A Safe Place Essay
Thyis piece is an essay written to describe what a safe classroom needs to have. An interesting point is that if the ideals are not followed (pretending to follow or not really following is the same as ignoring this), the classroom is not very safe.
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Human Rights Assignment
By: Chris Momot
What is a safe classroom? Obviously, it is a place in which you feel safe. Not so obviously, you need several things too feel safe in a classroom environment, all of which are your rights. The first of these things (and, for some, foremost) it your right to privacy. How can you feel safe when every inch of your personal life has been exposed and subsequently exaggerated through gossip? Lack of privacy makes everybody feel endangered, and exposing someone’s personal life is simply another form of petty bullying. It is also a form of peer pressure.Peer pressure is another form of making others feel insufficient: Bullying. They change themselves to stop themselves from being socially exiled, and end up wearing a constant mask at school. This will lead to extreme stress. Related to this is a lack of real friends and caring people, telling you that the people who are applying peer pressure are wrong and that you are ok after all. Saying, "I know how you feel," and leaving it at that is nothing. You cannot know how somebody else feels, ever. A friend will tell you that you are not really that way and point out your strengths, instead of leaving you to be abused by the verbal bullies. Friends that abandon you in these times are actually strengthening your feeling of worthlessness, because they make you think that your friends also think you are not good enough for them.
People also need to be considerate of how much they lie in order to feel safe. Distrust also creates an unsafe environment when nobody will talk to you because you lie. It does not only go for the people that are lied to and about, but also those who lie feel bad, because they are scorned and isolated from peers because nobody wants to hear them lie and lie. Those that are lied about are being spread rumours against, which is worse than gossip. It not only spreads; it makes people that are rumoured to be doing this and that feel terrible. Then, once the rumours are disproved, the person they are against never really recovers, but instead is forever scarred by the experience. Then, the people that spread the rumour are scorned, and everybody ends up feeling bad, and unsafe.
A safe classroom only means that your rights are not violated, but are respected. But that means they really need to be respected. "Lip service" or "Not walking the talk" is worthless. Unless everybody is really prepared to stop gossip, peer pressure, bullying and lying, we cannot feel safe in our classrooms. And bullying is not only kicks and punches. Words hurt, too! The worst form of bullying is constant put-downs by a large group of people, for a long time. When the victim has no real friends, it is worse than coming home with bruises and scars every day. These bruises and scars last all their lives, psychological scars.