Today, January 23, is the first day of No Name-Calling Week 2012, and happily my new No Name- Calling Week wristbands arrived in the mail today as well.

I’ll probably take my own photo of them later, but right now I’m just using the one from the GLSEN Shop page. As you can see, these are black wristbands with “Words Can Hurt. End the Name- Calling” and the No Name-Calling Week web site URL printed on them in red, along with the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) logo in white and yellow.

To quote from the No Name-Calling Week “About” page:

No Name-Calling Week was inspired by a young adult novel entitled “The Misfits” by popular author, James Howe. The book tells the story of four best friends trying to survive the seventh grade in the face of all too frequent taunts based on their weight, height, intelligence, and sexual orientation/ gender expression. Motivated by the inequities they see around them, the “Gang of Five” (as they are known) creates a new political party during student council elections and run on a platform aimed at wiping out name-calling of all kinds. The No-Name Party in the end, wins the support of the school’s principal for their cause and their idea for a “No Name-Calling Day” at school.

Motivated by this simple, yet powerful, idea, the No Name- Calling Week Coalition created by GLSEN and Simon & Schuster Children’s publishing, consisting of over 40 national partner organizations, organized an actual No Name-Calling Week in schools across the nation. The project seeks to focus national attention on the problem of name-calling in schools, and to provide students and educators with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate name-calling in their communities.

Check out the No Name- Calling Week web site for lesson plans, resources, and other information.

In addition to the No Name- Calling Week wristbands, you can buy No Name-Calling Week buttons, stickers, posters, and even resource kits for your school.

You can also “Like” the Facebook No Name-Calling Week Page to share experiences, artwork, and news with a supportive community.

I’ve already written about some of my experiences with and thoughts about bullying in my “SEE a Bully – STOP a Bully” post, but I wanted to say a little more here specifically about the name-calling aspects of bullying:

I’m sure you’ve heard the line “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me”, but basically all bullying starts with name-calling regardless of whether it ever progresses to physical abuse, and as the graphic says, words can hurt!

Here are some of the ways (I’ll add more later) name-calling does serious damage to all of us:

• Name-calling is often used to single people out for public humiliation.
• Name-calling teaches children to use hate speech regardless of whether they even know the meaning of the insults they’ve heard and are repeating.
• Name-calling is often used to terrorize people with threats of physical violence or other future abuse.
• Name-calling perpetuates bigotry by using names for whole classes of people as insults, as if they were less than human.
• Name-calling perpetuates bigotry by being used on people who don’t conform to rigid gender and other stereotypes.
• Name-calling perpetuates bigotry with its message that a person’s worth is mainly determined by factors such as how they look, or how much privilege they have.
• Name-calling is often used to isolate people by labeling them as fair game for abuse, and making it clear that anyone who objects will likely become a target as well.

More later … I do want to post this while it’s still January 23 :-), but will come back and say more tomorrow.

p.s. If you’re interested in anti-bullying wristbands, check out my posts on the “SEE a Bully – STOP a Bully” wristbands from the American Federation of Teachers and the “End Bullying” wristbands from the Human Rights Campaign as well.

updated October 23, 2013

My 16-year-old Arthur just started his first class at Cabrillo College, and in honor of that I decided to feature my two Cabrillo-related wristbands — one for the Cabrillo Bookstore and the other for the Affordable Textbooks movement.

Cabrillo’s mascot is the Seahawk, but as the bookstore unfortunately doesn’t carry any plush Seahawks, my Reed College griffin has taken on the modeling duty here (at least they both have beaks and wings — click the above picture to see the full version) in a break from its usual “Wildlife Warriors” collar.

“The mission of Cabrillo College is to enhance the intellectual, cultural, and economic vitality of our diverse community by assisting all students in their quest for lifelong learning and success in an ever-changing world.” – from the Cabrillo College Mission Statement

As a community college, Cabrillo College is a tremendous resource for the whole community, and it seems like pretty much everyone in the Santa Cruz area has taken at least one class there at one time or another, from teen homeschoolers to new high-school graduates to parents and grandparents looking for enrichment or career change. I’ve been taking classes there myself (most often in the form of one music class at a time) off and on since 1983, and have definitely gotten many things from the bookstore over the years, from ordinary things like books and supplies to a stethoscope for listening to my older son’s heart when I was pregnant with him. For decades the bookstore was in a kind of cramped room below the cafeteria, but in 2007 it moved into a large and bright space in the new Student Activities Center. Unfortunately they no longer have the nice purple www.cabrillobooks.net wristbands as shown above (or any other Cabrillo wristbands), but back when the bookstore web site was much newer they were giving them away at the bookstore counter.

Like all college bookstores, the Cabrillo bookstore is now suffering from loss of revenue due to online sales — if, say, the bookstore is selling your Psychology textbook for $100 new or $90 used, but there are so many used copies out there that you can get one online for $8, then not many community college students are going to want to be spending possibly more than their tuition on textbooks, if there’s a way to avoid it. Which brings us to the second wristband:

Back in 2008 some of my children’s friends were making up much of the Cabrillo Student Senate (you can see two of them here), and one of the many worthy projects they were working on was affordable textbooks and textbook alternatives. One time on the bus one of them gave me this wristband with (as shown at the top of this posting) “Affordable Textbooks” on one side, and “Join the Movement” on the other. To quote from a June 2008 Facebook event posting:

As you will know if you have have bought a textbook recently, we are currently in the midst of a textbook crisis.
 
