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Oct. 19th, 2010 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikSo I took a little break and went to play on LJ, thinking I'd check to see what's been posted, and then write something up about the intensive this last weekend.
...and instead I wrote way too much in a response to a post in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theferret's journal, about the things kids can do to make it less likely to be bullied. (I think I'm inclining towards the opinion that learning social skills is innately useful, whether or not one decides to conform - among other things, it gives you the power to decide - and completely separate from shutting down bullies. Which also should happen.) I guess I'd been thinking about the bullying thing a bit too much.
Anyhow, I'm posting my response here because - hey! - it's like I posted something. And maybe I'll write about the intensive later.
I wonder if one could rephrase this in terms where being a bully and being a target are posited as being on separate axes. There is going to be a certain amount of social cruelty, even with "nice kids" where the situation is well managed in ways to avoid bullying. People who are targets - and being a target is something a person will have some amount of influence over, but that amount can be from very little to really a lot - are going to generally receive a disproportionate share of the social cruelty. Teaching that management bit really has to be handled with a lot of compassion. Managing bullies is something different altogether. (Okay, I'd still say is should be managed with compassion. But my definition of compassion is pretty broad.)
It's pretty amazing, in some ways, that I wasn't bullied more. I didn't exactly lack social skills exactly - certainly, I got social cues and had some idea what to do with them, but OMG I was a weird kid. My second and third grade teacher fricking saved my life, largely by intervening with my family to get me out of there, which took some doing. When I was in elementary school, I really don't think it was particularly possible for me to bridge the social gap. One could argue that I made it worse for myself when I did things like bring in college level math texts - but the thing was everyone already knew that I was working several grades ahead of anyone in the class. I don't think there was much worse to make that. In some ways, that I was doing college level stuff was at least kind of cool. There were a number of kids I was vaguely friendly with sometimes but it was really hard to get past the bit where we just had nothing in common.* (Ironically, one of the reasons my mother resisted having me go into the gifted program was because she thought I would never learn how to relate to people there. Though, considering my mother, it is also entirely possible that she was mostly punishing me. This also might be one of the reasons why I tend to think of myself as not having gotten bullied - it wasn't that bad, really, and it positively paled beside what I got at home.) That being said, while there were a few pretty stunning examples of social cruelty - my teacher dealt with them well - and third grade was a pretty generally miserable year, I didn't get the kind of bullying many people talk about.
And then I moved into the gifted program and almost immediately found friends and became fairly social. Ah, geek culture. But not just geek culture - by sixth grade I thought I'd figured out how the game worked (and I'd gotten somewhat interested in Fashion). So I made a concerted try at being popular, and it worked. I'd had a suspicion that it was a combination of a skill set (which wasn't really all that difficult) and a shell game (having the social confidence to pull of this part is I think what a lot of people stumble over, and while I wasn't exactly confident, I had a good poker face and could do a lot with brute determination) and my experience at least was that that was about it, really.
Near the end of sixth grade I got completely disgusted with myself, buzzed off my cute little waver hair cut and started wearing mostly men's clothes. (Which, hey, this was the mid eighties, and it worked well enough.) And dropped the popular set as a set, though I stayed friends with a few individuals. I was just sick of the whole thing... Not just one thing, but a lot of little things, like when I caught myself rephrasing and presenting opinions from the New Yorker music reviews as my own because while there was plenty of music I liked those particular groups just struck me as tedious and I couldn't be bothered. Though, huh... another example. Through most of seventh grade, my nickname was "Butch". Which I suppose could have been a slur on my gender presentation and/or sexuality, and I think it was coined by people who were not my friends. But I thought it was funny, and my friends adopted it. I didn't quite understand what it meant, but it seemed to fit well enough and it wasn't a problem for me. I wonder how much of that not being about bullying was my response - if I'd been embarrassed and humiliated, how would it have gone?
So. All that babble is to establish my biases. If I were teaching a kid about how to navigate social situations** I would teach them that social interactions are a skill, and that like other skills it comes more easily to some people than with others, but, again like other skills, it can be studied and learned. Kind of like driving, or doing math, or writing. (I would probably also mention that social interaction came a lot more easily to my younger sister than to me, but that this hasn't been entirely to my detriment and in many - most - ways I've generally been happier with my social life than she has.) I'd really make the point that this isn't some innate thing, it's not a measure of their character, and that social validation is something that they may well choose not to seek and that that is okay. However, there is a necessary subset of skills that they really do need just to get on. And that furthermore, as is the case with many other skills, if you go on to learn how it works pretty well, not just the getting by set, you can reach a level of skill where you can choose to break the rules, understand what they are and why you're breaking it... and either do so knowing you can get away with it or at least understanding the likely consequences and taking them on intentionally.
I want to empower them, and give them more or a sense of things than "if you do this, you can slide under the radar". And I don't want to tell them that this has innate value beyond being better able to communicate and generally smoothing their lives. Being popular, while probably generally better than being bullied, isn't necessarily better than flying under the radar, and having a couple of close friends you trade books with. It's kind of like money - having more doesn't necessarily make you happier once you have enough. And you get to figure out your own enough.
* I should mention that I'm a fan of gifted education, particularly as a form of special needs education.
** It seems relevant to mention that I did spend a couple of years working in a school for gifted children especially those with unmedicated ADHD, and this kind of thing did come up. But I won't go into the story of why one of my third graders had a safe-word...
