When most people leave school, they optimistically hope they’ll never have to encounter bullying again. Unfortunately, returning to school as a teacher means returning to school-age problems. I’ve been bullied and seen others bullied in the most unbelievable of ways.
Teaching is full of arrested development types, which makes it all the more depressing that they spend more time with your children than you do, modelling “adult” behaviour. Teachers are the only people who should actually feel impostor syndrome. They can have fragile egos and are quick to become fractious or feel threatened.
A former colleague of mine almost lost their job because a jealous colleague told stories about them to the principal, who didn’t do their due diligence to confirm their veracity. My colleague couldn’t be fired, so the principal trimmed their hours down to single digits, hoping they’d leave. My colleague stubbornly dug in and waited for eventual vindication (which came). Unfortunately, it took years for their timetable (and therefore salary) to be restored to former levels.
Another teacher I knew was holding a charity event. They put up a sign in the staffroom asking for everyone to be accommodating and let the involved students leave class early to prepare the hall. The sign was torn down. The two teachers I was fairly sure did it made a point of complaining loudly in the staffroom (when my colleague was there) that it was a disgrace they’d be missing sixth-years because of the event. The next day, they equally loudly exclaimed relief that they’d be missing sixth-years due to a choir service (held by their friend). Despite this, several hundred euro was raised for the charity.
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In my last school, I witnessed the most heinous and calculated campaign of bullying I’d seen. I grew to become friends with the person being bullied and it pained me to watch events unfold. After a staffroom bust-up, the bully filed a fallacious complaint about my friend, lying about being verbally abusive. My friend became a staffroom pariah, spending lunches or classes in their car. In the height of winter, they took to secreting themselves away in a disused office.
When the bully got wind of this, they kept borrowing the school keys so they could lock the room. I went to the principal on my friend’s behalf. The cruelty of this was insane. After being leashed, the bully took a different approach. Haranguing the caretaker into removing all of the furniture from the room so my friend would have the enviable choice of standing or sitting on the floor.
Bullying is a buzzword in schools, a straw man that’s hung out so committees can proudly declare they’ve solved the epidemic in their school. Ironically, bullies usually populate these committees and crow the loudest about the issue.
Subconscious guilt? The realist in me doubts it.
At the last staff meeting in which this issue was discussed, an anti-bullying charter was drafted. I looked around the room, aghast, convinced I was in a Kafka-esque nightmare. My colleague contends that we’re in a hidden camera show, like Punk’d, where the producers are waiting for us to break. In this charter, the word “dignity” kept popping up.
After my own bullying experiences, I’ve lost my sense of dignity or of being valued in my school. It’s made me not particularly care about the job any more. I was once talented, creative and energetic. I just about slump through the day now.
Management has a role to play in this. There are many principals who bury their heads, don’t want to get involved, or are disconnected from the staffroom zeitgeist because they stay in their office all day.
Bullying isn’t always of the abrupt, give-me-your-lunch-money variety. It can often be of the insinuating kind. I often see trainee teachers being approached by some of the old guard, who’ll lean over them and observe how wonderful it would be if someone were to start up the debating club again; how it’d look great on their CV and reference. I once collared a trainee to tell them that they’re being used, that the teacher who approached them has a post of responsibility specifically about jump-starting debating, that they’re being paid extra money to make debating happen and that they’re charitably defining “running the club” as getting someone else to do it.
Bullying in sports is its own beast. My school has a coach/caretaker for the sports complex. I stress the word sports, but he only allows one sport to be played there. Any other member of staff who attempts to play any other sport in there has to deal with his petty childishness. Nets go missing. Cones are strewn across the floor to prevent any encroachment on his turf. The man himself, with the likeness of one of Mussolini’s grandiloquent propaganda posters, stands rampant on the shiny court, pretending not to notice he’s in the way.
On the rare occasion that a skirmish is successful and another sport has breached his stronghold, he returns quickly to circle the wagons, or the court in this case, making his intimidating presence felt until the pressure gets too much and the teacher acquiesces and ends training early.
Students always moan, “Why do we have to study Shakespeare?”
Appearance versus reality is one of the primary themes in almost all of his plays. Being able to identify who is fake and genuine.
I use the school as a case study.
