First Grade Bully

First grade was the first time in my life when I experienced someone being mean to me or teasing me. Recently, I found a definition in the dictionary about what a bully is. A bully is “a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.” One of the bullies that I most remember is a boy by the name of Stephan. Stephan was a rougher kid who didn’t seem to know how to follow the rules set forth in the classroom. No matter what the teacher would ask Stephan to do, he always seemed to end up doing something completely opposite and disrupting the class. There was another bully by the name of Shawn.

He was a really big kid who, if he wanted to, could pretty much scare any kid. Between these two students, I was often made fun of, if not a little bit abused. To this day, I’m not sure if it’s something that they meant to do or if they were just being themselves and not realizing that they were bothering or hurting someone else. A lot of times it’s just assumed that everyone knows social rules and norms. It’s just something we expect people to know and follow. Sometimes neurotypicals can be programmed to have a negative reaction to someone who is not following the social norms the way that they think they should be.

I am someone who likes and needs for things to be pretty quiet. I don’t like a lot of loud noises or distractions, especially when I’m trying to learn. If there is too much else going on in the room, I’m not able to focus on learning the material that is being presented to me.

So with a lot of kids not realizing or understanding the need to be quiet when the teacher or someone else of importance was talking or leading a group discussion, I was never really able to focus in and learn what was being taught. It seemed like a lot of kids just didn’t really notice or care that there was a teacher up in front of the classroom, trying to do her job and teach the students relevant information that they needed to learn.

I was always very puzzled that when the teacher asked us to be quiet, I would always still hear kids whispering to each other if not talking aloud to one another in the classroom. I could never understand this. To me, be quiet means exactly that: be quiet.