Hello, I need help with doing a response to this essay, “Words that Wound”, the paper have to have 5 paragraphs.
words_that_wound_article.pdf
instruction_for_this_paper.docx
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Words that Wound, by Kathleen Vail
Brian Head saw only one way out. On the final day of his life, during economics class, the 15-year-old
stood up and pointed a semiautomatic handgun at himself. Before he pulled the trigger, he said his last
words: “I can’t take this anymore.”
Brian’s father, William Head, has no doubt why his only child chose to take his life in front of a classroom
full of students five years ago. Brian wanted everyone to know the source of his pain, the suffering he
could no longer endure. The Woodstock, Ga., teen, overweight with thick glasses, had been
systematically abused by school bullies since elementary school. Death was the only relief he could
imagine. “Children can’t vote or organize, leave, or run away,” says Head. “They are trapped.”
For many students, school is a torture chamber from which there is no escape. Every day, 160,000
children stay home from school because they are afraid of being bullied, according to the National
Association of School Psychologists. In a study of junior high and high school students from small
Midwestern towns, nearly 77 percent of the students reported they’d been victims of bullies at school—
14 percent saying they’d experienced severe reactions to the abuse. “Bullying is a crime of violence,”
says June Arnette, associate director of the National School Safety Center. It’s an imbalance of power,
sustained over a period of time.”
Yet even in the face of this suffering, even after Brian Head’s suicide five years ago, even after it was
revealed this past spring that a culture of bullying might have played a part in the Columbine High
School shootings, bullying remains for the most part unacknowledged, underreported, and minimized by
schools. Adults are unaware of the extent and nature of the problem, says Nancy Mullin-Rindler,
associate director of the Project on Teasing and Bullying in the Elementary Grades at Wellesley College
Center for Research on Women. “They underestimate the import. They feel it’s a normal part of growing
up, that it’s character-building.”
After his son’s death, William Head became a crusader against bullying, founding an effort called Kids
Hope to prevent others from suffering as Brian had. Unfortunately, bullying claimed another victim in
the small town of Woodstock: 13-year-old Josh Belluardo. Last November, on the bus ride home from
school, Josh’s neighbor, 15-year-old Jonathan Miller, taunted him and threw wads of paper at him. He
followed Josh off the school bus, hit the younger boy in the back of the head, and kicked him in the
stomach. Josh spent the last two days of his young life in a coma before dying of his injuries. Miller, it
turns out, had been suspended nearly 20 times for offenses such as pushing and taunting other students
and cursing at a teacher. He’s now serving a life sentence for felony murder while his case is on appeal.
Bullying doesn’t have to result in death to be harmful. Bullying and harassment are major distractions
from learning, according to the National School Safety Center. Victims’ grades suffer, and fear can lead
to chronic absenteeism, truancy, or dropping out. Bullies also affect children who aren’t victimized:
Bystanders feel guilty and helpless for not standing up to the bully. They feel unsafe, unable to take
action. They also can be drawn into bullying behavior by peer pressure. “Any time there is a climate of
fear, the learning process will be compromised,” says Arnette.
A full 70 percent of children believe teachers handle episodes of bullying “poorly,” according to a study
by John Hoover at the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. It’s no wonder kids are reluctant to tell
adults about bullying incidents. “Children feel no one will take them seriously,” says Robin Kowalski,
professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, N.C., who’s done research on
teasing behavior.
Martha Rizzo, who lives in a suburb of Cincinnati, calls bullying the “dirty little secret” of her school
district. Both her son and daughter were teased in school. Two boys in her son’s sixth-grade class began
taunting him because he wore sweatpants instead of jeans. They began to intimidate him during class.
Once they knocked the pencil out of his hand during a spelling test when the teacher’s back was turned.
He failed the test. Rizzo made an appointment with the school counselor. The counselor told her he
could do nothing about the behavior of the bullies and suggested she get counseling for her son instead.
“Schools say they do something, but they don’t, and it continues,” says Rizzo. “We go in with the same
problem over and over again.”
Anna Billoit of Louisiana went to her son’s middle school teachers when her son, who had asthma and
was overweight, was being bullied by his classmates. Some of the teachers made the situation worse,
she says. One male teacher suggested to her that the teasing would help her son mature. “His attitude
was ‘Suck it up, take it like a man,’” says Billoit.
Much bullying goes on in so-called transition areas where there is little or no adult supervision: hallways,
locker rooms, restrooms, cafeterias, playgrounds, buses, and bus stops. When abuse happens away
from adult eyes, it’s hard to prove that the abuse occurred. Often, though, bullies harass their victims in
the open, in full view of teachers and other adults. Some teachers will ignore the behavior, silently
condoning it. But even when adults try to deal with the problem, they sometimes make things worse for
the victim by not handling the situation properly. Confronting bullies in front of their peers only
enhances the bullies’ prestige and power. And bullies often step up the abuse after being disciplined.