...and instead I wrote way too much in a response to a post in
theferret's journal, about the things kids can do to make it less likely to be bullied. (I think I'm inclining towards the opinion that learning social skills is innately useful, whether or not one decides to conform - among other things, it gives you the power to decide - and completely separate from shutting down bullies. Which also should happen.) I guess I'd been thinking about the bullying thing a bit too much.Anyhow, I'm posting my response here because - hey! - it's like I posted something. And maybe I'll write about the intensive later.
I wonder if one could rephrase this in terms where being a bully and being a target are posited as being on separate axes. There is going to be a certain amount of social cruelty, even with "nice kids" where the situation is well managed in ways to avoid bullying. People who are targets - and being a target is something a person will have some amount of influence over, but that amount can be from very little to really a lot - are going to generally receive a disproportionate share of the social cruelty. Teaching that management bit really has to be handled with a lot of compassion. Managing bullies is something different altogether. (Okay, I'd still say is should be managed with compassion. But my definition of compassion is pretty broad.)
It's pretty amazing, in some ways, that I wasn't bullied more. I didn't exactly lack social skills exactly - certainly, I got social cues and had some idea what to do with them, but OMG I was a weird kid. My second and third grade teacher fricking saved my life, largely by intervening with my family to get me out of there, which took some doing. When I was in elementary school, I really don't think it was particularly possible for me to bridge the social gap. One could argue that I made it worse for myself when I did things like bring in college level math texts - but the thing was everyone already knew that I was working several grades ahead of anyone in the class. I don't think there was much worse to make that. In some ways, that I was doing college level stuff was at least kind of cool. There were a number of kids I was vaguely friendly with sometimes but it was really hard to get past the bit where we just had nothing in common.* (Ironically, one of the reasons my mother resisted having me go into the gifted program was because she thought I would never learn how to relate to people there. Though, considering my mother, it is also entirely possible that she was mostly punishing me. This also might be one of the reasons why I tend to think of myself as not having gotten bullied - it wasn't that bad, really, and it positively paled beside what I got at home.) That being said, while there were a few pretty stunning examples of social cruelty - my teacher dealt with them well - and third grade was a pretty generally miserable year, I didn't get the kind of bullying many people talk about.
And then I moved into the gifted program and almost immediately found friends and became fairly social. Ah, geek culture. But not just geek culture - by sixth grade I thought I'd figured out how the game worked (and I'd gotten somewhat interested in Fashion). So I made a concerted try at being popular, and it worked. I'd had a suspicion that it was a combination of a skill set (which wasn't really all that difficult) and a shell game (having the social confidence to pull of this part is I think what a lot of people stumble over, and while I wasn't exactly confident, I had a good poker face and could do a lot with brute determination) and my experience at least was that that was about it, really.
Near the end of sixth grade I got completely disgusted with myself, buzzed off my cute little waver hair cut and started wearing mostly men's clothes. (Which, hey, this was the mid eighties, and it worked well enough.) And dropped the popular set as a set, though I stayed friends with a few individuals. I was just sick of the whole thing... Not just one thing, but a lot of little things, like when I caught myself rephrasing and presenting opinions from the New Yorker music reviews as my own because while there was plenty of music I liked those particular groups just struck me as tedious and I couldn't be bothered. Though, huh... another example. Through most of seventh grade, my nickname was "Butch". Which I suppose could have been a slur on my gender presentation and/or sexuality, and I think it was coined by people who were not my friends. But I thought it was funny, and my friends adopted it. I didn't quite understand what it meant, but it seemed to fit well enough and it wasn't a problem for me. I wonder how much of that not being about bullying was my response - if I'd been embarrassed and humiliated, how would it have gone?
So. All that babble is to establish my biases. If I were teaching a kid about how to navigate social situations** I would teach them that social interactions are a skill, and that like other skills it comes more easily to some people than with others, but, again like other skills, it can be studied and learned. Kind of like driving, or doing math, or writing. (I would probably also mention that social interaction came a lot more easily to my younger sister than to me, but that this hasn't been entirely to my detriment and in many - most - ways I've generally been happier with my social life than she has.) I'd really make the point that this isn't some innate thing, it's not a measure of their character, and that social validation is something that they may well choose not to seek and that that is okay. However, there is a necessary subset of skills that they really do need just to get on. And that furthermore, as is the case with many other skills, if you go on to learn how it works pretty well, not just the getting by set, you can reach a level of skill where you can choose to break the rules, understand what they are and why you're breaking it... and either do so knowing you can get away with it or at least understanding the likely consequences and taking them on intentionally.
I want to empower them, and give them more or a sense of things than "if you do this, you can slide under the radar". And I don't want to tell them that this has innate value beyond being better able to communicate and generally smoothing their lives. Being popular, while probably generally better than being bullied, isn't necessarily better than flying under the radar, and having a couple of close friends you trade books with. It's kind of like money - having more doesn't necessarily make you happier once you have enough. And you get to figure out your own enough.
* I should mention that I'm a fan of gifted education, particularly as a form of special needs education.
** It seems relevant to mention that I did spend a couple of years working in a school for gifted children especially those with unmedicated ADHD, and this kind of thing did come up. But I won't go into the story of why one of my third graders had a safe-word...
