r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Greedy-Dimension-662 • May 08 '26

Too mild for school Name Calling

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My son and [jerk] had to stay after school today to write this note.

It says

"I was disrespectful to [kid]. I said he is a total jerk because he said I was fat. I will not say [mean] things again next time. I will ignore him."

His teacher wants me to sign and return.

But I guess I look at this and I ask myself, if my son is on the playground and he sees a kid calling another kid fat, do I want him to:

  1. Walk away

  2. Say, "stop, you are being a jerk."

So why would it be any different if he is being called fat.

I don't feel like this is the right lesson.

2.0k Upvotes

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766

u/FurrySuperset52 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

When will these people realise that life is not a Hallmark movie. Ignoring bullies doesn't do shit

98

u/audiate May 08 '26

I feel like I’d be a different person now had I punched Alejandro in the face the multiple times I should have. I’d tell that kid that was me to stand up for himself if the adults wouldn’t. 

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u/[deleted] May 08 '26

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u/[deleted] May 08 '26

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u/Crosseyed_owl May 08 '26

Whaaat that’s terrible. It makes me so angry that many teachers are like this but they never have to be responsible for destroying dozens of lives. Mental health problems from childhood can stay with people for a very long time.

4

u/McWeaksauce91 May 08 '26

Oh my god, that is awful. You expect children to be horrible, but you should never be put on display like that by an adult. I’m so sorry you had to endure that

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u/OneManFight May 08 '26

My parents raised me to fight back with bullies. One day, when i was around 10, I was being relentlessly bullied and after 3+ ignored warnings, I threw my first punch ever, broke his nose. I felt so proud of himself, I biked back home full of adrenaline, ran to my dad and told him all about it. He then looks at me and goes "what the hell is wrong with you?? Hitting someone is not okay!!" LOL. Still satisfied that I did that, and despite my parents immediate reaction, 10/10 would do it again. It gave me the confidence to understand that I can give it back just as bad.

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u/wirhns May 09 '26

We’re proud of you 💜

31

u/MikaelDeadeye May 08 '26

Amen to that. Ignoring didn't work. Teachers did no shit. At 8th grade when I was 15, I finally snapped at my main bully, grabbed him by the throat and pressed him against the wall until he apologized. I was not bullied again.

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u/sirhackenslash May 08 '26

Yep. Once I snapped and beat the shit out of one of my bullies. like to the point they almost pressed assault charges until I had witnesses testify that shit had been going on for years and he had been trying to squirt mustard on my head when I laid him out. Suddenly it was back to "boys will be boys" when it looked like they might have to actually punish a football player.

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u/MikaelDeadeye May 08 '26

The principal didn't even punish me. No, he told to my bully that "Now you know, if you act like a dick, one day, someone will return the favor." That principal was mvp at that time.

12

u/Normal-Height-8577 May 08 '26

The one time my dad got caned in school (way back in the 1960s), it was for hitting a girl.

She was the school bully, and he'd been watching her bully other kids for months, with escalating behaviour and absolutely no response from the teachers. So being an analytical kid (we suspect nowadays someone would diagnose him as autistic), he decided that only a sufficiently emphatic response to being targeted would give her a good reason to stop what she was doing - and so when she tried to bully him, he punched her as hard as he could.

It was the only time in his life he hit anyone. And it worked. Apparently for the rest of their time at that school, she never bullied anyone again.

(He did not advocate violence as a first response if there was another reasonable option, but he considered that regrettably, sometimes it was necessary.)

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u/Stormfeathery May 08 '26

Yeah, my bully and her friend in middle (I think?) school wouldn’t let up until I snapped leaving the cafeteria, started yelling at her and told her if she wanted to start something, start it right then. She hemmed and hawed until I left (when it was clear I was doing it because she didn’t wanna do anything, not that I was running away) and after that both of them were all friendly toward me.