“People know it happens, but there’s no structured way to deal with it,” says Mullin-Rindler. “There’s
lots of confusion about what to do and what is the best approach.”
Societal expectations play apart in adult reaction to childhood bullying. Many teachers and
administrators buy into a widespread belief that bullying is a normal part of childhood, and that children
are better off working out such problems on their own. But this belief sends a dangerous message to
children, says Head. Telling victims they must protect themselves from bullies shows children that adults
can’t and won’t protect them. And, he points out, it’s an attitude adults would never tolerate for
themselves. “If you go to work and get slapped on the back of the head, you wouldn’t expect your
supervisor to say, ‘It’s your problem—you need to learn how to deal with it yourself,’” says Head. “It’s a
human-rights issue.”
Ignoring bullying is only part of the problem. Some teachers go further by blaming the victims for their
abuse and letting their own dislike for the victimized child show. “There’s a lot of secret admiration for
the strong kids,” says Eileen Faucette of Augusta, Ga. Her daughter was teased so badly in the classroom
that she was afraid to go to the blackboard or raise her hand to answer a question. The abuse happened
in front of her teacher, who did nothing to stop it.
Head also encountered a blame-the-victim attitude toward his son. Brian would get into trouble for
fighting at school, but when Head and his wife investigated what happened, they usually found that
Brian had been attacked by other students. The school, Head said, wanted to punish Brian along with his
attackers.
“The school calls it fighting,” Head says, “But it’s actually assault and battery.”
The bully-as-social-outcast is one of the persistent myths of bullying. In fact, bullies are almost always
more popular than their victims, says Chuck Saufler, a counselor at Wiscasset Primary School in
Wiscasset, Maine, and the director of Maine Project Against Bullying. “It’s easy to pick on kids that
aren’t popular.” Bullying behavior starts in elementary school and peaks in middle school. However, it
attracts more attention from adults in high school, where the students are physically larger, and bullying
sometimes takes the form of sexual harassment. “If you look at adolescent sexual harassment behavior,
it doesn’t spring up all of the sudden,” says Mullin-Rindler. “Kids are practicing the behavior at an early
age.”
The stereotypical bully is a boy, but girls bully, too, in different ways—typically by ostracizing victims or
gossiping behind their backs. Most bullying, by boys or girls, starts out as verbal—teasing and putdowns—and unless an adult intervenes properly, it gets progressively worse and can become physical.
And if the situation erupts into a fight, teachers sometimes aren’t sure who’s at fault and discipline both
of the students involved.
But Saufler says it shouldn’t be difficult to tell the bully from the victim in an altercation. Look at the two
children, he says: The one who is crying or upset is the victim, while the bully will be cool and calm and
in control. A common trait of bullies is that they are less likely than their peers to empathize with the
victim or to understand other people’s point of view.
Experts disagree on the reasons why bullies choose certain kids to torment. Some speculate that likely
victims are the kids who stand out—the ones who are too tall, or overweight, or have other unusual
physical characteristics. But Saufler says victims are chosen because of their personality, not their
appearance. Bullies look for victims who are emotionally vulnerable. The traditional victim is a passive
child, but there also are “provocative victims,” who have poor social skills and agitate other children.
Theories also vary on why children become bullies, but most agree that bullies gain power and enjoy the
control they have over others. Some research has shown that bullies tend to come from families that
use harsh and inconsistent discipline or families in which the parents verbally abuse each other.
Australian-based psychologist Ken Rigby has suggested that some bullies are sexually aroused by
tormenting other children. And some researchers theorize that bullies might be sadists, who enjoy
seeing others suffer.
Bullies have been found to have high self-esteem, a sign that their behavior satisfies their needs, and
they’re not likely to stop on their own. Schools must find ways to take away the rewards of bullying.
“We have to eliminate the opportunities and make it uncomfortable for them,” says Saufler.
When bullying isn’t stopped, it escalates. And it isn’t just the bully and the victims who are affected
when adults don’t intervene. Bystander students become desensitized to the abuse when it appears to
be condoned, says Mullin-Rindler. They are less likely to empathize with the victim and more likely to
join in the bullying.
The torment students witness and experience in their schools has a more powerful effect on them than
violent videogames and movies, says Head. Children cannot reconcile the contradiction between what
adults say and what happens everyday. When they see victims punished along with bullies, or adults
tolerating violence among students, “it has a numbing effect,” says Head. He fears that more incidents
like Littleton will occur until schools stop the bullying.
“This stuff starts with a climate that says it’s OK to call children names,” says Georgia mother Eileen
Faucette. “We need a zero tolerance policy for teasing.”
Three years ago, the Clarkstown (N.Y. Central School Board surveyed fifth-, eighth-, and 10th-graders
about school climate. One of the red flags that appeared was the amount of bullying students reported.
“We were all surprised,” says Clarkstown board member Lorette Adams. “It showed us a lot more was
going on than we thought.”
