What Children Say to Their Mates

I remember a day when one of my former girl student, came to me and said, “Miss, he (she referred to a boy in her class) said that I will never be able to do math and my hand writing is so bad. He did it for many times.” I looked at her and found that she cried. As usual, I didn’t believe that easily, so I check the truth by asking her about who said that bullying words to her. She told me a name, then automatically, I asked the boy who bullied my student about what he did just now.

He admitted that he did like what my girl student’s said, both of her mathematic and handwriting skill. “But, Miss, she actually in class 5 and I can’t read her handwriting every time I get my turn to check her assignment. And she can’t do multiplication, “ excused him. Well, it is the fact that my girl student cannot write well and often get bad scores in math, nevertheless, there is no excuse to put that early bullying on her.  Then as a teacher, I chose to talk with my boy student, just the two of us, and said that there is no point to judge our friend(s). If we think that we are better than our friend(s), so teach them. Don’t  make them more inferior like they can do nothing if you don’t have a solution to bring them up.

What my boy student tried to said was just a truth since they meet each other everyday at school. It is typically norm al in their age, but actually there is something wrong with them, when they, probably, want to criticize but in the end, what they actually do is bullying. The worst is, nobody tell them that they are wrong, even they start to enjoy bullying and do it more and more. Sometimes, their goal is to make the bullied person cries or feeling lose, but if it gets worse, it can make the bullied person is getting frustrated. So, what I’m trying to say to my students at that age is that will be okay to express the true feeling or criticize something, but if we don’t have the solution to make them better, we better keep silent. It’s because, a critics or expressions without any good will to fix is just a bull shit, a thing that will just make people do bullying instead of criticizing. Can children or youth understand?

I can say that family members and teachers in school are the ones who responsible to children in that age. The responsibility is not only to choose good words to make critics, but also to listen to critics well as a positive feedback, not as a thing which makes them feel more inferior.

*ditulis untuk @EnglishDiscuss pada saat tema perbincangan "Bullying"