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[jaydub]

I got to be the new kid 3 times between 6th and 8th grade.  My experience was rather less triumphant.  I did learn a pattern of endurance however.  There were usually 3 waves of attacks, with the most aggressive bullies first, followed by their toadies.  It would be more or less peaceful after that, with practical jokes, name calling, and ostracism taking the place of beatings.  There would be the occasional punch, shoving, and application of indian¹ burns throughout the year - in retrospect probably as a consequence of some defeat the kid had suffered elsewhere to prompt retaliation against easy targets.

I had a sickening feeling a couple weeks into this school year when it became apparent my 10yr-old daughter had come into the cross-hairs of what I assume was a budding mean girl clique.  She had a couple sick days where she was complaining of stomach pain followed by a day where my wife or I was staying home with her; she wasn't sick on those days though.  We got the story out of her and took it to the leadership of her school (they have a zero-tolerance towards bullying policy).  There was some sort of a counseling intervention, the bullying stopped, and she is friends now with one of the girls that had been picking on her. 

The counseling appeared to be a couple sessions with my daughter during school hours, and separately with the girls causing the problem, followed by some sort of workshop for her whole class.  Finally there was a school wide presentation from an anti-bullying group (I have no idea whether that was a consequence of our complaint, or whether the school had planned it in the years' curriculum anyway).

So, no more sick days for Kaitlin, and she's getting good grades and participating in school clubs and the like.  Yay Kaitlin, Yay Mission Hills Middle School.

Caveats: Private school, small classes (only one 5th grade class with 18 kids in it). All the teachers know every kid, and the administrators are the founders and are totally passionate about their work and building the school.

I can say with authority that this approach would have completely failed when I was in 6th/7th/8th grades, and probably would have made things much worse for me.  Different times though, and obviously, boys vs. girls.

¹ Sorry for the obviously culturally insensitive name for this particular torture.  I don't know how else to describe it, and I suspect everyone else here knows it by that name as well.

[AugustWest]

Huh.  I moved after 5th grade, after 6th grade and after 9th grade. 

7th grade was the toughest, although most of what I went through was ostracism/nasty rumors.  Not much actual physical violence, luckily. 

For the most part, my children have grown up in the same place throughout their childhood.  We moved in the middle of Thing 1's first grade year and have been here ever since -- it'll be 15 years on Monday.  That's the longest I've ever lived anyplace, by far.

[side_show]

I had to change schools in the middle of sixth grade due to bullying.  I went to a very small private school where all of the other girls did not live in the neighbourhood and had affluent, not mentally ill parents.  I did not fit, it was noticed, there was no room for me at the lunch table, and no fun at recess.  I was friends with two boys who also lived in the area and were not wealthy and therefore were equally socially outcast, but things got bad - they were not my boyfriends, which was a difficult distinction at that age, and were getting their own form of bullying from the wealthy boys.  I got no help from my mentally ill mother (she told me I needed to act more like the girls who were bullying me to fit in), and this was around the time my dad was assaulted by a coworker and diagnosed with PTSD from the incident, so there was no support for me.  I was so alone.  I attempted suicide, but no one noticed (took a bottle of pills, woke up the next day).  I changed to public school, and the other new girl, who would become my BF, had also changed schools to the same school for similar reasons.  We have been friends since we were 12.  Also a couple teachers took notice of me and really reached out in powerful ways.  High school got even better - more outcasts and weirdos to build alliances with, and lots of extra circulars to avoid going home.  

I was bullied in highschool too, but in weird ways.  I was sort of considered "cool" because of the rise of grunge and the fact I was pretty alternative in a natural, non-contrived way due to circumstances.  Plus due to being in almost every non-sporting extracurricular activity (plus badminton) I had a lot of older friends, as well as friends across every social strata, who cared and took my side, including the culture-making closet-gays of the school.  I remember one girl constantly wanted to beat me up and tried to arrange for times for me to meet up with her so she could beat me, and I just didn't show up.  "Next week, on Thursday at 4pm, I'm going to fight you!"  I was never clear if she actually expected me to really show up, and basically just ignored her.  I wonder if she was actually waiting around at the perscribed times for me to show?  Eventually, we got partnered together by a teacher for a school project, and I went to her house to work on it, and I saw that her life was pretty crappy, like mine, and said so, and after that she no longer wanted to beat me up.  Another time a girl who straight up hated me for no reason punched my right in the eye in the middle of the dance floor at a sock hop.  It was unprovoked - one minute I was dancing, the next I was seeing stars.  The backlash from older kids who all knew me, like the student council president and such, was so harsh that the girl was pretty much hated by everyone by the next week, and people who hadn't even been my friends before were all reaching out to me.  Who'd have thought getting blind cold cocked would have social benefits?

