Isn't this the truth! What unravels my shorts is the no fighting policy. In general it is fine but how about the student who is constantly being abused, picked on, ridiculed? Should they too be suspended or possibly expelled for defending themselves? Absolutely not but it happens all the time. Our schools have created rules that protect the bully and leave the bullied without hope.
Okay..you are responsible for your reaction to an action. If my son's reaction to the action of someone punching him was to defend himself then I'd say that one fine reaction. lol. Nah..the blame is on the action. The one causing the action should be worried about the reaction he or she gets, IMO. You cant' go around bullying and expect everyone to backdown. Since when did the schools start honoring the bully? These poor kids. My friend's kid got bullied at school. He is very passive and introverted. A few kids decided to pick on him to the point of pulling his pants down in front of a group of girls. His parents complaints were virtually ignorned. I think there is too much sucking it up in today's society. We make victims weaker and bullies stronger by putting the ownership of action or reaction on the victim. Isn't this like blaming a girl for getting raped because her skirt was too short? (ok, becky, let me have it...lol..I haven't been too good at examples today..LOL)
I always disagreed with the fact that schools would suspend both people in a fight, even if there were witnesses saying that one person was only defending themselves. I got quite a reputation in my 2nd high school because I defended myself in a fight. Less than a month after I transferred to the school, a boy in my English class started a fight with me. We sat across the room from each other. We were waiting for the teacher to come in one day, and the boy was getting ready to throw a book at me. He then started calling me names (b*tch, slut, etc.). He pushed me, I pushed back. Then he swung at me & missed. Before I had time to think about what I was doing, I swung back. My fist made contact with the side of his head & sent him tumbling over a desk. At some point during this, the teacher had walked in. After I hit the boy, the teacher sent him to the office. He stayed out sick the rest of the week. The next week, we were both called to the assisstant principal's office, where they finally heard my side of the story. I had never spoken to this boy before. In fact, until the day of the fight, I didn't even know his name. I'd been at the school less than a month & had never been in trouble. I was let off completely free. He was written up for fighting & for the names he called me. He was also told that if this had been dealt with the day it happened, he would have been suspended, but since it was a week later they wouldn't suspend him. Shortly after that, he switched to a different English class, and transferred schools at the end of the semester. Another assisstant principal decided that he would deal with anything involving me. He saw me as a troublemaker. If anything happened & I was anywhere near it, I was blamed. He tried again & again to suspend me, sometimes succeeding. He was determined to have me expelled. My mom got so tired of it, that she went to the school to "talk" to him. The entire front hall heard her. She screamed & yelled and threatened to slap him with a restraining order if he didn't leave me alone. So, he had a gym teacher try to have me arrested for participating in gym class. Two days in a row. I took it to the principal & the assisstant principal & the gym teacher (he wasn't even my teacher) were both told to leave me alone, before the school ended up with a law suit on their hands. I started in that school my Freshman year, at the end of 1st quarter. Shortly after my Junior year started (we got a new principal that year), I was informed that if I did not willing transfer to another school, I would be in solitary confinement. I would be in a room with just a teacher & an officer, no other students. I would not be allowed to leave the room between classes or during lunch. I would not be allowed to leave the room, even to go to the bathroom, without police escort. By this time, I was tired of dealing with it. I had been suspended, served ISS, and had actually been locked in the assisstant principal's office for hours. I had been accused of things that I'd never done. I was spending more time in trouble than in class. So, I transferred. All of that because I defended myself against a boy. The 2 girls that got in a fight in the cafeteria (one stabbed the other in the head with a pencil) didn't go through all of that. The students that had to be taken away by ambulance (to the hospital for alcohol poisoning), because they drank a large bottle of vodka on school property, didn't get treated that way. All I did was defend myself against a guy, who (for no known reason) decided that he wanted to fight me. I was harrassed until I transferred to anther school. Then, when I transferred, the asst. principal called the school I was transfering to and warned them about me & what a troublemaker I was! Plus, I was told that if I ever set foot on the property (the school I was leaving) again, I would be arrested. Now, this is an extreme example, and I'm sure most people don't have to deal with this situation. However, this is how some students are treated in public school. Most of the people I hung out with were harrassed into dropping out because the school found them "unworthy". As for the original topic, I don't know that I really believe the statistics. I have a boy & a girl, and homeschool them both. in my state, we only need to notify the district that we're homeschooling if the child was in the public schools before being pulled to homeschool. Since my dd attended ps for Kindergarten, I had to inform them that I was pulling her out to homeschool. However, my ds (now 5) has never & will never be in the public schools here, so the district doesn't know that he's homeschooled & likely, never will know. Because of the states like mine, where you don't have to report or register, they can never get truly accurate statistics regarding homeschooling (unless they go door to door asking every household how many children they have, if they attend public or private school or are homeschooled, how many are boys, & how many are girls, etc.). So, I really don't pay much attention to most homeschool statistics. They come up with these statistics based on a fraction of homeschooling families, and then act as if they're accurate. However, using a fraction of a community will not give an accurate view of the community as a whole.
I've not mentioned my business beyond my introduction, and it bears no relation to the study at all. (Maybe it was a mistake for me to mention it in my intro, but I wanted to be open and honest.) I was just very surprised to see a major and recent trend towards girls being homeschooled more than boys. I could see no logical reason for this, but some of the posts in this thread make it clear that "mean girl" syndrome could well be a factor. Someone else mentioned how boys need outside activity. Ironically, one reason we homeschooled our older son is because he's very much an outdoor type. In the local public elementary school, almost every teacher was a woman and both my wife and I concluded they taught classes the way girls like to be taught. Boys, who need to release their energy, just had to sit quiet, which totally goes against my son's nature.
