I was picked on - OT

"EvelynVogtGamble(Divamanque)" wrote in message
m...


Joy wrote:

I started this thread, not to talk about myself, but because several
people in that other thread mentioned being picked on in school. I
thought it would be interesting to see just how many of us did fit into
that category, and if there is anyone who wasn't picked on.

Joy

I wasn't exactly "picked on", just shunned. When I was just starting
second grade, my widowed mother bought a house in a different school
district. You wouldn't think kids that age had already formed cliques,
but they had, and I, the newcomer, was chosen to be avoided. Funny thing
was, the girls leading the clique weren't people I even WANTED to be
friends with. (One of them was physically unattractive with a singularly
nasty way of bad-mouthing everyone, the other enormously fat -
unfortunates one would normally expect to be the outcasts.) However,
coming from a school where I DID have a great many friends, I was hurt and
bewildered by their animosity. Fortunately, many of our neighbor children
went to the nearby Catholic school, not the public school I attended, so I
had plenty of kids to play with, just no friends at school.

Even though both girls had long transferred to other schools before we
graduated from eighth grade, the harm was done. I simply played with my
Catholic neighbors, and took refuge in books. Fortunately, my talent for
music (singing) was recognized and encouraged by our music teachers. Even
though I was shy about personal relationships with new people, I was
always happy performing, so things could have been worse.


I think it depends on where you live, too. We lived for 6 months with my
grandparents in the *very* small town in Ohio where my mother was born/grew
up. And where she lived next door to my father. Cliquish isn't the word.
Bass-ackwards might be better

When the teacher announced I'd just moved there from Bangkok, Thailand, the
kids started calling me "Jap". Never mind that people from Thailand aren't
Japanese, never mind that I had blonde hair and blue eyes. I was an
immediate outcast. Their tiny little small town minds couldn't conceive of
someone who had lived outside the confines of this town that only had one
stop light and didn't even have a pay phone until 1980. LOL

I play piano by ear. (I still can't read music.) The kids didn't believe
me when I sat in the music room and played Nino Rota's score from 'Romeo &
Juliet' without the benefit of sheet music. Oh, and the music teacher made
everyone sing (audition) so they could figure out which music class to place
you in. (A barbaric and cruel practice, if you ask me, since it immediately
slapped a label on a kid.) "General Music" was for those who couldn't carry
a tune in a bucket, "Chorus" was if you might have some sort of talent,
"Choir" was if you could sing and showed musical promise. (I'm surprised
they didn't want to find out who could tap dance.) I made the Choir, which
further fueled my classmates' animosity.

I pretty much spent that 6 months hanging out at Grandma's house. Reading
books, mostly. While we lived in Bangkok I rarely got to see friends except
at school. We were all expats, so friendships were easy. In Ohio, there
were no friends in school. I'd really thought coming back to the States
would be a good thing. But trust me, I could have lived without that "home
town" crap. Small town, small minds. All these years later, I'm still
resentful about it.

Jill

BfloPolska wrote:
On Jul 25, 8:30 pm, "Joy" wrote:
I started this thread, not to talk about myself, but because several people
in that other thread mentioned being picked on in school. I thought it
would be interesting to see just how many of us did fit into that category,
and if there is anyone who wasn't picked on.


I caught so much hell in my youth that I am at times surprised that I
made it as far as I have without becoming a career criminal or being
on the street, and still in the back of my mind I wonder when the
other shoe will fall.

The abuse I endured from my family alone, I will not go into at
present. It is guaranteed to whiten the hair of any who may read it.
Many of my issues pertained to what I know know to be learning
disability, left unresolved, untreated, and undiagnosed until I was in
my mid-30's. It was considered a moral deficiency on my part, and I
was something of an afterthought in my home. Clothing that was not my
school uniform was my mother's hand-me-downs and made me look old. I
was forbidden washing more than a few times a month because soap cost
money. (My father was a commodities broker, that ghetto of the
impoverished in the 1970's.) I was isolated from my peers and never
learned how to interact and make friends; and when the sexual abuse
started it was written off as attention-getting and story-telling.
Suffice it to say that my home life extended into the outer sphere of
things, and I was routinely scapegoated--one time a boy crapped on a
paper place and smeared it on me while his buddies held me down. My
family blamed me for that, and the rocks thrown, the defaced books,
the kicks and beatings and the general terror. "If you weren't so
ugly..." Apparently being Polish was also a good reason for such
bullying, and it was years before I could find reason to lay claim to
some good old-fashioned Polack Pride. My brother became the petty
criminal. I had not spoken to my father in over twenty years before he
died in Poland. In those twenty years I had spoken to my brother three
times.

I also wonder how I ended up getting married.

Blessed be,
Baha

Baha

I got it too, but nothing like that. It always goes to show, whenever I
think that I've had it bad, I find that someone has had it much worse.
Sweetie, I wish we could have known each other back then. We could have
helped each other through the family abuse and, hopefully, the crap
could have landed back on the jerk who dealt it.

Pam S. saddened at the waste of a beautiful person childhood

"Joy" wrote
"Yowie" wrote

I was - an am - remarkably tall. I was close to 6 foot tall in the last

I always wanted to be that. Tall but worth the climb.

