I am reading a most fascinating book titled Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories (ed. by Megan Kelley Hall and Carrie Jones.) Yes, the intended audience are teen readers, but they book really speaks to the young teen that is still lurking around inside of me.
I am only about a third of the way through, but it means something when I am having trouble putting the book down to write this blog post! (And will obviously post a second post when I am through with the book.)
For the A to Z Blog Challenge in April, I posted a story about the "mean girl" in my life in fifth grade. I didn't even go into what she was involved in my eighth grade year (and the school principal believe everything he heard from certain students . . so stupid!) I haven't posted about the boy with the locker next to mine in middle school (he was just mean.) I haven't posted about the girl in sixth grade who perhaps had a lot of things going on at home, but seemed to take it out on me.
That's why some of the stories thus far in this book speak to me. I hope that we, as the adults of today, are doing a better job with the kids of today. Kids don't need to be experiencing any of this crap just because it is tradition, because we are taught to suck it up, to have to put up with it. Adults need to listen and not stick their heads in the sand, or be bullied themselves by other people.
A. S. King (whom I met at the Tucson Festival of Books in 2009) wrote in this book: "I swear adults are the dumbest people alive. I get lied about, groped, and read to from the Bible and nobody blinks a stupid little eyelid. But somebody makes up a story about my long-graduated sister in a fit of hysterical homophobia and now it's my problem. I have no idea what to say. They're just sitting here looking at me and I am deaf from the pounding explosions in my head. Too many things wrong with this to compute. Too many things. I wish I could disappear. Run away. Start over." (106)
I am only about a third of the way through, but it means something when I am having trouble putting the book down to write this blog post! (And will obviously post a second post when I am through with the book.)
For the A to Z Blog Challenge in April, I posted a story about the "mean girl" in my life in fifth grade. I didn't even go into what she was involved in my eighth grade year (and the school principal believe everything he heard from certain students . . so stupid!) I haven't posted about the boy with the locker next to mine in middle school (he was just mean.) I haven't posted about the girl in sixth grade who perhaps had a lot of things going on at home, but seemed to take it out on me.
That's why some of the stories thus far in this book speak to me. I hope that we, as the adults of today, are doing a better job with the kids of today. Kids don't need to be experiencing any of this crap just because it is tradition, because we are taught to suck it up, to have to put up with it. Adults need to listen and not stick their heads in the sand, or be bullied themselves by other people.
A. S. King (whom I met at the Tucson Festival of Books in 2009) wrote in this book: "I swear adults are the dumbest people alive. I get lied about, groped, and read to from the Bible and nobody blinks a stupid little eyelid. But somebody makes up a story about my long-graduated sister in a fit of hysterical homophobia and now it's my problem. I have no idea what to say. They're just sitting here looking at me and I am deaf from the pounding explosions in my head. Too many things wrong with this to compute. Too many things. I wish I could disappear. Run away. Start over." (106)
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