Hi Everybody

It's great to be part of Classroom 2.0. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this blog, yet. If anybody has any suggestions I'd love to hear them. I could use it as a place to post some of my own answers to questions that I ask on my other blog,

OK, so here's a quick thought about bullying on off the Internet that I shared with my students at Hebrew School the other day. I have a gross motor skills deficit. It really has not slowed me down cognitively. But, I've never hit a ball out of the infield when playing baseball. I rarely if ever am able to score a basket when playing basketball. Imagine being a sensitive boy going through school with these deficits. Think of what it does to your self esteem. Once your self esteem is down it's easy for kids to pick on you in other ways. (I'll never forget one day, in 6th grade at the beginning of the school year, another kid kept hitting my stuff off of my desk. It just so happened that the teacher was giving out textbooks that day. When it came to be my turn I took all of my stuff up to the front of the room with me to get my book. Even the teacher cracked a joke about my bringing all my stuff with me.) Kids just don't get the damage that they can impose on one another by teasing. I'm 36 years old and still struggling to overcome the self doubts that I developed as a kid. Maybe if we shared more stories like this and at the same time helped kids feel good about themselves we'd limit some of the bullying.

At the same time, perhaps it's also important to teach kids how to defend themselves. Even now as I think about this story of the kid knocking stuff off of my desk, I wonder why I didn't knock stuff off of his desk. The worst that could have happened was that he would have hit me. So, I would have hit him back. Let's just assume that I got suspended from school. It probably would have been a good experience as I would have felt better about myself. But I was too timid and didn't know how to defend myself.

Just some thoughts for a first post on this "Anti-Bullying Day."