Mom shares teacher’s ‘brilliant’ secret for fighting bullying, easing loneliness
7 hours ago
- Video: A teacher’s use of index cards to prevent bullying has become a viral sensation after the parents of one of her fifth-graders came to class and discovered her tactic.
Glennon Doyle Melton calls it a “brilliant Love Ninja strategy,” and she proudly told the world about it.
Melton, a writer and mother of three, learned about the secret method her son’s fifth teacher uses to help prevent bullying one day when she went to the teacher for math help. (Not for her son, she clarified on her blog — for herself, because she couldn’t understand his math homework.) She discovered that Kathy Pitt was teaching her students something she felt was even more important than academics: kindness.
On TODAY Wednesday, Pitt explained her method for gathering clues about which kids might be at risk, lonely or bullied. The veteran teacher passes out index cards and asks students to write the names of kids they want to get to know, and to nominate an exceptional classmate, all by secret ballot.
“When I came up with the idea of simply distributing the cards, it really was to find out which children were belonging and which children were not,” said Pitt, who teaches at Sea Gate Elementary School in Naples, Fla.
In the 15 years she has been using the cards, she has found that the names that don’t show up often are the ones she needs to monitor most.
“I thought it was stunning,” Melton said.
So did millions of others. Melton wrote about Pitt on her blog Momastery in January, and it has been shared more than 4 million times.
Melton told TODAY that Pitt has been passing out the cards since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, where two students killed 13 people at their school.
“Because that was the day she realized that kids have to be seen,” Melton said. “All of them. They can fall through the cracks. And if they’re not seen, they’ll find a way to be seen.”
In her blog post, Melton writes about Pitt’s simple strategy: “As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children — I think that this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students.”
“This story isn’t just about teachers and kids,” Melton said on TODAY. “This story is about the beauty that happens when we go through our day and we notice people who might not get noticed.”
Pitt says she hopes her students are getting her message about inclusion and kindness, summing it up this way: “I care about you. I want you to care about each other.”
My Comments on Article:
Bullying can happen anywhere and to anyone: they say it starts accelerating in middle school and declining in high school, however individual cases of bullying can happen within any age group. People pick on people because they don’t fit in, because they don’t look like others (appearance), they don’t behave like others (they are “not cool”): thousands of kids (and not only kids) are afraid to go to school, feel depressed, attempt (and unfortunately sometimes successfully) suicide, ctr. Lots of tragic accidents already happened across the nation, many of them took places in school. Aftermath is usually: how did that get overseen by us (parents, teachers, friends)? I think the idea the teacher came up with is simple, doable and effective. Indeed, the teachers need to remember that they are connected with their students; they spend lots of time with them, they get to see them so often (sometimes even more often than parents) that the first signs of problems can be noticed by them (especially at elementary schools). If we are talking about older students (college included) where there are multiple teachers, the changes in someone’s behavior can be less noticeable. Some statistics shows that a repeat bully at age 8 has a one-in-four chance of having a criminal records by the age of 26; it’s somewhat easier to teach a child that bullying is not ok than do the same with a 18 year old.
olgamartinez1977 