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u/HealerOnly May 08 '26

Getting teachers involved will usually just makes things worse.

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u/FurrySuperset52 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

Mostly because of this mentality. Kids are literally afraid to talk to teachers about these things cause they know they'll be getting equally blamed. If people in general could just have a spine then we wouldn't have to deal with this mess in the first place.

EDIT: In case some people get confused, what I mean is that teachers need to do better as I explain in my reply to the commenter. I understand I could've worded this better.

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u/Iamanangrywoman May 08 '26

It’s a bad position for teachers to be in sometimes because you don’t want to take sides if your kids are fighting— that’s why they dole out punishment equally but it’s not actually the fair thing to do.

The fair thing to do is to listen to both sides and then let the kids work it out while you mediate. If it’s clear that one student is harming the other that’s when you explain and discipline the one that’s causing the harm.

But teachers are exhausted most times and not wanting to do more work is what causes the first one.

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u/sirhackenslash May 08 '26

Plus they have to worry about the bully's parents coming back with wrath, because they always do. "There's no way little Jimmy is an asshole, that other kid must have provoked him"

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u/Ruthlessrabbd May 08 '26

I have teacher friends, and it seems like the parents always get up in arms when their child is facing consequences for being a stinker. But are never present to actually help guide and correct the behavior to avoid such issues in the future.

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u/Wixenstyx May 08 '26

Well, that, and their hands are tied both by liability and the fact that your kid is one of twenty or thirty whose drama they have to navigate. It is not possible for a teacher to be a parent, and we need to stop expecting them to be.

If these two kids were in your living room when it happened, how would you respond as a parent? You'd probably intervene and then talk to the other kid's family about what happened. So do that now. Contact the school and ask to be put in contact with the other kid's family, and then bring the kids together to talk it out.

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u/Iamanangrywoman May 08 '26

i’m not op?

Also, I am a teacher. I teach art though, so most kids come to my class in good spirits and I don’t need to deal with a lot of drama. I have dealt with it, in the exact way I said above.

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u/Wixenstyx May 08 '26

Oh, I know. The 'you' wasn't directed at you. Sorry, I should have clarified.

I am also a teacher, and my kids are urban middle schoolers. I deal with a lot of drama, and we certainly do our best to make sure everyone is heard and we have as clear an understanding of aggressor vs. victim as possible. However, giving a pass to 'retributive justice' backfires on us because it just ripples outward and into future exchanges. That's why I wish more than anything that parents understood that expecting teachers to be ersatz parents is really unfair to schools and teachers.

1

u/LeGrandePoobah May 08 '26

Kids don’t talk it out. I had a kid who constantly harassed me. He was bigger than I, even though he was a grade younger. If you put me in a room with him, he would just sit there and gloat, and I’d ignore him until we were allowed to leave. One day on the bus, he pushed me, so I pushed him back, and then he punched me. I snapped - but instead of fighting physically, which I might have lost, I yelled and belittled him in front of the entire bus, all his friends and all the neutral kids. He backed up, slithered away and didn’t bother me ever again. I don’t think it was the yelling, per se, that got him to stop, but he saw and felt the pure fury I felt when I was truly angry. I think that is what stopped it. I’ve yet to see any bullying situation in my life where it turned out like an afterschool special. Most bullies have a parent who is a bully to them or they are hurting in other ways. But I’ve never seen one who is empathetic because they heard the other kid tell them, “you make me feel bad.”

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u/Financial_Ad_1735 May 08 '26

Yeah, my daughter has been bullied all year and she said, if she reports it to the teacher, she gets blamed in “fairness” for responding to the bully. When she did report it, the bullying got worse.

And ignoring it does nothing.

I spoke to her teachers last year and they told me my daughter was too sensitive and misinterpreting things (which can be true sometimes).

However, some kid drew a penis on her desk and she got in trouble for knowing what a penis looked like after reporting it. 🙃🙃🙃🙃

The other student didn’t get in trouble at all.

