High up in the gorgeous Adirondack Mountains, I had a beautiful afternoon at Webb Central School talking with students about bullying.
My escort today was a young man named Brandon, who recently held an anti-bullying poster contest as a lead-in to my assembly today. Vibrant art covered the gym walls with illustrations in support of anti-bullying, peace and acceptance. I held assemblies with k-5th grade and then 6-12th, and Brandon announced the winners. Best of all was that, with each name called, the rest of the students cheered them on. My heart melted at the sound of peer-to-peer support.
One brave kindergartner came over to me personally too for some ideas on how to handle a bullying peer in his class. As we talked, his tiny peers joined one by one until we were having a full class conversation about feeling safe in school.
At the end of the day, Brandon presented me with one of the school's Stood Up Bullying Pledge shirts. STAND Up Day is an incredible program that gets students involved to anti-bullying from an empowered angle. You can understand by reading the back of the shirt, which says, "Today I have an obligation. No longer will I be silent if you need help. Silence is participation. I refuse to participate in the problem. We're all different but we all deserve respect. If you need help, come to me. If I think you need help, I'm getting involved. I got your back. Signed," at which point I promptly threw my sharpie to the fabric and scribbled my name. All of today's winners signed my shirt, too. This statement and mission is one of the best I have seen in terms of making students clearly understand the role they play in the solution. Every word of this shirt is everything I have been teaching all year.
No comments:
Post a Comment