Milk, Cookies & Crazies




Although it's quite cinematic school should never actually feel ominous

 The other night my wife and I had an unusual craving. We were just about to watch the horror movie “The Crazies,” which involved scenes of horrific violence, gore and naughty language when we were overcome with a pang for milk and cookies. My wife had just baked a couple leftover batches from the weekend and we couldn’t resist them despite the crude entertainment. I have to say though; a warm chocolate chip cookie alongside a pitchfork to the gut does me just fine, but would probably be an odd juxtaposition for anyone else.

It makes me think about the odd relationship of bullying and school, namely that the one cannot exist without the other. School has a noble purpose, to educate our youth in a number of fields, to stretch their minds and flex their cognitive prowess, and to help prepare them for the world they will face as adults. Like any noble endeavor though, it can become tainted. Our army has a goal of protecting our nation but fails to protect women and gays within its own ranks. Our markets attempt to diffuse risk to allow for greater financial access for all Americans and a stable economy to support growth but they became shortsighted and greedy and nearly destroyed our entire financial system. Likewise, our schools have strived to teach our youth, yet they have fostered an environment of bigotry and violence that has grown so enormous that they have lost any control over it. They have lost their students trust and ours as well.



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 The Cyberbullying Research Center, directed by two professors with doctorates in Criminal Justice, has been running studies on students since 2004. Their website is a vast resource for anyone interested in concise, empirical evidence of this problem. Their most recent study found that about 20 percent of students have experienced cyberbullying and roughly the same percentages of students have admitted to cyberbullying. Their research has also found a startlingly high percentage of students that had been bullied within 30 days of the survey. [see their chart]

Tuesday night the College of St. Rose and the Times Union hosted a panel that discussed the rise of cyberbullying and various ways to hopefully prevent it. My social media class joined a large group of parents to see what information they had to share.

Lori Cullen, a plump and cheery mother of three children and Times Union blogger, said she recently had a “shared introduction” to social media with her children, finding out that her young children already had an internet presence on sites such as Facebook.

Sandra Morley, discussed “teaching etiquette” in her classrooms. Her perfectly erect posture and stern expression gave away her profession as Principal of Bethlehem Central High School as clearly as her introduction from moderator Lydia Kulbida, the news 10 anchor. She spoke of a need for schools to “know your students and know them well.”

The discussion stalled when it came to Joseph Donohue, state police lieutenant with a strong jaw and white hair, who riddled his comments with cliché after cliché. He had a lot to say but said nothing stronger than bullying had gone too far by the time it reached the police.

The opposite end of the contribution spectrum was Professor Stephen Birchak. He wore a dark, tailored suit and a disarming grin and shook things up with a joke or two before settling into his lecture. This wit obviously helps him in his appearances as Dr. Bird, speaker and therapist for children dealing with esteem issues. At the meeting it aided him in conveying his points.

Birchak found that most cyberbullies don’t realize the pain they cause by making hurtful comments online about others. He believes most of them do it seeking attention for themselves and that they are “ignorant to the pain and suffering they cause.” Birchak also described the need for administrators to seek out the bystanders and believes that they are the key to overturning bullying in any environment, in school or online.

This coalesced nicely into the final panelist, James Preller, author of the novel “The Bystander.” The book covers the topic of bullying in the middle school environment and the fear experienced by the student on the sidelines, the silent witness. Preller utilized visits to actual schools and his own life experience to create what he called a work of “realistic fiction.” He told the story of reconnecting with a bullied classmate on Facebook and how this grown man had never fully rid himself of the terrible memories of his youth and the dreadful feelings that these recollections still evoked.

“How we treat each other has lasting effects,” said Preller.

Then two students from Shenendehowa High School introduced a mock demonstration of what they termed the “virtual bathroom wall.” It was an example of a Facebook profile, created by cyberbullies, with the sole purpose of ridiculing and humiliating a fellow student. In addition they created Facebook group pages and a Formspring account to detail every avenue cyberbullies are using to torment their victims.

The St. Rose panel comes on the heels of President Obama’s conference that discussed the problems of bullying. This seems to beg the question, what plan will work as an effective means for, if not deterring bullying, to lessen it and its harmful effects?

Is the federal government’s intrusion into local schools an effective means to this end or is this another area best left to local administrators?

I like to believe that bullying can be prevented as a result of curbing the “bystander effect” and allowing victims more outlets to report being bullied. Bullying is not exclusive of schools but that doesn't mean that schools can't be exclusive to bullying. If the problem were given the attention it deserves, and maybe now it finally is, then perhaps we can eventually conquer it. In the meantime, I like what Professor Birchak said to one of the questions at the end of the panel.

“[Victims] feel there’s a permanence to things,” he says. What students need to realize, he says, is that these things shall pass and that there are people that love and care deeply for them that they can turn to. He says that often times talking to someone about their plight helps them to see the bigger picture, that being a victim of a bully does not define who they are. To the parents, he says, their obligation is to “keep that conversation open.”