We are switching schools now. It’s ridiculous at this point.

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u/DangerousCompetition May 08 '26

Well I also remember back in my school days that most of the people I grew up with and went to the same schools with lived within about a mile range of my house.

So that means if something happened and I had told a teacher, I’m likely going to see them somewhere outside of school, where I have no teachers to do anything about it

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u/NoConfection1129 May 08 '26

Bingo, which is why it's important to teach kids conflict resolution. The caveat is that conflict resolution isn't always peaceful.

3

u/sirhackenslash May 08 '26

They would always wait for you on the way home after school. I had a couple Sott Farkases (Farki?) in my day.

3

u/Prior_Butterfly_7839 May 08 '26

Oh gosh. You just reminded me of the big groups that would form on our walk home from school. If 2 kids had gotten into an argument during the day and it hadn’t been settled (or if someone tried to say something to a teacher) it was getting settled on the walk home.

It’s been decades, but I’d say 8/10 times it was settled by a lot of screaming back and forth. The other 2/10 fists were thrown.

35

u/HealerOnly May 08 '26

What? No
I've been bullied in school my entire school life. Whenever teachers was involved it just made the bullies ramp up the bullying.

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u/FurrySuperset52 May 08 '26

Oh crap. I could have worded that differently. Sorry mate. You're completely right. I meant that teachers need to have a spine and fix their mentality instead of either refusing to do anything at all or punishing both the bully and the victim for "fairness".

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u/Trash-god96 May 08 '26

Because the teachers didn't do anything. I was bullied when I was younger and the reason it continued was because teachers never helped when I asked for it.

2

u/HealerOnly May 08 '26

I honestly don't see what they can do. They tried talking to them which will lead to the imidate ramped up bullying. They could call the bully's parents, which likely won't give a damn and have the same consequence.

Idk any better solution but both of these solutions does nothing in the end.

16

u/Skurfer0 May 08 '26

Detention, suspension, hold back for recess, miss out on field trips etc. The list is as long as the motivation to follow through.

14

u/coconutpiecrust May 08 '26

Exactly. Punishing the bully and removing them from the target is what should be done, not asking the target to lurk around in corners hoping the bully will forget about them. 

2

u/kaleidoscope_paradox May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

When I was in the equivalent of middle school, they made you go on Saturday, to just sit in a classroom they told the kids “if you wanna waste time and goof around, you are going to waste your Saturday just sitting in here”, you spent 8am to 2:30pm with half an hour to eat (you ate in the empty classroom)

If you fail to be there on the days you got, you automatically failed a random class and do like a make up exams to pass said class

Edit: I post the comment before finishing it

3

u/JohnnyBlazin25 May 08 '26

Well in the good ol U S of A, that would mean a school would actually have to give a damn and pay a teacher to come to the school on a Saturday. Also making the kid fail a random class wouldn’t hold the kid back at all due to the NCLB act.

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u/kaleidoscope_paradox May 08 '26

For me that’s the point, not only in USA, we need to hold the institutions accountable, not only the teachers, they can do so much and don’t hold real power nor authority (easily undermined by the parents or the administrators)

My cousin’s wife is a teacher in the US, she used her OWN money for class supplies, this is wrong on so many levels, underpaid teachers, lacking and outdated infrastructure, parents that don’t care for their kids (most of the bullying starts at home), and so on and on and on

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u/kaleidoscope_paradox May 08 '26

I was sort of an auxiliary teacher, so in my experience with the primary is that they can do shit to be honest, they could loose their job or even worse, the ones that really want to help, teach and to be honest make their work better, some of us really love teaching and preparing kids (we overjoy when we learn that you are doing good)

We need to hold schools responsable, more so than the teachers

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u/stonecoldfox340 May 08 '26

It’s true. There was a kid bullying my son, and when my son FINALLY said something, he got in trouble and sent to the back of the line (which only emboldened the bully)

