It Takes a Snitch

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Something just triggered this 50-year old memory from my elementary school years ...

There had been a rash of bullying incidents on the playground, so the administration hired some extra playground monitors. Their job was to observe and intervene whenever they saw someone being bullied. However, they never seemed to notice any bullying until one of us kids pointed it out to them.

They were not living up to their stated purpose, yet the administration did nothing to correct this situation - years later, you could still see them clustered near the door, smoking, drinking coffee, and laughing over their private jokes.

I wonder why they did not try to stop those playground bullies until after the bullies had struck, even though it was always the same bullies that were involved?

Oh this brings back memories!

I do not recall ever being saved by a monitor. As you said - they seemed more interested in socialising.

It has not changed, my 8 year old nephew gets bullied every day and no longer bothers telling a monitor or teacher as he is told to "play somewhere else" away from the bully.

Ya know what's worse than that?
Bullies who know what they're doing. Covering their s**t up and pretending to be harmless as long as they're under supervision.

But why should we have had to report these incidents at all? Isn't it the monitors' job to "Spot 'em and stop 'em"? Why didn't the monitors simple keep watch, and at the first sign of unpleasantness, intervene and remove the trouble-makers from the playground immediately?

I'm an aspie teacher with a Master's in Education and dual certification. I was an elementary teacher for 17 years. I am now a Culinary Arts instructor and this is my 9th year teaching high school and my 26th year in the field of education.

Based on the anecdote you provided, I'd have to point out that the people who were hired were NOT certified teachers. They were simply underpaid and not terribly well trained playground monitors who as you noticed, were oblivious to what was going on.

Had kid A punched kid B in the mouth and started a knock down fight, the monitors would have undoubtedly have noticed that ... but kids are sneaky. There are other ways to bully. Bullies may taunt and threaten their victims and if the monitors aren't circulating as they SHOULD have been doing, a group of adults standing on one side of the playground would be unable to hear what the bullies were even saying.

I was bullied as a child and my TEACHERS did nothing.

I was a military service brat and my first (and last) experience in a public high school as a student occurred during my junior year. It was 1976 and my father had been transferred to Atlanta, Georgia. The old Jim Crow laws of the deep south had only been repealed a scant ten years earlier and despite desegregation, schools and neighborhoods were still quite segregated.

The white kids in the affluent suburbs went to largely white schools while the inner-city kids in Atlanta went to largely African-American schools. Even though desegregation was the law of the land, change did not occur overnight. Schools still served their local communities and despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, inner-city neighborhoods remained largely African-American while the suburbs remained largely white.

My family is Asian and just in case you're wondering, I'm just barely old enough to actually remember the old Jim Crow laws. I remember when the first McDonald's opened in Atlanta. My father took us to McDonald's. He was in his uniform and my mother was in her Sunday best. When we tried to sit down, the manager came around the counter and pointed at a sign. I was too young to read but I'm told that the sign said, "Whites only." McDonald's sold us burgers, fries, and shakes, but we weren't allowed to eat with the white folk and we were forced to leave the restaurant.

My father made a game of it saying, "We're going to have a picnic in the car!" I thought that was brilliant and could not understand why my mother, who had been born in New York City, was crying. After all ... we had burgers, fries, and shakes and daddy had just announced that we were going to have a picnic in the car! (sigh)

Shortly thereafter, my father was transferred to Thailand and we remained overseas until my junior year in high school when we returned to Atlanta.

I was one of two minorities at my school.

The other guy was African American. The white kids said that he was okay for a n****r because he was on the football team. They said I was okay for a "Chinese" because I talked white.

This is not to say that everyone loved me.

I didn't like eating in the cafeteria because I had no friends, so I started volunteering to work in the library during lunch. One day the librarian asked me to take a film to a freshman class. When I walked into the classroom, the entire class erupted.

"Chinese!"

"GOOK!"

"GO BACK TO CHINA YOU CHING-CHONG MAN!"

And the teacher did NOTHING. She sat frozen in her seat like a mannequin. I handed her the film and left.

This was just one of many incidents that I suffered through during my junior year in high school. The good news is that because I had attended private schools overseas, after finishing my junior year, I learned that all I needed for graduation was high school English ... so I took that during the summer and graduated before my senior year ever began.

I thought I'd have my senior year to laze about but my father packed me off to college a year early while I was just 17.

I never returned to Georgia and to this day, southern accents give me the willies because of all the racism I suffered during that one miserable year.

The funny thing ... ironic, not funny, is that as the inner city expanded, whites fled the neighborhood I had lived in. Today my old neighborhood and my old school are part of the inner city.

I cannot help but wonder what those "good 'ol boys" who waved the Stars and Bars at football games (while playing against largely African American teams) and who insisted that, "The South will RISE AGAIN" would have thought had they known that their neighborhoods and school were to eventually become part of the inner-city.

@Marvin-- not that racism is solved or anything, but things today sound a lot more appealing than then.

This one's easy, and you know it: lazy motherf***ers that just wanted the paycheck without the work, that's why they didn't do s**t.

^ This.

@Aristophanes, I'm surprised at your anger! No offence, I had a bit of an anxiety attack when I read it, you are often so calm..

@Earthling is also correct, bullies are sneaky..

As to the psychology behind the monitors lack of care, perhaps they were bullies themselves at school.

I refuse to be stereotyped, lol. I prefer a well crafted response, but sometimes vulgarity gets the point across more succinctly.
(that sounds more like me right?)

As for the addition you made to the thread I was going to bring that up as well, but I wasn't there, I don't know the monitors so I wasn't going to reach and say they were probably bullies as well. That being said it's completely feasible.

Very few people seem to regard bullying as a real problem that warrants doing something to stop the bullies. On the other hand, snitches are universally condemned. To oppose bullying seems, therefore, against human nature. It’s hardly surprising if you think about it in terms of natural selection.

I've never necessarily had a problem with that, what I've always had a problem with is when a person defends themselves against a bully and then gets punished. It's the "don't retaliate" rule-- that has never made sense to me and I doubt it ever will.

This is when a Snitch must become a Sneak, and do something to set the bully up for a fall - anything from simple embarrassment to arrest.

That's a lot of effort for basically no gain, I'd rather just crack a skull and take the punishment. Don't get me wrong, I'm non-aggressive-- but when someone wants to forgo civility and return to animalism I'll take that s**t right back to the Cretaceous, eat or be eaten motherf^cker. Of course people think I'm crazy and unbalanced since I'm actually very passive in real life and when I explode in physical violence they don't know what to expect, but that also keeps people at a healthy arms length away too.

I've sometimes wanted to do that, but, since I was no match for my bullies in a fair fight, the only ways I imagined it happening were sneaky and using some kind of weapon against an unarmed target, and therefore cowardly. People seem to have been born with some basic sense of honor I lack, and now I think this more than justified the bullying.