This is a long piece, a letter to an elected official in Washington state, but it is well worth the read:
Chairman Quall and members of the House Education Committee, Do you know what Prolonged Duress Stress Disorder (PDSD) is? It is a psychological condition that is a near-cousin to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an issue for our soldiers; PDSD is an issue for the victims (and relatives of victims) of bullying. Just as a backfiring engine can trigger a PTSD episode for a soldier, so a perceived “return to the battlefield” can induce a PDSD episode. That is precisely what happened at the close of the Education Committee hearing Friday morning. Being “lost in the paperwork”, being dismissed and ignored, triggered a flashback to the “dark days” of being bullied at my former school. Another word for “flashback” is “revivication”, reliving the event. As I rose to object to being ignored, I was reliving the bullying that I experienced at MMS, my former school. You saw a clear example of the lasting effects of bullying on the victim. That is precisely my point. It doesn’t matter whether the victim is a child or an adult; bullying causes long-term psychological, physiological and behavioral damage. Period. The Legislature has the power to begin to stop all bullying in the schoolhouse. What are you going to DO about it?
I am sorry if I disturbed the decorum of the hearing, but you may understand our (victims) position on adult bullying after you read further. This is, necessarily, a long letter. I apologize, but if you are to have an informed discussion and make an informed decision, you need to know what life is like for the victim. Please be assured that I am only giving you the highlights; there is much more detail to this story. Of the many bullying weapons used against us by the principal and his mob at MMS, one of the most widespread was ignoring us and our input with a frequent dismissive, “that’s just your perspective,” with a sneer in the voice. The quality curriculum that we senior staffers presented to students was marginalized and limited (my wife and I routinely mentored students to placements at the Washington State National History Day exhibit-we had one student take first place in her category and qualify to go to nationals in Washington, D.C. in 2005); less rigorous curriculum presented by younger staff was highly praised. Then there was the “silent treatment” where the office manager would not speak to us (preferring a facial sneer that said, “you are less that trash”) or provide professional services until we started the conversation and responded with as few words as she could, which were delivered as if we were the scum of the earth (or she would sneer at us that she was busy and she’d put it in our mail box later, as if we had interrupted her important work with our totally unimportant work). We were not called on during faculty meetings unless it couldn’t be helped otherwise. When we were allowed to speak, all of our suggestions and input were met with derision. In light of this treatment, perhaps you can see how not being allowed to speak to the Committee after driving all the way from Richland would be upsetting and trigger a flashback.
The basis of bullying is an imbalance of power. Whether children or adults, the more “powerful” may try to dominate, even humiliate, the weaker. Teachers in a bullying situation take a lot of garbage. Here are a few more examples, none of which happened to me but rather to others in my building. The run-on sentence structure is used in a deliberate attempt to evoke anxiety in the reader, just as the bullying does. You are assigned 39 students for your Japanese language (talk about rigorous curriculum!) elective (you are about to become a KCTS9 Golden Apple winner), but you only have 32 chairs and 33 books and have mentioned this in passing to another teacher and the next day you received word of your award and the principal pulls you into his office and you think that he will praise you for your accomplishment but he and the counselor yell at you for complaining in public about not having enough books. Or: you notice that three days after the resignation of another senior staffer (in early October!), the principal begins to behave oddly toward you and within a week is openly committing bullying acts toward you (serial bullies do that-get rid of one target then focus on the next one on the list). Or: the principal decides that your years-long successful for-high-school-credit (the only one in the district) biology class has to have 27 students in it even though you only chose 19 through your selective process which assures that all students will be able to keep up with the advanced work load (you are a KCTS9 Golden Apple nominee and winner of a Toyota grant that allows your honors students to hook up to a NASA data stream), so he assigns 8 students that you have previously turned down and 7 of them fail your class even though you gave up your lunch period for two trimesters to tutor them AND THEN the principal blames YOU for their failure and calls you a bad teacher in front of your peers. Or: the principal warns you, as a senior staff member, that you need to be in your room in the morning to monitor the students and help them with their work (but don’t forget to read and respond to all of your e-mails!) while the junior staff members sit in the faculty room drinking coffee and eating donuts. Or: you go to the principal with a clarifying question about implementation of the new online grade book and he goes ballistic, yelling at you, pointing his finger at you, telling you, “I don’t like your attitude!” and when you try to withdraw from the situation, he yells, “No, we’re going to take care of this right now!”, threatening you with the reminder “Don’t forget that I’m your evaluator” AND he yells and threatens you in the same way one month later in the presence of the vice principal who seems appalled and you invoke your Weingarten rights to have a union rep present and the principal refuses and continues to yell at you until you insist on representation at which point he finally disengages. Or: five behavior disordered students (all boys) are assigned to your last period class when both you and they are at low energy points and you have a daily struggle with discipline and the rest of the class is not learning because you are spending most of your time disciplining these five students and halfway through the year you find out that the counselor had left specific instructions the previous summer that these five boys should NEVER be assigned to a class with any other of the five and the ONLY other person with scheduling authority is the principal. There is more; so much more. Why do teachers put up with this? Because the principal has all the power and they have none. We were told by an upper level administrator that the principal can talk to you anytime, anywhere, and in any manner that they see fit and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is a well known axiom in the teaching profession that the principal is God and that running afoul of him/her can mean being subjected to bullying. It is education’s dirty little secret.
Lots moreThousands more teachers know firsthand how bad the school workplace can be.
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