said this in class and I am sticking to it, kids will do anything when they know there is a camera watching them. Make it a little less obvious, do challenge day but with a hidden camera so the kids don't know they are being watched. See how they react when there is no camera watching them, are they still going to open up and let people in, or will they react to those activities as if they were a joke and dismiss them before they ever took part in them. My solution to bullying is that there is no solution. It has been a problem for many decades and if there was a solution then it would have been solved by now. Obviously for the more serious cases of bullying there should be some sort of punishable offense, but bullying is a problem that will never stop because boys will be boys and high school students will never learn to change the way they are, they don't know better it is our nature. Bullying doesn't make you a man, it is dealing with it that does.