Hacker News Reader

Comment by crescentfresh | Hacker News Reader

Some of my 13yr old son's classmates have started a bullying campaign against their own teacher, trying to dig up dirt or otherwise gossip about her. This happens over insta and snap.

My son isn't involved but as a result she wouldn't even meet with me to discuss his recent report card (a right I thought I had), she is so sick and tired of people ganging up on her.

I've always warned my son, you misuse or otherwise abuse a privilege in the presence of adults and they will strip you of it, a phone is no different. Then the more I tried to apply that to this situation I realized I'm wrong: his peers have already learned to bully and harass outside of school now, the teachers can do nothing about it.

I don't know what to do about this one.

View on HN

Here bullying a teacher would get you suspended fast, and bullying outside the school could have consequences in school too (if someone reports it, and some adults would care enough). I don't have kids myself so this is just theoretical to me at this point; I don't know how well that works in practice.

I teach high school. There are ways to hold students accountable if their actions outside of school affect what's happening in school. But you need staff and administration who are all on the same page and working together, and it helps to have a group of people who are focused on what's best for the learning environment, not just a group focused on winning against kids and families. Unfortunately, that is not always a given.

If they're trying to find dirt on the teacher then the teacher could get in trouble too. Future teachers will be particularly vulnerable to this because they grew up with half their life being shared on social media.

I would like to think even a 13yo is smart enough to make anonymous account to bully the teacher with.

They may think they are smart enough.

When I was in middle school back in the 90s we all had city-provided Unix accounts for e-mail, homepages etc. The e-mail was read over telnet with Pine. Some student found out they can change the sender address inside the app, proceeded to set it to another kid's email, and sent an insulting e-mail to the science teacher.

Of course the e-mail sender field is just for display purposes; the teacher had no trouble checking the headers and finding the kid behind this.

The medium has changed a bit, but I can imagine teenagers still easily tripping over some technicalities and details.

the point is that the person who can "read the headers" is so abstracted from the school system as to not matter. when you report something to instagram it doesn't even take it down unless it hits a certain volume of reports - almost never if the page is a closed group. there is no human to talk to either. what teacher can stand up to bullying in that case? suppose some kid cracks under pressure - the other kids just inform everyone in their group that a new group exists on snapchat/facebook/discord

source: someone in an online page got outraged at a comment of mine and tried to bully me out of the group. in the end i did just leave rather than deal with the issue coz it felt like fighting a hydra

Some, yes. All, no.

Some accounts start off being anonymous, then they reveal themselves somehow.

Your typical bully is not exactly long on perceiving how they will be seen (or caught). Throw in the perceived invincibility of teenagers, then you just end up with some fantastically traceable abuse.

> his peers have already learned to bully and harass outside of school now, the teachers can do nothing about it.

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.

Schools probably don’t have the staff but I think that’s a good idea. Or remove the kid from one class per day (rotating) and have them talk to counselors.

Our little school certainly didn't have much staff, but a particularly problematic student somehow always had an escort--this kept bullying to fairly limited levels. Maybe you don't need "every minute", but you make sure that someone from the staff shows up right before the end of class and escorts him until the beginning of the next.

There are all manner of creative ways to impede a student's "social life" if you are the school authorities. And, given that the single most important thing to a student at that age is their social life, that's a massive hammer.

Probably she could sue the parents? idk how it works in the US but kids aren't above the law, and their parents can't ignore illegal behaviour without consequences.

American police rarely do things for actual harassment. If you are lucky you might get a police report and if it happens enough you might get a restraining order that is poorly enforced. Just because kids aren't above the law doesn't mean that the law will do anything about it, especially if they think the teacher should be able to just brush it off.

There's a way around that, too: bully law enforcement. Probably won't work (yet) for teenage kids but the Church of Scientology used it to tremendous success during the 70s and 80s.

>Probably she could sue the parents?

She could also go postal. Both of those would quickly become matters of public record and end her teaching career.

Being cruel and digging up dirt on people is wrong but not illegal.

Depending on what dirt was dug this could be called defamation which is illegal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com