Bullying? Stand up!
When I was a kid, I remember being bullied a fair bit. I was small for my age, bespectacled, shy. The teachers didn't help by putting a target on my back by making me Vice Head Prefect. I would get my stuff just taken away from me by bigger kids, dragged out into the field to be tickled until I collapsed (much less fun than it sounds), and pushed into the storm drains. Not all the kids were full-blown bullies of course. But I remember some of them standing by, and politely holding my spectacles (so they wouldn't be broken) while the bullies did their work on me. Most of this stopped when I got to secondary school, where a much larger proportion of my fellow students were now just as nerdy! And of course I grew up too. I don't really look back on those days with any kind of animosity, because I think it never occurred to me that it was unusual. But I do think my experience made me a bit more sympathetic about people around me who are being bullied. When you