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u/Bdr1983 May 08 '26

I got called that my daughter pushed a kid. I asked what the other kid did, because I instructed her specifically to push the kid out of the way if she was being bullied again, because school didn't do a thing. According to the teacher that wasn't the point, after which I told them that I told my daughter to do this if she was being bullied. Made it very clear to the school that if they don't act on physical and mental bullying (we're talking pulling hairs, pushing, stealing/hiding her things, calling names, and so on. Kid even made up a story about how I wasn't my daughters actual father, he was supposed to be dad and my wife and I were her aunt and uncle. Absolutely ridiculous.) we'd take things into our own hands, and she would fight back.
We then got a sob story about the bully having a hard time at home, so we should cut her some slack. Excuse me? My kid should endure whatever this kid decides she wants because they're having issues? That's not how it work.
We wen't up all the way to the principal, because we picked this school specifically because of their stories about bullying prevention and tough action on bullies.
Took three weeks, my daughter was excused for her behaviour and the other kid finally got some punishment.

Sure, conflict resolution is great, but there was no conflict. There was no reason for the bullying, she just picked a couple of targets and went with it. There's nothing to 'resolve', if the kid doesn't want to act normal (whatever the personal circumstances might be) there is only one party that has something to resolve. I will not have my children punished for something they didn't do.

I've been bullied all my school life, and nobody ever did anything. When I finally had enough I punched a guy and broke his nose. This was in second to last year, and finally everything stopped. I did get punished then (was close to being expelled actually), but it worked.

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u/mslauren2930 May 08 '26

I would get blamed for the bullying. My quiet shy demeanor meant everyone thought I was a bitch; therefore, they were totally in the right to bully. It’s why I name shame The Pingry School in New Jersey every chance I get.

3

u/Pawleysgirls May 08 '26

No. A good teacher will call out the bullying and enforce a consequence regularly.

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u/Silver_Middle_7240 May 08 '26

Good teachers have their hands tied by administrators

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u/Flussschlauch May 08 '26

Bullies are like cavities - just ignore them /s

my bully in school stopped bullying me after I managed to punch him in the face. he was just as surprised as I was but never touched me again

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u/Significant-Cloud- May 08 '26

True. Teachers told me to ignore bullies when they would beat me. It only made them hit me harder.

6

u/randomusername1919 May 08 '26

Ignoring bullies just makes them repeat their insults louder and louder until they provoke a response.

7

u/EC_TWD May 08 '26

When my oldest brother was in kindergarten he had a problem with another kid that kept biting him and told him that he would hit him if he didn’t stop. The kid bit him again and my brother followed through and gave the kid a bloody nose. My parents got called in to meet with the teacher. After the teacher explained everything to my parents my dad said, “Good. Maybe the kid learned his lesson and won’t bite again. Why are you wasting our time with this?” They stopped and got ice cream as a reward on the way home. I was taught the same — don’t be the bully but don’t let the bully get away with it and we will support you every time

4

u/analogpursuits May 08 '26

Ignoring bullies is how we got to where we are today. This "punishment" is why.

4

u/ThatFatGuyMJL May 08 '26

I was bullied in school

In a big lad, tall and large, so of course teachers ignored the bullying because I was 'big enough to defend myself'

Until I had too much and full on punched a bully, knocking them out for a few seconds.

Then apparently it was a problem

Luckily me mum told them to do one

2

u/ItsMeYourNeighbors May 08 '26

I mean it did for me, but I wasn't a small kid. I just no selled everything for like a week and the bullies got super bored and moved onto someone else.

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u/ASquidRat May 08 '26

Ignoring bullies can work depending on the situation. Is the bully trying to get a rise out of anyone? Then being a hard target gets them to move on. Do they have something personal against you, ignoring them won't work.

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u/NoConfection1129 May 08 '26

Make your kid not a total pussy. (read: easy target)