Teasing

Being in middle school, teasing is bound to happen sometime.  Whether you tease someone or someone teases you, at some point in your middle school years, you're going to have to deal with it.  For some students, teasing is part of their every day life.  Some tease to bully or put down others because it makes them feel better about themselves maybe because they are jealous of the other person.  Some tease to be the class clown or the funny guy or gal.  Sometimes students tease because of peer pressure.  Friends in their group may pick on someone else and they feel pressured into doing the same because they don't want to be the person teased.  If you're the one being teased, to deflect that negative attention you may tease someone else just to try to get them off your back.  Teasing can also start off playful and fun, especially if you're with friends.  Playful teasing can be ok as long as no one crosses the line and offends someone else.  It's easy to cross this line and it takes a mature person to realize when this happens.  Most of the time, middle schoolers are not that mature and feelings get hurt.  If you've ever been teased, you know that it sucks.  For this week's blog post, I want you to think about this topic carefully.  When was the last time that you teased another person?  Was it a sibling?  Someone on the bus?  A friend?  Think back and try to remember how it happened.  How did it start?  Did you start it?  Did anyone's feelings get hurt?  How would you know if they did?  

Think back to a time in which you hurt someones's feelings by your teasing.  How did it make that person feel? How did it make you feel to know you hurt someone else?  Describe that time and can you use that example to learn something from it?  See if you can come up with three things to tell me about it.  It can be about what you learned from it or how you could do something different the next time a situation like that happens, or a combination of both.  

My favorite vlogger, Casey Neistat, has a good video on haters but it has some swearing in it so I'm not going to post it.  Teasing is definitely a form of hating on someone and he summed it up nicely when he stated, "Haters are losers."