I was reading other people's blogs when I came across Annie Young's post:

One incident that sticks out is this: A good friend of mine (Let's call her Abby) had been best friends with a separate girl (Let's call her Sophie). But Sophie had turned incredibly clingy, and would get very upset if Abby was friends with anyone else. So, Abby, out of options broke off the friendship, realizing that it was hurting her. Sophie was devastated, hurt and angry. She began commenting on all of Abby's Facebook statues with rude comments on anything that was posted. (Which, was a form of bullying in itself). I defended Abby, and for about a week, my best friend and I would stand a few feet away from Sophie before school, sending glares her way, occasionally saying rude things loudly.

We never directly spoke to her, or threatened her. But if we ever saw her, maybe in the halls, maybe in the library, maybe on the blacktop, we would glare, and if we were close enough her name was possibly said, "Sooooophie." The single word would be whispered, the implications of what we could do to her would be left hanging in the air. I don't think Sophie realized that in reality, we were two 5'5 girls, who couldn't possibly manage to do anything to anybody, half the time we struggled carrying our own backpacks. But she didn't know that.

This post stuck out to me because I thought that the way she wrote her essay pretty much covered everything that needed saying. One thing I liked that she did was use anonymous names for the people. It reminds me of that activity we were doing in class the other day about masking your identity. The second thing I liked was that she even said that they were 'just two 5'5 girls who had a hard time even carrying their backpacks'. The reason I like this part is because of the way she described it. The final thing I like about this is that it is from a different side of the story. It is sort of like at first Sophie was the bully, but then Abby and Annie got in her head. I think that was a good strategy to use in that position. I think that Annie's Post was over all my favorite because of the care and thought she put into it.

This relates to the ASTI constitution in four main ways. The first way was by resolving the conflict peacefully. The way she did this was by not threatening her, but just sort of ignoring her. That was one of the steps that i wrote in my essay. The second thing Annie did was think before she acted. She had to think about if she should step in on her friend's problem and help, or just stay out of it and let it resolve by itself. If I was in her situation I would have stepped in too because it is good to help your friends with their problems. Next she spoke up for one of her class mates by help her with the problem because it is the right thing to do. This one relates a lot to the last one because it talks about how Annie helped Abby,and what she had to do to help. Finally the last thing that relates to the constitution is building mutual trust for others. When Annie allied herself with Abby she began to build mutual trust for her. Building mutual trust with someone is important because if you are ever in a bad situation the person you trust can return the favor by helping out of your hard times. In this quote Annie talks about a hard time in her life, but I think because of that it made it easier for her to talk about

‘Just Kidding’ and ‘Ganging Up’

I remember one time when a group of kids went around the whole school picking on smaller kids. At that time I was one of the smaller kids. They would do things like make fun of their clothes and how they looked. I know that that was wrong because kids couldn’t change how they looked, or how their clothes looked because the kid’s parents might not have had money to get them the name brand clothing. Whenever a kid would try to do something like confront the group they would just get humiliated. If the kids tried to go to the teacher they would simply exclaim they were just kidding. That really made me angry.

Some of my options were to try to tell a teacher, get in a fight, get a group of your friends to confront them with myself, or simply just ignore them. Trying to tell the teacher didn’t work because like I said, they would be ‘just kidding’. Getting in a fight didn’t make sense either because violence wasn’t the answer to this problem. Getting a group of my friends together made sense at first so I talked to a couple of them and we decided to do that. Later that day I realized that that would probably lead to violence to, so that choice was out. The last choice was to ignore them. That always works the best in a situation like that, but it is hard to do for me. I always just wanted to say something back, and a lot of the times I did. But I realized that it wouldn’t. Soon everybody else started to ignore them and they stopped. I think the reason that they stopped was because they always had someone react to it. Once they saw that everyone just ignored them they just felt stupid. I think that was the best ways to make anything like that stop.

I think the two main reasons that kids bully each other is because they either have been bullied themselves, or they have problems at home. If a kid is made fun of for a really long time they start to do it to other people because they think it is okay, or they need some way to let out their anger. If they have problems at home like abusive parents or their parents argue a lot they seem to do the same thing because that is how they were raised. Even if one of those two things I happening to you it is still not okay to tease people, or hurt them. And they reason that they do it to other kids is because they can’t do it to adults. If they tried to do that to an adult the adult would get them in trouble because they have more authority.

If you are being bullied by someone the best way to solve is by ignoring them. Remember this for the future.