I was always smaller than my classmates, but my mother was tall. At
junior

Instead I ended up short but worth the stoop.

Oh well!

In article ,
"Joy" wrote:

I started this thread, not to talk about myself, but because several people
in that other thread mentioned being picked on in school. I thought it
would be interesting to see just how many of us did fit into that category,
and if there is anyone who wasn't picked on.

I didn't get much of a chance to get picked on at school. I still did
get picked on in first grade about the questionable hygiene practices
that my parents instilled in me at that time, and my poor social skills,
and my last name, and the 'smart' label that I got because of who my
sister is.

I got pulled out of school after first grade. That's when the bullying
got worse, at home, from sperm donor. Threats were endless, and
punishments were doled out based on how ****ed off he was that day.

I really do like cats better than people most of the time...

--
minnow ^..^

http://twitter.com/taheenahana
http://www.flickr.com/photos/minnow/

Joy wrote:

I wouldn't live through my teens again for anything, and most of the people
I know wouldn't either.

Most people I know feel the same way you do. They have relatively happy
childhood memories, but high school was a nightmare. I feel the opposite.
My younger childhood was a nightmare, but when I got into my teens things
got much better. I have a lot of good memories from high school. Not that
I was in the popular clique, but I did have friends and an active social
life, and my confidence went way up. Then it crashed again when I hit 18.

Joyce

--
Basically, I feel like the food industry is making us fat so the diet
industry can make us thin. -- Janet

On 2010-07-25 19:30:44 -0500, Joy said:

I thought I'd start a new thread as a result of some of the things that
have been said in the "chopped liver" thread.

When I was in school, I was picked on because I was younger than nearly
all of my classmates. I was called "the baby" and jeered at on a
regular basis. I was already extremely shy, and that didn't help. I
did do well in school, and that probably added fuel to the fire. I
shall never stop being grateful to my parents for refusing to let me be
advanced two grades in elementary school. That would have driven me so
far into my shell I never would have found my way out.

I got teased about my name, too. That was more good-natured, but it
still bothered me because I didn't want people looking at me.

I started this thread, not to talk about myself, but because several
people in that other thread mentioned being picked on in school. I
thought it would be interesting to see just how many of us did fit into
that category, and if there is anyone who wasn't picked on.

Joy

Oh boy - was I ever picked on. A lot of my peers seemed to have
problems dealing with redheads, and readheads with a lot of freckles
caught a lot of ****. I was always painfully shy, so that also gave the
creeps more ammunition to use against me. Since I didn't react with
anger as they expected, the bullys really loved to give me ****.

That crap went on until I left high school.

I am positive that the crap I had to put us with as a kid was the root
cause of my present inability to deal with strangers and crippling fear
of crowds.

Cheryl P. wrote:

I found school mostly boring, occasionally interesting, enjoyable, or
bad, but I wouldn't home school a child of mine. If I'd been home
schooled, it would have been a disaster to judge by the results of my
mother attempting to teach me to play the piano. Sometimes it's easier
to learn from someone who has less tied up emotionally in the outcome,
and, of course, not everyone is a good teacher even of things they know
very well.

I don't see why whether or not it's always enjoyable makes a difference.
It's not as though you can expect to enjoy all of any activity.

I have mixed feelings about home schooling. (This is probably going to
spawn a new thread...)

Pro

On one hand, I feel a lot of what goes on in public schools (and maybe
some private schools, too, but I know a lot less about that) is pretty
destructive. A lot of what kids learn is how to sit quietly for long
periods and be obedient - to learn to tolerate long stretches of boredom,
which will prepare them for the jobs that the majority of them will have.
I'm *not* saying kids should never experience boredom, or ever have to do
things they don't like. No matter how school is taught, that's going to
happen, and things like discipline and commitment are valuable lessons,
too. I'm talking about how, for so many kids, school is about sitting for
hours and hours every day, totally uninterested in what's being taught,
but being forced to stay there and at least pretend to pay attention. Well,
that's how school felt to me!

Then of course, there's the declining of the academic curriculum, due to
budget cuts and non-child-oriented priorities. You don't have to look very
far to see the effects of that. Just read posts on the Internet. It's
horrifying to see how little education many people managed to graduate with!

There are also a lot of values that I wouldn't want my kids to be stuck
with, such as that violence is an acceptable solution to conflict, and
that you have to conform to be accepted by your peers. I know that officially,
schools profess that they disapprove of violence, but other *effective* ways
of dealing with conflict are not taught very well. That leaves kids no choice
but to use violence when it's being used against them. As for conformity,
my sense is that this is even worse today than it was when I was going to
school, and I didn't think that was possible!

Con

On the other hand, unless you get together with a bunch of other home-
schoolers and form a small school of your own, your kids aren't going to
get enough of a social environment, or learn how to get along with kids
they didn't choose to be with and don't like. It's one thing to hang out
with your friends, but you can choose your friends. What about getting
along with some jerk you can't stand? I'm not even talking about bullying
here - there are many reasons kids don't get along. Jealousy, conflicting
values, personality differences, all the regular things that go with being
human. I think it's important for kids to learn how to deal with this stuff.

