My brother is a freshman in high school and is only 4’9” and weighs 85 pounds. All through elementary school, he was called names and made fun because he was small. He was called things like “midget,” “little man,” “mini,” and “shrimp.” He would do his best to ignore it, but fifth graders don’t really know what to do in those situations and the school wasn’t doing much to help. In elementary school everyone is friends with everyone and you don’t expect there to be any bullies. So the first time someone picks on you when you are a kid hurts, you don’t know what to do.

Eventually one day on the bus a kid was calling my brother “midget” and picking on him, so my brother stood up and threw a punch. The two of them threw punches until the bus driver stepped in. My brother was sick of getting picked on and didn’t know how to stop it without fighting. Because my brother participated in the physical part of this incident both him and the bully were punished.

In my opinion the bus driver should have stepped in before any punches were thrown. No kid should have to deal with name calling on the bus. And the school supervisors should have done more to prevent the fight in the first place. But I do think it was good that both kids were punished. It was a step to show that bullies will be punished and that violence will not be tolerated. I also think that the school should have educated the students better on how to deal with bullies so that the situation never would have happened in the first place.

After my brother’s incident on the bus the name calling started to stop. Once one of the bullies got in trouble they all started to calm down and stopped with the name calling. Some people still threw the names out there or joked with him about his size. But he learned to ignore it as he got older.

Bullying is always going to be a problem, but I think that if we start educating children while they are younger we can eliminate some of the problems from the elementary and middle schools.