Experts say surveying is a good way for a district to approach the problem of bullying—asking students,
teachers, principals, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, janitors, and parents about instances of bullying they
have experienced or observed. Unless school officials have numbers and facts in front them, it’s easy to
assume that bullying isn’t a problem. But just because you haven’t heard about problems doesn’t mean
they don’t exist. “By the time a complain treaches you, it’s a last resort,” says Massachusetts
psychotherapist Linda Sones Feinberg, author of Teasing: Innocent Fun or Sadistic Malice? “Most
children hate to tell the teacher.”
Efforts to deal with bullying will be ineffective unless the school board and administrators are involved.
Saufler says that any anti-bullying measure “must be sustained and supported, or it won’t work.”
Saufler’s Maine Project Against Bullying is a research group that provides training for educators and uses
state and federal money to gather and evaluate anti-bullying curriculum materials for kindergarten
through fourth grades. The programs that work the best, he says, are comprehensive and involve
everyone in the school and the community.
Focusing only on the victim and the bully doesn’t work either, says Mullin-Rindler. “We don’t really
change things when we do that,” she says. “The problem keeps coming back. We’re not doing anything
to change the climate that promotes bullying behavior.” The ones to reach are the children who aren’t
bullies or victims—the “disempowered majority,” says Saufler. These are the children who can stop
bullies by letting them know that behavior isn’t acceptable and by not joining in to tease victims.
Clarkstown formed a community-wide task force to look at the problem of bullying. The district hired a
New York-based consultant to assess individual schools and provide training for teachers,
administrators, staff, and parents. Teachers and administrators are working on a violence-reduction and
safety curriculum.
“We hope our efforts will be reflected in a safer, more secure learning environment,” says Adams.
The Littleton shooting has increased interest in anti-bullying programs, says Mullin-Rindler, as has the
recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that school systems may be held liable if educators ignore student
complaints of sexual harassment by classmates.
And changes are coming. This past April, five months after Josh Belluardo’s death, the Georgia State
Legislature passed an anti-bullying law. The law defines bullying as “any willful attempt or threat to
inflict injury on another person when accompanied by an apparent present ability to do so” or “any
intentional display of force such as would give the victim reason to fear or expect immediate bodily
harm.” Schools are required to send students to an alternative school if they commit a third act of
bullying in a school year. The law also requires school systems to adopt anti-bullying policies and to post
the policies in middle and high schools.
Head was consulted by the state representatives who sponsored the bill, but he believes the measures
don’t go far enough. He urges schools to treat bullying behavior as a violation of the state criminal law
against assault, stalking, and threatening, and to call the police when the law is broken.
He knows it’s too late for Brian, too late for Josh, too late for the teens who died in Littleton. But he
continues to work, to educate and lobby on the devastating effects of bullying so that his son’s death
will not have been in vain.
“We should come clean and say what we’ve done in the past is wrong,” says Head. “Now we will
guarantee we’ll protect the rights of students.”
For this paper, you will be expected to plan and write a response to one of the
readings from this module using one of the prompts below.
Before you begin, you should view the Essay Rubric in the Course Resources
section. The goal of this class is to teach college-level writing conventions, which
may require some students to move beyond previously taught writing models, like the
5-paragraph essay format. There are many significant weaknesses to this model and it
is not adequate at this level. Some aspects of this formula should be particularly
noted. It is not desirable to have a thesis statement that presents the ideas of your body
paragraphs. This “A + B + C” thesis always sounds forced and is overly simplistic. It
also contributes to the next major issue, which is a lack of real transitions between
body paragraphs. Your body paragraphs need to have clear relationships between
them–in the 5-paragraph model, this is usually not the case, but instead the
paragraphs read more like a list. You can often see this in the choice of transition
words–“First, Second, and Finally”. There is no relationship here but the order in
which they come. The final major issue with the 5-paragraph model is the summary
conclusion. The conclusion is a vital space that can engage the reader in new and
unique ways. By simply summarizing points from your essay or restating the thesis,
you will disengage the reader’s attention and add nothing to your paper.
There is no one, single way to approach a paper, or one size or shape. Therefore we
are not looking for a particular number of paragraphs (although to prepare you for the
exit essay, you should have at least 5) or a particular word count. If you look at the
rubric, you will see what we want. First, you should have a strong introduction,
which introduces the topic and identifies the paper’s direction. Next, there should be
quality support, which offers specific details that are well organized and
thoughtful. Finally, you will need a conclusion that challenges the reader and adds to
the paper. This should be done with clear and concise writing. Think outside
of formulas and focus on being as effective as you can be.
Please choose a prompt from the following sources. Take careful note of what the
prompt is asking, and be sure that you are directly addressing the question at hand.
For “Words that Wound” answer the following:
June Arnette, associate director of the National School Safety Center, said that
bullying is “an imbalance of power, sustained over a period of time.” What do you
think this means? When do you think particular words and actions cross the line and
become bullying?
…
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