Not to mention that I think it's healthy for kids to be exposed to lots
of other adults besides their parents. Not just because parents can't be
good at everything (so aren't necessarily the best teachers for every
subject). But also because you get different points of view from different
teachers. As long as the school isn't hammering home the same point of
view from every teacher (which, with pitifully few exceptions, is often
the case - and then you get the problems cited in my "pros" section), kids
would get a chance to consider different ways of looking at things, and not
assume their parents are the fonts of all knowledge. In addition, there are
the other *relationships* that kids can form in school, not just with their
peers, but with teachers and other adults at school. That fosters community
connections, and I think that's a very important experience. Home schooling
always strikes me as an insulated and kind of artificial environment, which
they will probably never encounter again.

If I were a parent, I would probably not home-school, because I feel a
bit stronger about the arguments against than the arguments for. It would
be a hard decision though, and I can understand why people would make
either choice.

Joyce

--
I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better
for it. -- Abraham Lincoln

Lesley wrote:
On Jul 26, 9:13 am, Adrian wrote:

I wonder what he's doing these days.

Funnily enough when I was about 17 I was talking to some friends of a
friend in a pub and we all worked out we'd been at the same school
roundabout the same time and I did ask if anyone remembered a kid
called Malcolm Hewitt?

Long silence....then it was revealed he was facing jail for assaulting
his girlfriend ... these being lads from Romford they felt the "B**ch"
deserved it 'cos she'd talked back to him .....and it wasn't a
"b**ch's" place to do that...she "nagged" him over spending rent money
which made it okay for him to give her a good slapping 'cos she
shouldn't have said anything "after all" as one of them said "He works
so it's his money and she can't tell him what to do with it"
Apparently he was annoyed because his kid got taken away by those
B***tards at social services who didn't apparently understand a man
had a right to slap women

Why do you think after growing up in Romford and this charming session
I made the following vows:

1. I will always earn my own money and never be dependent on anyone
else if its my money I can spend it as I see fit
2. I'll never be a housewife- even through my school and family try
to teach me the only "success" is to snag a man with a good job and
have kids and never have to work again....I;d rather be a failure in
their eyes
3. HOW SOON CAN I GET OUT OF THIS PLACE?!

Maybe I should thank Malcolm Hewitt more often :-)

Lesley

Slave of the Fabulous Furballs

He sounds like a charming bloke, pity he was allowed to breed.

--
Adrian (Owned by Bagheera & Shadow)
Cats leave pawprints on your heart
http://community.webshots.com/user/clowderuk

On Jul 27, 4:40*am, Adrian wrote:

He sounds like a charming bloke, pity he was allowed to breed.


Sadly along with many Romford "blokes" of the time he was almost
expected to breed. the other side of the "Snag a guy in a good paid
job and become a mum of 2 ASAP" was "If the bird ain't up the duff on
the wedding day okay but if she ain;t up the duff within 6 months
top..are you a pouf?"

I recall my youngest brother (who had some bullying issues of his own-
too much of a swot) sitting in the car following the hearse with my
mum's coffin on it...as we went past some of the old stamping grounds
he looked back and my other brother (Who never had a problem- then
again he was six feet tall by 15) said "Thinking of the good old
days?"

And my brother said "I'm just thinking thank f**k I never have to come
here again!"

Lesley

Slave of the Fabulous Furballs

In ,
Takayuki typed:
Yowie wrote:
I cam from England to Australian when I was 4. I had done half a
year of school in England at the time (England's school year starts
half way through the calendar year, Australian school years start at
the start of the calendar year), however, I could also read
remarkably well, so instead of putting me with my age peers into
kindergarten, they decided to put me up into first class because I
already knew most of the stuff I would have learnt in kindy.

Our childhoods were sort of similar! I came to the US from Japan
when I was 4, and when I was enrolled in kindergarten, I was the only
one who could read, although I couldn't speak English well at that
point (I'd studied written English formally before entering school).

But boys, I think, grow up in a different culture than girls. There
was always horseplay and a low level of mostly harmless casual
violence among us. But I don't condone it spilling over the gender
line - there's no cause for that.

its funny to watch girls & boys itneract. Being an only child, Cary is is a
bit 'left out' at times, but when we visit other people - partcularly people
we know well, I get to see the difference between Boys and Girls. There's
one family in particular whose son is 10 and daughter is 8 (Cary is 6).
Until Cary was about 5, he much preferred to play with the daughter, and the
son openly said "I DON'T PLAY WITH BABIES!" alot. Nowadays, Cary still begs
to go over to the daughter's house, but when he gets there, he'll spend
almost all his time either physically sparring with the son or playing
wargames with the son. Cary will still ask that the son not be there so he
can play with the daughter if we go over there, but thats clearly not how
things go when they all get together - the son and Cary, having spent 4 or
more hours laughing madly together and totally ignoring the daughter have to
be peeled apart for us to go home, but will mantain that they dont like
playing with each other even to each other's face. Strange little critters.

Yowie