Parker-Pope, T. (2011, February). Web of popularity, achieved by bullying. The New York Times. Retrieved March 15, 2011, from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/web-of-popularity-weaved-by-bullying/.
The author states that bullying today is due to tweens and teens fighting for popularity status. Surprisingly, the main bullying is happening within the tweens and teens that are middle to upper rankings of status. A major part of bullying is aggression, which researchers found was more evident in the upper rankings (except the top two percent) of students than the lower rankings. The article presents some options for educators to prevent bullying. One option is to enlist non- bullying students to develop some solutions for programs.
I could not believe that research shows that students nearer to the top of the popular scale are the bullies. When I picture a bully I think of someone who no one gets along with because they are too afraid to talk to them for fear that they would get hit. After looking back at my junior high and high school years, I do see that the majority of the time it was the popular students bullying the lower students. Most of this bullying though was done by spreading rumors. Our school did not see very many fist fights. The bullying usually happened between the two most popular girls in school because they each wanted to make sure they stated on top.
The article presented a new example of bullying and how it relates to schools. The best thing that a school can do is assign/appoint a committee of teachers, administrators, and students that would handle all complaints about bullying. This committee would also set-up some guest speakers to come in and talk about the experiences that they went through when they were bullied. Tweens and teens usually react more from someone close to their age telling a true story.
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