Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take

The sooner we get rid of this absurd and broken system the better, it has survived long past its useful life.

Then you're just not creative enough.

You can simply "tail" one of the annoying students continuously when in school. An administrator escorting a problematic student "every single minute of the day" for a week or two would ostracize them quite nicely and the other students would take note of the threat.

I was in late elementary school in 2008 (grade 8), and I don't know if any of my classmates had a cell phone. Yes, some people had Facebook, but I think it had a minimum age limit of 15 years (?), and stuff like Instagram did not exist. People still called each other on the telephone.

Fast forward 2–3 years into high school though, and everyone was on Facebook, probably half of my classmates had BlackBerries (BBM was all the rage), and some people had iPhones. A few kids had their own laptops that they brought to school, but schoolwork was entirely paper-based. (Heck, I didn't have home Internet access until after I graduated from high school, but I think I was in the minority there.) Using your phone during class resulted in it being taken away.

Now I look at my youngest siblings, and everything they do is online. They submit homework through Google Classroom while browsing Instagram on the sly (Facebook is for fudder dudders), and their phones are their lives. They don't call people, and txt spk lk this is rly populr again for some reason. And teachers encourage phone use during class for certain things.

I am constantly dismayed at not only the fact that many seem to have an education somewhere at the high school level, but also that they still seem to crave a ton of drama and other similar "schoolyard" socialization habits.

It would be humorous if it weren't for the fact that I live here with them; but that was the choice I made - I deliberately chose to own an older home that cost less than what I could afford, in a decidedly blue-collar neighborhood with no HOA so I could work on my vehicles or do other "loud fabrication activities" that I couldn't in another neighborhood.

Part of me, though, wishes I had taken the plunge and had a home built out in the boonies.

For the most part, my neighbors are nice and thoughtful, but there's a certain segment among them that I wish would just "grow up" already.

> Some would say it's a shame that middle schoolers need to develop the skills of a modern PR agency.

If teachers don't care yes.

Yes, this is our society in 2019.

But you should have continued the train of thought here. It is our society because we made it that way; and in the process of doing so, other things that we once made and didn't seem to be useful/ethical/healthy/desirable went away. And in the exact same way, the current things that we carelessly introduced but that seem to be not useful/ethical/healthy/etc. after the fact can be dispensed with.

Not that it's easy or immediate. But "this" can very much go away.

The only difference is that now there's actually some data, third parties are more directly involved in facilitating making records of these things.

There still aren't (to my knowledge) the safety monitoring cameras that would actually be an unbiased witness over the school; it's still like a bad daytime only jail rather than a better one with actual security for the inmates. Only now some of them can selectively capture moments in time and share them.

So, yes, the problem is a little worse, but it's also more public. Now we as a society can actually have a conversation about the issues and MAYBE, we'll actually have that conversation and POSSIBLY actually advance a little as a culture.

Sure, (most) people survive it.

There is no "bully" moment, there's no confrontation of your perpetrator, it simply feels that everyone is against you. The enemy isn't a single person making you feel bad. It's everyone.

I know I didn't face the threat of that kind of stress at school. Embarrassing moments were allowed to pass in a few days and did become enshrined documentation attached to your identity.

This industry doesn't need to make users happy anymore than the tobacco industry makes its own customers happy - as long as the dopamine is within arm's reach they've got most people hooked so much more than tobacco ever could. But unlike cigarettes, no one can cut open a slice of your social media lungs and show you that your mind is covered in tar. And since no one dies directly of exposure, we're left trying to convey how life could have been better without the second-order effects of using the product. If your lungs don't function with all that tar, you avoid physical activity because 'you don't like exercise' (when you can't breathe anymore). And if your brain has been trained to seek fulfillment from your phone that's because 'you like using your phone more than doing other things' (when you can't think of anything else you like to do anymore).

They were, but now we have a device which can massively amplify shame. Worse, evidence of bad, stupid, or shameful behavior is archived forever for later judgement by people in your professional and personal life. This is not mentioned by the article but it should have been. People do dumb and embarrassing things when they are young (childhood up through college), and they used to have the ability to leave their past behind them when they became adults. Now that privilege has been taken away from them and they have to police their behavior and speech or some asshole might post it without their consent on Instagram. I am so glad camera phones were garbage when I was a kid and that social media was in its infancy when I was in college.

