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Nov. 8th, 2005 01:25 amSo, this Sunday in Hebrew school, I did some teaching about Lashon Ha-Ra.
See, at the staff meeting (the one where I was dressed as Jayne Cobb), the topic of bullying came up. Now, there isn't a big bullying problem that I can see in the Hebrew school, mainly because we're only there for two-and-a half hours a week, and the kids are always under adult supervision. But a lot of kids have been having problems in their regular schools. And we were trying to talk about if there was anything we could do, as religious instructors, to help give kids tools to deal with this.
Now, the bullying that they're really having trouble with is the emotional kind -- teasing and the like. One kid in my class said that she'd lost all of her friends, because someone had spread lies about her. And the only person who she still had left as a friend was someone she didn't even LIKE that much, but it was the only person who'd still talk to her. And my point in the staff meeting was that Judaism teaches that this is really serious stuff -- but it doesn't really offer many solutions. I mean, you could argue that someone who really humiliates people should be stoned to death, but you can't actually DO that in the modern world. But the point that some other teachers made was that, if nothing else, being told that the reason this hurts so bad is because IT'S ACTUALLY GODDAMNED SERIOUS, and it's NOT a failing in them for feeling bad, since this IS actually that bad -- that, even if that was ALL we could do, that would have some value. Validating their feelings was important, and useful enough to do for that reason alone.
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See, at the staff meeting (the one where I was dressed as Jayne Cobb), the topic of bullying came up. Now, there isn't a big bullying problem that I can see in the Hebrew school, mainly because we're only there for two-and-a half hours a week, and the kids are always under adult supervision. But a lot of kids have been having problems in their regular schools. And we were trying to talk about if there was anything we could do, as religious instructors, to help give kids tools to deal with this.
Now, the bullying that they're really having trouble with is the emotional kind -- teasing and the like. One kid in my class said that she'd lost all of her friends, because someone had spread lies about her. And the only person who she still had left as a friend was someone she didn't even LIKE that much, but it was the only person who'd still talk to her. And my point in the staff meeting was that Judaism teaches that this is really serious stuff -- but it doesn't really offer many solutions. I mean, you could argue that someone who really humiliates people should be stoned to death, but you can't actually DO that in the modern world. But the point that some other teachers made was that, if nothing else, being told that the reason this hurts so bad is because IT'S ACTUALLY GODDAMNED SERIOUS, and it's NOT a failing in them for feeling bad, since this IS actually that bad -- that, even if that was ALL we could do, that would have some value. Validating their feelings was important, and useful enough to do for that reason alone.