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Let's be clear: these kids still attend school, like you did. Susceptibility to bullying has not disappeared. What the article is discussing specifically is lei

Let's be clear: these kids still attend school, like you did. Susceptibility to bullying has not disappeared. What the article is discussing specifically is leisure time, and it was just as possible to spend that sedentary and alone 30 years ago. Having a social life vs not being bullied is a false dichotomy.

riehwvfbk 1y ago
Let's be clear: invalidating someone's life experience based on your misrepresentation of something they said is not cool. Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.
- lanfeust6 1y ago
  Don't project things I never conveyed in any way shape or form.
ryao 1y ago
I was beaten during “leisure time” (it was called recess). As far as I was told, this was good for me because to use your words, it gave me a social life. That social life was one where I was a punching bag, but none of the school employees cared. They blindly thought leaving children to their own devices was good for them and while there was supposedly oversight, the teachers had no idea what a student being beaten by his peers on a day to day basis looked like and apparently thought there was nothing wrong while I was being stuck by several others. They only recognized it the few times I fought back, and then disciplined me for having the audacity to defend myself, while my bullies were exempt from discipline through the intervention of their parents. Having leisure time in school be spent with zero interactions with other students would have prevented the beatings. As per my recollection, when my mother discovered this after it had been on-going for 3 years, she asked me why I did not ever say anything. At the time, I simply thought that was normal, since I had no recollection of a recess period where I had not been beaten. I also was not very good at explaining that, since not only had I had no idea that this was abnormal, but I had also repressed the memories to be able to function during the day. It did not stop me from having horrific nightmares seemingly every night from which I would often awaken screaming for years, but how was a young child supposed to know that any of this was not normal when it was all that he had ever known?
- em-bee 1y ago
  as kids we don't know what is normal. this is the whole insidious thing with any form of child abuse. the bullying i experienced was limited to frequent teasing but i never made any friends at school and at home my parents were not very emotionally supportive (not their fault, they had it worse growing up). i was unconsciously searching for that emotional support all my life, but it took me decades before i finally understood what i was missing and how it affected me. i also don't remember much from my childhood because i repressed memories from that time.
  - ryao 1y ago
    The students were not the only ones to bully me. I can recall three incidents where teachers bullied me: * One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful. * The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue. * Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil. That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.

riehwvfbk 1y ago

Let's be clear: invalidating someone's life experience based on your misrepresentation of something they said is not cool. Even if bullying remains a fixture in one's life, having something to look forward to after the hell they call school is much better than having nothing. And the "something" can be learning to program, tinkering with Linux, or talking to friends from around the world online. Having screen time vs having a social or intellectual life is a false dichotomy.

lanfeust6 1y ago
Don't project things I never conveyed in any way shape or form.

ryao 1y ago

I was beaten during “leisure time” (it was called recess). As far as I was told, this was good for me because to use your words, it gave me a social life. That social life was one where I was a punching bag, but none of the school employees cared. They blindly thought leaving children to their own devices was good for them and while there was supposedly oversight, the teachers had no idea what a student being beaten by his peers on a day to day basis looked like and apparently thought there was nothing wrong while I was being stuck by several others. They only recognized it the few times I fought back, and then disciplined me for having the audacity to defend myself, while my bullies were exempt from discipline through the intervention of their parents. Having leisure time in school be spent with zero interactions with other students would have prevented the beatings. As per my recollection, when my mother discovered this after it had been on-going for 3 years, she asked me why I did not ever say anything. At the time, I simply thought that was normal, since I had no recollection of a recess period where I had not been beaten. I also was not very good at explaining that, since not only had I had no idea that this was abnormal, but I had also repressed the memories to be able to function during the day. It did not stop me from having horrific nightmares seemingly every night from which I would often awaken screaming for years, but how was a young child supposed to know that any of this was not normal when it was all that he had ever known?

em-bee 1y ago
as kids we don't know what is normal. this is the whole insidious thing with any form of child abuse. the bullying i experienced was limited to frequent teasing but i never made any friends at school and at home my parents were not very emotionally supportive (not their fault, they had it worse growing up). i was unconsciously searching for that emotional support all my life, but it took me decades before i finally understood what i was missing and how it affected me. i also don't remember much from my childhood because i repressed memories from that time.
- ryao 1y ago
  The students were not the only ones to bully me. I can recall three incidents where teachers bullied me: * One teacher lifted me by my tie off the floor (to the point where I was on my toes) and yelled at me for the audacity of trying to help her with a computer issue. I forget what the issue was (although I believe it involved printing), but I recall that I had encountered the problem in the past and had regurgitated the solution in an effort to be helpful. * The same teacher hit me repeatedly on the head in class while telling me that until I had a college degree, I was not to tell her how to do her job, again for having had the audacity of telling her to how solve a computer issue. She later took my advice and solved it, but tried to hide that she had taken it. Either this or the previous incident had been over my telling her to press the insert key to disable overwrite mode in Microsoft Word. She had been puzzled on how to disable overwrite mode until I tried to help her. I am not entirely sure which incident correspond to which issue. * Another teacher, upon hearing that I could solve all of the math problems given to us in class mentally, started yelling at me while the class jeered. Then she wrote a bunch of numbers on the board and demanded I tell her the average while she loudly counted down and the class was making a racket. All of the noise caused an off by 1 error in my computation and she then concluded that I was incapable of doing mental math. I had known that I might be off by one, but I did not have enough time to repeat the computation, so I picked one of the two possibilities and unfortunately picked wrongly. Ironically, I later won a mental math competition in the school that had people solve questions that far exceeded those the we were expected to solve using a paper and pencil. That said, my mother somehow learned about the incidents involving the computer teacher. I had no idea at the time why she was upset and threatened legal action if it ever happened again. Many of these incidents were a blur when I was a student as I had repressed them. My mother had to learn about what had happened by asking my classmates before she was able to pry the details out of me. I started to remember many of these things years later when my circumstances had improved and the memories had resurfaced as intrusive thoughts, which in a way, victimized me again years after the events were long past. There is nothing quite like going about one’s day only for memories of past abuse to resurface for an attack on one’s psyche.