Anyway, I lost the student council election by a handful of votes - I wasn't that cool, but in the world of highschool popularity, I was a solid B level.  Considering I was totally ostracized in elementary and middle school, I did pretty well for myself.

[jay-ell]

I lived in the same small, affluent, suburban town my entire life until a few months before starting high school. By the end of first grade I was widely regarded as "the nerd," and my only friend was the other weird nerdy girl in the class. Which was kind of cool with me, because we liked the same kinds of books. Even the other kids in the smart-kids pull-out class thought I was geeky. And I was -- a shy, quiet, girl who hated sports and loved video games, legos, and reading. By the time I started caring what other people thought of me -- middle school -- I had been branded by all the other kids as a dork and nobody but other dorks would have anything to do with me.

I wasn't bullied much, I guess, mostly left alone -- but there were some unfortunate instances with some of the middle-school cheerleaders that involved threats and accusations of cowardice, and there was also a group of socially outcast boys who, realizing that the girls who were actually pretty were way out of their league, decided to wait for me in the halls between classes and make lewd remarks about my belatedly-flowering figure.

I was thrilled to move to a new state to start high school. I was absolutely determined not to be branded a nerd, so I fell in with the grunge crowd (it helped that a lot of the orchestra kids were pretty free spirits, since I played viola). I was never popular and never wanted to be, but people tolerated me in the main and I was much more confident than I had ever dreamed of being in middle school. Even now I have some former middle school classmates on my FB feed, and sometimes I just want to post a giant "Fuck You" message in which I describe how great my life is, no thanks to those assholes. But then I remember that one of the guys who used to harass me between classes died in a very violent and sudden way that can only be described as a mentally ill man committing suicide by police, and I think that maybe my sense of fulfillment is its own reward.

[wombat]

Middle school cheerleaders? There is such a thing?

[miles]

Hey Doc, does the world end?

[jaydub]

No answer.  Ominous.

[theinevitable]

My ex was fat in middle school, and was forced to do middle school cheerleading by her parents, who thought it would make her more outgoing and popular. Apparently she cried enough that they did not try to make her do it the next year.

[Doc]

Hey Doc, does the world end?

Yeah but it's not as big a deal as you'd think.

[AugustWest]

Middle school cheerleaders? There is such a thing?

Well duh-uh.

[wombat]

I never went to a school that had sports teams. My high school didn't even have a gym for most of the years I attended. I went bowling and took yoga for gym. There are no bowling or yoga cheerleaders at any age.  So obviously there is a cultural gulf here, but middle school seems awfully young for sports teams having cheerleaders.

Come to think of it, I also never went to anything called a middle school. So you'll have to bear with me, I guess.

[theinevitable]

I spent middle and high school being the weird kid who reads a lot and won't shut up in class. Towards the end of middle school I fell in with a group of nerds. Then in early high school I gravitated towards the "alternative" kids. Then the first group never grew out of their dorky uncool hobbies, and the second group all got really into weed and beer, so I hung out with the annoying theater kids, where I only had to put up with constant renditions of Rent songs. I was also on the OM team, and had a contentious relationship with those kids. Where I was "the guy who is really easy to upset, and also constantly screws stuff up", so I was constantly teased. I had a 4-year-long crush on the only girl on the team.

In college, I found out that sometimes you meet like-minded weirdos who are into what you are into, and are also nice people most of the time. That was cool. It blew my mind pretty intensely. At a certain point I remember thinking, "oh, this is what friends are."

[littlefallsmets]

I was not a cool kid but I had a position of default-leadership amongst the weirdos because I was one of the few "smart kids" who was funny and also one of the few "smart kids" who was bigger than all the bullies.

Other than the fact that I wasn't having sex with all the pretty nerd girls I mooned over constantly, it wasn't a bad place to be. One-eyed man in the kingdom of the et cetera.

[pmcd9]

When I went to school some stuff happened I guess, but it's all pretty foggy to me now.

[theinevitable]

Just sent the application for the cool grocery job. For once I think I managed to inject some enthusiasm and selling of myself into a cover letter. So maybe this one will get a response.

Yesterday I remembered a high school experience: in 9th grade the kid who sat next to me at roll call for gym class every day asked me if I ever thought I would shoot up the school. He wanted to make sure I knew he liked me.

(I fantasized, at one point, that someone would come to the school with a gun and I would somehow die a hero and everyone would look back and realize how great I had been all along.)

Lately I keep remembering weird moments like that.