Clay Burrell over at Beyond School has started a fantastic and important meme...he is looking for stories, "Bullied then, successful now" is the theme. He was contacted by a grade nine teen who is enduring horrible bullying at school, and is trying to cope. All the anti-bullying sites didn't really help him, the victim, then he came across Burrell's post about his near suicidal high-school years and his current success and happiness. He said it helped. A lot.
I can do nothing better than quote Burrell himself:
I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story - literally, a story - of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.
That’s one way to do it. Other ways:
a blog post
a webcam video
a Skypecast
a Comic Life or photo-essay
a VoiceThread
[your idea here]
If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.
I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying - and come on, it’s been with us as long as war - one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.
You can read his post in full here .
If you, or someone you know, or loved or parented has something to share with this effort, I would encourage you to take part....it is a fabulous idea, and I think there is a need.
photo by Marius Dollinger on Flickr
6 comments:
Would you even recognize the splendor of the poetry?
If the jerk has eaten the whole thing for the millionth time and never once recognized your needs or rights or anything else except satisfying his own gluttony! And it's definitely not in the name poetry that he keeps doing it.
What a wonderful idea - to help and to offer hope to the victims of bullying when they truly need it. Sam was part of a group that presented an anti-bullying campaign to various schools - and became so disheartened as the bullying continued.
Hey, I'm just a random blogger from the 'Beyond School.' I got into blogging because of Mr. Burell's crazy exciting english + technology ideas. Reading your posts are astonishing (:
GM, it would depend on if it was the millionth time or not, wouldn't it.
Beth, maybe Sam could write something up??
Jung Ah Lee, I am glad you like the posts...could you leave a link to your blog? Is it open to public viewing? It might be very cool to read what you have to say too.
Sam is sweating over studying for his MCAT exams right now - I wouldn't dare ask him to do one more thing. (He is seriously grumpy.)
Beth, MCAT's goodness...it is astonishing how grumpy they can be isn't it....
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