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How Can We Help Miguel?
One of the hardest parts of doing fieldwork is hearing difficult, nuanced stories that break my heart. The more complicated the story, the harder it is to tell, but I feel a responsibility to at least try. Given how many educational reformists read this blog, I want to provide a portrait of some of the teens I've met who are currently being failed by the system. My goal in doing so is to ask a hard question: how do we help these specific teens? Let me start with Miguel.… more
Digital Self-Harm and Other Acts of Self-Harassment
Sometimes, things aren't what they appear to be. And, in those cases, jumping to the wrong conclusion can be a disservice to everyone. After I first wrote about Formspring seven months ago, I couldn't stop thinking about teens who chose to respond to vicious or harassing questions (since only responses are ever posted publicly). Listening to teens, I had concluded that many out there were trying to prove that they were tough and could handle anything. And I've continued to hear that story in the field. But as I started looking into the negative commentary on teens' pages, I felt like I didn't have the full explanation.… more
"Bullying" Has Little Resonance with Teenagers
!["Bullying" Has Little Resonance with Teenagers Blog Image](../sites/dmlcentral/files/imagecache/blog_image/blog_images/bullying600nomod.jpg ""Bullying" Has Little Resonance with Teenagers Blog Image")
Ever had one of dem days you wish woulda stayed home / Run into a
group of niggas who getting they hate on / You walk by they get wrong you reply
then shit get blown / Way outta proportion way past discussion / Just you
against them, pick one then rush em / Figure you get jumped here thats next /
They don't wanna stop there now they bustin / Now you gushin, ambulance rushin
you to the hospital / with a bad concussion / Plus ya hit 4 times bullet hit ya
spine paralyzed waist down / now ya wheel chair bound / Never mind that now you
lucky to be alive. - T.I. "Dead and Gone"
Sometimes, I feel like I'm living in parallel universes. I attend conferences and hear from parents and journalists who are talking about the bullying pandemic. And then I talk with teenagers about their social dramas, producing the interactions that adults identify as bullying. I hear from well-meaning adults about how they want to create interventions to help teenagers with bullying. And then I hear teens complain about the assemblies and messaging that they're forced to listen to that don't even begin to resonate with them. Whenever I talk to folks about bullying, I'm forced to confront the fact that adults and teens are talking past one another. And then I hear songs like T.I.'s "Dead and Gone" that capture the escalation at the most extreme sense and hope that teens are taking home the core message of the song, which T.I. captures simply as "I won that fight, I lost that war." The cultural logic underpinning bullying is far more complex than most adults realize. And technology is not radically changing what's happening; it's simply making what's happening far more visible. If we want to combat bullying, we need to start by understanding the underlying dynamics. And we need to approach interventions with an evaluation-based mindset. We won't know how to stop bullying and no amount of legislation requiring education is going to do squat until we actually find intervention mechanisms that work. And that starts with understanding what's happening.… more