HN please fix this.

On the bright side, the bully could grow up to be a really amazing person, and and maybe won't be labelled this way his whole life.

It's a continuum. I used to write letters once. I loved email when it was new ("new" where I lived and amongst my friends). Within a few years, people who once wrote me a few pages of letters would rarely write more than 2-3 lines in email. It's gone downhill from there.

I would have rather gotten beat up once or twice as a kid, and learn to handle it, than have constant parental surveillance.

Privacy really is dead.

Back in the eighties when I grew up, the world was much, much less stimulating than it is now. Bullies bullied weaker people, hit on girls and tortured animals just to get their dopamine fixes and to alleviate boredom.

Now all the potential bullies have smartphones full of apps. And the homescreen apps they have on their phones are the result of a decade of competitive evolution -- they are apex attention predators. As a result, their smartphones provide them with more than enough stimulation to keep them occupied all day: porn, dating, gossip, news, games, gambling.

As a result, I haven't been mugged in a decade (knock wood). There were a couple of tries, but I just disregarded them.

I say this is good.

In my country it isn't possible to watch any show on Amazon for free. You have to at the very least pay to be part of a club called Amazon Prime before you can watch shows. Is it different where you are?

https://www.uta.edu/news/releases/2013/09/jeong-bullying.php

Also, just because kids seem nicer and more together doesn't mean that they don't bully. Appearances can be deceiving. Though there are merits to confiscating phones from kids, we mustn't forget it also has drawbacks. Kids can't document bullying. Just because the phone is gone doesn't mean the bullying ends. It just means that the bullying can happen in secret and silence. We shouldn't forget that many child molestation by teachers and bullying by kids were brought to light because of smartphones. Smartphones are a tool. It can be both bad and good.

This story is very heavily straw manned to make a point, but I can believe that social media would amplify my above experience by magnitudes, so it's not unjustified. I just don't believe that Brian would have been quite so lucky back in 2008 either.

Which you finally got over in college because you told your new friends the story and they laughed with you not at you. You became shorts by your own volition or dropped the moniker by the same means.

Edit: I was thinking high school above, but this story happened in elementary school.

Shit - I just remembered a story where I wore jeans for the first time to school on a day where we didn't have to wear our uniform. Previously I'd been sweats only. One of the girls I thought was cute made fun of my fashion sense and I ran out of the room crying. My grandma brought me some sweats and I went back to class.

I'm so glad there wasn't social media at the time. My memory of the event has faded drastically since then. I don't want to watch a video.

I guess this is kind of a counter argument to my own statement. I think the damage done would have been worse had there been video. I mean, this was obviously something that affected me and I consider myself a fairly well adjusted person. I wonder how a video of this I could have watched over and over and over again would have made me feel. It's hard to say.

In order to use a platform you must agree to the conditions of use, which includes indemnifying the platform from harm (Blah blah)... making the parents liable for the child's actions on that platform. Which could also allow suit of and prosecution...

In short making a mountain out of a molehill to try to make everyone better people. Though the real issue is that society wants to view the train-wreck, to have someone worse than the individual so that everyone else can be built up on the body of the scapegoat.

A 13 year old could probably drive a car around town safely. Kids are capable of racing karts at high speeds and riding off road on dirt bikes. They are more than physically capable of operating a vehicle.

We don't give them a driver's licenses, because we don't think they responsible enough. If they're not responsible enough to do something as simple as drive a car without crashing, maybe we shouldn't trust them to build vast social networks without parental oversight.

The problem though, so many parents just turn on their own phones, so it would be another box to check on the sign-up form that gets ignored like a EULA.

These platforms already have processes in place to automatically and manually scan for adult content and copyright. Google has image search. This should be extended to protecting the privacy of minors.

"Is a child in this picture?" sounds like a classic computer vision problem.

Because every single kid in the history of the world hasn't heard that, either from their parents, on TV, from a teacher.

Kindergarten is usually for children 5 or 6 years old; 1st grade, 6-7 years old, etc. By 12th (senior) year of high school, kids are usually somewhere between 17-19 years of age.

I'm not discounting new brands of terror, but propensity for cruelty is the constant--the medium of cruelty is the main difference.

However, I can imagine it's close to impossible to execute if you don't know who posted the material or it has been reposted like in the article.