This old post is what I wrote last Augest. It is not about the r word but it goes right along with this topic
I remember when I was little and my dad told me that "Sticks and Stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you. Well I don't think it is true... Wait let me rephrase that it is . Princess and book gal have a easy cry baby that would me. My dad says that I am too sensitive and tells me to ignore it. That is the bad advice that you can give a victim of bullying disabled or not .Still don't believe me okay here comes a story
In sixth grade my mom and dad through that I should have one class in special education called RSP. it basically is a study hall with a special needs teacher who helps you do the work. Well in Sixth grade I had a guy in my class who always said I was a loner and no one played with me. I told the teacher and she said to ignore it because he was from a bad family and needed attention. Well I never could ignore it and I spent the remainder of my first middle school year yelling at him back and froth.
The school thorough I had behavior problems so in seventh grade I was put into a RSP room with a strict teacher and mean kids. Man did I hate that class. There were three other kids in the class who teased me and like the guy in 6th grade all of them came from middle class families trying to make ends meet. What made it worse was that there was a nice RSP room with good kids who teacher was nice. I also was the only one with my teachers on my RSP teacher case load The nice one had the others.
On Wednesdays were the hardest day of the week. The teacher had meetings that day and we were under supervision of a sub. One peculiar Wednesday a girl said that the entire 7th grade hated me. She was training for a peer helper and the class was talking about me and how much they hated me. My aid talked to me and sat by me during my next class and we talked to the head teacher(Who is a great guy that i had for math the next year) who told me that they had been talking about how to treat someone with a disability and my name came up. Someone did not learn their lesson.
Words do hurt and schools need to be aware of this and help those getting teased and don't tell them to ignore it . Think about it this way if your son/ daughter fell and scarped his/her knee you wipe it up right. Well bullying is like that only the cut is invisible It's a cut to the child self esteem
2 comments:
I was just discussing that "sticks and stones" saying with my son the other day. Words DO hurt. Sometimes even more than sticks and stones ever could.
It's amazing how words that start as medical diagnoses end up as insults or slurs. For instance, the word "spastic," as you know is a medical term for high muscle tone. It used to be used to refer to cerebral palsy until it became a well-known playground insult. If the words "mental retardation" are abolished, people will just whatever words replace them as insults. What really needs to stop is not the use of certain words as medical terms, but using words to refer to people with disabilities in derogatory ways.
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