That class was very lively.

In general, the students correctly predicted the very negative effects of bullying on victims (lifelong psychological scarring) and the fact that shy or quiet children were often targeted — those who couldn’t fight back or were afraid, especially among girls.

But they did not predict the high rate of later criminal behavior among bullies. Sometimes students got “leadership” and bullying mixed up. Nor did they predict the studies revealing that bullies of both sexes were quite often victimized, beaten, or denigrated in their own homes.

The interesting point for everyone was how much this problem preoccupied people in all countries. In some countries, students committed suicide when they did not do well enough in school to please their families or were shamed in front of fellow students. In other places, it was tied to dating and rivalries among girls.

One question to research was how to prevent or stop bullying. The students were very skeptical about the “conflict resolution peer groups” used in many high schools in the U.S. today. They were interested in the fact that such efforts existed here while in most countries the problem is ignored. However, they doubted that anything could be done.

Next year, I would like to invite a speaker from one of these groups to speak to the students. This was a very lively discussion and in addition to fluency practice, we learned a lot of new vocabulary and a lot about each other’s countries and culture.

For the next class, I prepared a question sheet about bullying and the students worked on answering the questions to the best of their ability in small groups of mixed nationalities. The questions were:

• Why do some children become bullies?
• Why are some children victims of bullying?
• What should you do if you see bullying?
• What are the consequences of bullying for the victims? For the bullies?

For homework each group was given ONE of the questions to research on the web. They were told to find expert opinion on the issues by consulting reputable websites (and we discussed how to tell websites of value by looking on the web together as a class).

The students had to find answers to the question their group was assigned and report back to the class. They also had to compare their original thinking with the experts’ opinion.

I’ll report on the actual discussion next time.

Almost all the students remembered some positive experiences learning about friendship or loyalty or how to get along with others. But students from all nine countries, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe to Asia and Latin America, remembered incidents of bullying as they grew up.

They said it was rampant and were very shocked to hear that it had not been a major problem in past generations. Now it seems ubiquitous. Each student (sadly) gave examples of bullying and the worst seemed to be among girls. We practiced indirect speech and paraphrasing by having another student summarize what had just been said and we compared experiences.

This gave an interesting background for what most of my students did not at first understand: home schooling. Put in this context – as a possible reaction to bullying and other negative influences — the home schooling movement from Reading One became less completely strange to them.

How have you all handled discussions of bullying with your students?

We started with Reading Two, the great story from Isaac Asimov called “The Fun They Had.” In the story, children from the future looked back on “the good old days” and how great it was to go to school (instead of relying on computer-learning at home). The children of the future were starved for the companionship and relationships that school can bring.

Then we asked the students to write for 5 minutes in free writing (not paying attention to errors but just brainstorming) on what they learned from other children in school: good and bad. Then they read their paragraphs to other students and commented on the results.

I’ll post the results of this activity next. How do you work with this particular unit?