I arrived home as my wife, son, and daughter were already sitting down at the dinner table. The air was filled with tension. None of the usual small talk or “getting dinner on the table” chatter broke the silence.
“What’s up?” I asked, after the prayer as we started to fill our plates. I looked at my wife for an answer or an explanation for this tension.
“You want to tell him, Ben?” she responded, looking at my son. Surprised, I shifted attention to my son.
This was rare. Ben was a first child, and in a lot of important ways he fit the stereotypical first child mold.
He followed the rules.
It was Ben who got up on time without our help. Ben who went to bed when he was told. Ben who grew impatient if my daughter Ellie, two years younger, was not ready to leave on time for school. He was quiet and thoughtful.
Once he had a clean breakaway in soccer, yards in front of other players, and he stopped running at the midline. He let the ball dribble down the field as other players passed him and someone else took the shot for a score. Why? His coach had once told him that, as a defender, he wasn’t allowed to cross the midline.
That’s him: he followed the rules even in the excitement of a sporting event.
So when there was tension at our house, it was seldom his fault. Who am I kidding? It was never his fault. Until tonight.
He looked down at his plate and mumbled something. A casual listener might have made out “trouble” and “bus”, but they were not clearly formed. His words came out in the sing-songy way that words come out when they are trying not to be sobs. He was starting to cry.
Seeing his struggle, my wife intervened. “The bus driver asked to talk to me when he dropped them off,” she explained. “It seems that Ben threw his water bottle at someone on the bus and the bus driver is mad at him.”
I turned my head to look at Ben, and his refusal to meet my gaze confirmed at least some of the story.
My wife added, “and he’s not allowed back on the bus.”
Ben and Ellie had recently started riding the bus when their school started a rebuilding phase. They were temporarily attending school in a building a few more miles away, so riding the bus was relatively new to them.
Still, as a longtime teacher myself, I knew that a situation had to be pretty bad to get kicked off the bus. I knew the driver didn’t think it was an accident at all.
I needed to know the whole story.
“Ben?” I asked gently. I knew that I could save time by gently coaxing the story out of him, rather than getting him into a full cry. He nodded almost imperceptibly. “Ben, I need you to look at me and tell me what happened.”
“Okay,” he started. “I dumped my water on Brian, but …” once the words started, they flooded out in much the same way the water likely poured from his water bottle. “He deserved it he was being really mean to Terri on the way back home today and we asked him to stop and everyone was saying to stop and she’s just a kid like Ellie and but he’s my age and he kept doing it and he does it every day and he says mean things and I warned him and then I held up my water bottle and shook it at him and he still wouldn’t stop and so I didn’t know what to do and …”
Ellie interrupted the flow of words, “He was being really mean. Brian was. And we all told him to stop.”
Ben looked at her, grateful to not have to say it all out loud.
A few more questions revealed the full story. An older boy on the bus, who was in Ben’s grade, had been teasing a younger girl on and off for weeks. The girl was Ellie’s age. He was calling her silly names, like “Terri-Berry” at first, then recently it escalated to something more offensive and annoying. At first it made her angry. “You can’t make me stop, Terri-Berry.” It wasn’t profanity or anything that sounded wrong, but it was persistent pointless name calling, and he kept it up even after she started to cry. Several people, including Ben and Ellie, had asked him to stop.
When he wouldn’t, Ben brandished his half-full nalgene water bottle, lifting it menacingly over his head. Ben hadn’t intended to throw it, really. He hadn’t even secured the lid to the mouth of the bottle. Ben gave Brian one last warning and then, when the taunting continued, he stood up. With full intention, Ben threw his water bottle at Brian from two bus seats back.
Water spiralled from the bottle on the way, and then the butt of the bottle connected squarely with the crown of Brian’s head. The sudden change in trajectory sent a large slosh of water forward toward the driver, and the water bottle fell at a right angle to the seat and then thudded against the rubber floor mat in the aisle of the bus. More water poured out as the bottle rolled to rest against a seat leg.
Brian let out a hurt and angry howl, bending over, holding his head. In the silent bus, someone near the back murmured, “That’s what you get.” Soon other students were excitedly telling their seatmates what had happened.
Hearing the howl of pain and the sudden change of energy in the bus, the driver asked what had happened. In his mirror he could see a boy crouched in a seat holding his head, and a water bottle on the floor.
His mirror revealed pandemonium. Some kids standing, one howling in pain, a couple of wet seats and a draining water bottle on the floor.