72% of the money students at Cabrillo College put towards their education goes to buying textbooks. Textbook costs are rising at four times the rate of inflation. There are only five main textbook companies in the US and they have a monopoly on the market. The same textbook sold in the US and the UK will cost two times as much in the US. Students are being forced to take classes without purchasing the required textbook.
 
Over the past semester at Cabrillo College Elowyn, Sophia, and I have been working to make textbooks more affordable through various means of alternative textbook distribution.
 
You have probably heard us talking excitedly about POD (Print On Demand), textbook requisitions, IPERs (Independently Published Resources), OERs (Open Educational Resources), longer adoption periods, professor checklists, petitions, customized textbooks, and the math department which has decided to use the same math textbook for all sections of math 152 for a longer adoption period.
 
As you may know, the Textbook Committee has decided that the best way to go about bringing all of these issues forward is to make a short documentary summarizing the problems and solutions to the textbook crisis and starring influential members of Cabrillo College faculty, administration, the board, and the student body.
 
We are now finished with the documentary and would like as many people as possible to watch it.

The above was for a public showing of the documentary at Cabrillo College back on June 5, 2008, including a presentation by and Q&A with the Cabrillo Student Senate Textbook Committee, but you can also watch it right here! Educate yourself about this important issue, which has been getting more critical every year!

p.s. The Textbook Committee and friends were also responsible for setting up the Textbooks 4 Change web site, which donates a percentage of online textbook purchases to either The Courage Campaign (online organizing for full LGBT equality), Special Delivery San Diego (delivering meals to people living with AIDS, cancer, and other critical illnesses), or Project Pueblo (providing adequate shelter, clean water, electricity, and community resources to disadvantaged residents of the Navajo Nation while fighting against poverty and social injustice), at no added cost to the buyer. You don’t have to be a Cabrillo student to use this site — anyone needing textbooks can buy them through Textbooks 4 Change to help make the world a better place, at again, no additional cost.

updated August 13, 2013

For my first post in this blog I’m going to take the LIFO route and describe the newest bracelets in my collection — two of these “SEE a Bully – STOP a Bully” anti-bully bands from the American Federation of Teachers (free for AFT members, and only a dollar each to non-members). To quote the AFT:

“When students see their teachers or anyone wearing the blue wristband, it will serve as a signal to students that they are not alone, that school is a safe haven, and that they can turn to and depend on their educators to deal with bullying or harassment.”

Stopping bullying is a subject near and dear to my heart, as a parent, as a person who helps to facilitate events for young people, and as a person who was subjected to years and years of it herself: In the summer between fifth and sixth grade, my family moved from Madison, Wisconsin — in my experience a friendly and fascinating college town where I was accepted and encouraged to be myself — to a “suburban hell” area of Colorado where I immediately became a target for school bullies (of the spoiled bored rich boys variety), who kept after me all the years from sixth grade up until I graduated from high school.

All young people deserve to be treated with respect and not bullied by schoolmates, school personnel, family members, and so on. It’s such a horrible thing when bullies slam down your hierarchy of needs so much that instead of being able to devote yourself to learning, planning for college, etc. your main concern in school becomes just to survive the bullying.

Although the “SEE a Bully – STOP a Bully” wristbands are new this year, they follow a tradition of blue anti-bullying wristbands: BBC Radio One’s “Beat Bullying” wristbands were such a hit — selling 100,000 on their first day of availability alone — that it was them (rather than the LiveStrong bracelets) that really popularized “awareness wristbands” in the UK, way back in 2004.

In the United States the anti- bullying movement didn’t really take off until September of 2010, when columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller started the “It Gets Better Project” (no wristbands yet, but they do have “It Gets Better” shirts, hoodies, beanies, and a book) to provide hope and support for lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and other bullied teens.

“Two months later, the It Gets Better Project (TM) has turned into a worldwide movement, inspiring over 10,000 user-created videos viewed over 35 million times. To date, the project has received submissions from celebrities, organizations, activists, politicians and media personalities, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Lambert, Anne Hathaway, Colin Farrell, Matthew Morrison of “Glee”, Joe Jonas, Joel Madden, Ke$ha, Sarah Silverman, Tim Gunn, Ellen DeGeneres, Suze Orman, the staffs of The Gap, Google, Facebook, Pixar, the Broadway community, and many more. For us, every video changes a life. It doesn’t matter who makes it.” – from the It Gets Better Project About page

Back at the beginning of 2007 I was sitting on the floor reading Kate Bornstein’s book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws during a break in my children’s Henry IV, Part 1 rehearsal, and it was quite the eye-opener, addressing not just school bullying, but all sorts of discrimination, oppression, control, and meanness as part of a general “bully culture”.

The book is among other things sort of a proto It Gets Better video (it even says “It Gets BETTER” in big letters on the back cover, and contains an illustration of a person giving an “It gets SO much better!!!” presentation) in book form, so you can easily carry the author’s warm, friendly, and often outrageous voice, story, and advice around with you, or hand it to friends. (September 2012 update: I saw Kate Bornstein read/speak at Bookshop Santa Cruz last month and she was fantastic.)

p.s. I really should take my own photo of these bracelets instead of just using the AFT one, because they’re actually an indigo/blue- jeans color rather than the royal blue shown at the top of the page. They’re also a little translucent, and have a slight curvature instead of being just straight up and down.

p.p.s. If you’re interested in anti-bullying wristbands, check out my posts on the ‘End Bullying’ wristbands from the Human Rights Campaign and the No Name-Calling Week ‘Words Can Hurt. End the Name-Calling’ wristbands as well.

updated August 8, 2013