Karma!

My class has the biggest bully I have encountered in my short teaching career. This little girl is the nastiest kind of bully because not only does she say and do whatever she can to make the other students feel like crap about themselves, she tries to get others to join her and gang up on certain kids. She has obviously been doing this for a while because she is SUPER sneaky about it too! Her latest victim is the boy from the popsicle post. He had been having a really hard time not playing during lessons so I moved him to a table with three girls so he would have no one to talk to. Well, it solved the talking problem, but the girl bully just started messing with him every chance she got. This went on for two days with me trying to teach them to ignore each other. I guess I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until popsicle boy just lost it on the bully. It was a full on panic attack complete with crying, shaking, heaving, and yelling. This boy could not stop yelling at the bully and was threatening her with all kinds of violence while screaming in her face, but wouldn't touch her. This kid was UPSET, but luckily, he is not violent. If he had been one of my more violent students, I think the bully would have been a bloody mess from getting her butt beat up.

I could tell that this girl had never had one of her victims freak out on her before because she was genuinely shocked and scared by this boy's reaction. I had to hold and hug the boy in order to calm him down, which is a statement of the situation's seriousness because I do not normally baby my students.

I won't get into the details of my conferences with both the victim and the bully, but the best part of the story happened about 20 minutes after my conference with the bully. She was at recess playing and jumped off of a piece of playground equipment. She wasn't paying attention to where she was jumping and jumped right into a bar. Her head split open and blood started gushing. I have seen a lot of playground injuries, but none with this much blood. She had never cut herself like that before and started freaking out thinking she was going to die. As I walked her to the nurse's office and watched her get cleaned up, I couldn't help but thinking this was Karma doing its best to set the world right. She left school to go get stitches in her head. And the student she was bullying had a great afternoon and did all of his work perfectly.