At our stop he relayed his decision to my wife: Ben had done something wrong and needed to be removed from the bus.
***
At the dinner table, I could understand the driver’s frustration in that moment. I have been in that situation, where you see the results of what happened, but they don’t tell you much about what really happened. I understand the investigation phase, asking what happened, and who did it.
Ben explained what happened next. “The driver asked what happened and Brian said ‘Ben hit me.’ And when he asked me, I told him I did it.”
Our dinner was getting cold. I was the only one who had taken a bite of it. The energy of the story had ebbed, and as the words slowed to a trickle, I took stock of the situation.
I broke a pregnant pause. “Ben, I am feeling two things right now. Do you know what they are?”
He looked up at me and took his first guess. “Angry?”
This might not have been the word, but close enough. “I am a little disappointed in your choices, yes. But I am feeling something else that is more important right now, or at least equally important.”
“Mad?” he guessed.
I’m not going to lie, as an English teacher I debated whether to scold him for wasting his second guess on a word that clearly meant the same thing as his first guess. I realized this was not the time for an impromptu English lesson. He got those all the time.
“No, son. I’m proud.” Suddenly everyone at the table was looking at me instead of at him. “You stood up for someone else who was not able to stand up for themselves.”
My wife interjected, “but he got kicked off the bus!”
“No, no he didn’t.” I said.
My family, all of whom had heard the driver kick Ben off the bus, all argued with me at once. I wasn’t there, they argued. I didn’t hear what he said, they told me. “He definitely got kicked off the bus,” Ellie insisted.
“Look, I hear you. I know what he said. He did get kicked off the bus. But unless I hear differently from the school tonight, you’re getting on that bus.”
“But,” I added, “you have to apologize.”
Now there was a new uproar. My family’s voices were once again unified against me in this new injustice.
They were right.
“Apologize … to the driver!” I clarified. “It wasn’t his fault he had to clean up his bus.”
“You don’t have to apologize to Brian, of course. He was wrong. But you didn’t give the driver a chance to solve the problem.”
I thought about our already chaotic morning schedules. “Besides, we need you to be able to ride that bus.”
“Here’s what you need to say,” I added, and we worked out the details over dinner. I wanted to help Ben apologize to the right person – the bus driver – while letting the driver know about the bigger problem.
***
The next day they boarded the bus as usual. Ben handed the driver a note that said this:
Dear Mr. Bus driver. I am sorry I threw my water bottle at Brian and spilled water all over your bus. Brian was being mean to Terri and we all asked him to stop. When he kept doing it, I got mad because I did not know what else to do. He does this every day.
This met my criteria – he took responsibility, and he informed the bus driver what was happening on his bus.
My wife and I had made plans for what we would do if Ben was not allowed on the bus, but they were not necessary. After Ben handed the note to the driver, he went to his assigned seat, next to Ellie.
We never heard anything else from the school or the driver about the incident.
And, as near as I know, the bullying stopped. My son stopped it.
And I am proud.
***
There are rules for standing up to a bully.
The first is to tell them what they are doing is wrong. Terri, Ben, Ellie, and apparently several other riders had done that, but the bully continued.
The second step is to try and remove yourself from the situation, or make sure you and others are safe. In a bus with assigned seats, and strict rules from parents over years about not getting up on a moving vehicle, I could understand why children on a bus would feel they could not do this.
The third, and hardest rule, is to figure out the right way to stop their behavior. Some part of that involves letting the person in authority know about the bullying. Ben didn’t have control over his classmate, but the driver did. Ben chose to throw a water bottle at the bully’s head. The driver was never given a chance to intervene on his own bus. This is why I had Ben apologize to him, but not to Brian. This brings up rule 4.
A final rule is that the person who has been bullied should never be asked to apologize to the bully. I asked Ben to fix the step he missed, but not to apologize to the person he hit. He might choose (or offer) to apologize for going too far, but should not be made to do that. Bullying involves an imbalance of power, and when the person in authority asks others to apologize to the bully, it rewards the bully’s behavior.
Standing up to bullies the right way is an important lesson in all of our lives, and I realized too late I hadn’t given my children direct instruction in how to do it. I was especially proud that my son stood up to someone else’s bully. It is normal to stand up against your own bully, but developing an empathy for others and standing up for them is, in my mind, the best use of our skills and strengths.
Jack Jose is an educator and author in Cincinnati, Ohio.