Blog five extra credit Anti Bullying

Last week during class we had two students come and show us their anti bullying presentation. They asked the class questions like what bullying meant to us, have we ever been bullied or seen someone that was being bullied. One of the girls wrote a list of types of bullying there were like cyber, physical, harassment, exclusions and so on, on the white board. They also had as do two exercises that at first I was not interested in doing. In the first exercise she got a piece of tape and divided the room. We all stood up and gathered around the line. The object of this exercise was to step on the line if what they called out pertained to you. For example if the girl called out “if you have brothers” then whoever had brothers would stand on the land. Right before we started the first exercise she asked us to look around to see who else was standing on the line with us. So that we could see who had things in common with us. During that exercise I learned a lot about some of my peers. I noticed that although some of the other students in my class did not seem to have anything in common with me, in actuality there were a lot of things we could relate to. Either it being us either having brothers, having been bullied or feelings like we had to change who we were to fit in. This made me feel a little bit more comfortable knowing that other people go through the same kinds of thing I have in my life. The second exercise was my favorite; it was a very positive experience. The two girls took a piece of paper and wrote each of our names down at the top of the paper. Then each paper was to be passed around and each person to write something nice or positive they thought about that person. Whoever’s paper it was could not look at the paper till everyone in the class had written something. I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to tell certain people the nice things I think about them from time to time. When I got my paper back I was happy to see that people actually wrote honest positive genuine comments. As oppose to just writing something to write something like “nice” or “cool”. Because we all know that that isn’t actually what they the think it is just something they wrote because they could not think of anything else to put down. People wrote that my piercing was pretty which made me change my mind to take it out. Some also wrote that I was confident which shocked me because although I come off that way I can be pretty harsh on myself sometimes. I have never been asked to do anything like these two exercises before, so it was very refreshing. As oppose to the typical anti bullying tactics they try to present students now. Overall the experience was fun and I think they should do more exercises like that in high school and middle school when bullying is more of a problem.