School has always been a major part of my life. I had a bad home life and school was suppose to be a place I could get away from that. I love to learn and I am currently in College to become a High School Mathematics teacher. I did wonderful in school I almost always had good grades and was considered a nerd. I still can't figure out what is so bad about being smart? Everything about school was fine except the bullying. I have been dealing with bullying my entire school career, all the way from kindergarten through high school, even a little in college. In elementary school it was stupid jokes from my peers but mostly just high school kids who thought I was an annoying little girl. The worse years for me were middle school and my last two years of high school. In middle school kids were just mean. I had recently moved from Arkansas to Ohio and had a thick southern drawl. I had also gained ALOT of weight the previous year and got the worse hair cut in the history of hair cuts(at least for a 6th grade girl in the 2000's a Mullet was considered torture). i was called Joe Dirt and Fat. Most kids thought i talked too much(which was probably true but doesn't mean you have to tell me how much you don't like me because of it) and they teased me about being smart. No one ever really hit me because i wasn't one to really talk back or say anything. I did have one teacher in middle school who seen a girl threatening me and he made sure something was done about it. Kids told me that if i joined the cheerleading squad that they would quit football because they didn't want to see me in that outfit, I was told i was just white trash and should live in a dumpster, and most kids didn't want anything to do with me because they thought i was weird. In the last two years of high school i experience a huge attitude change. Up until this point(even though i had been bullied my whole life) i had never had trouble making friends. But once again i was the new girl in a new school, i was a nerd(and proud), and i was kinda chubby. When it first started it was mostly boys making mean comments and girls who thought they could get away with anything saying the first horrible thing they could think of. I was told to shut up most everyday by at least one person and most the people in my graduating class didn't even talk to me unless they wanted help with homework. Then i started dating a girl. I was called so many horrible things i can't even remember. I went to my junior prom completely alone and didn't even go to my senior prom because i didn't see why i needed to repeat that horrible experience again. My home life had dramatically changed and by the time school ended i would have rather been anywhere but at school. If I ever had the opportunity to go back to high school, lets just say i would rather cut off my own leg. I want to be a teacher for many reason and one of those reasons is the hope that i may be able to save someone from having to experience the same things i did when i was in school. I really hope that one day bullying can be quashed, there are many things that need to happen and one of those is for people to realize that not just the schools can change it parents need to open their eyes to what is happening. Another thing is that the schools need to realize that, although they don't want to see it and turn a blind eye to it, bullying happens in all schools everywhere. Instead of not doing anything about it or telling the kids to work it out on their own, they need to remember back to when they were kids and how it felt for them. If they were not bullied good for them, although i don't believe you, but know that kids are very impressionable. Kids determine what they can or cannot do by your reaction to what they did. if you ignore the bullying eventually it will get bad enough to really effect how someone thinks of themselves. I never wanted to die but i did cut myself. I felt like i deserved to be punished because i must have done something for people to treat me this way. My graduation was one of the happiest moments of my life but for all the wrong reasons. School was hard no one wanted to listen and most of the time refused to believe saying "there is no way 'bullies name' would have done that they are an outstanding student". I am now almost 22 and am a junior in college. I survived being bullied for 13 years of my life and there are signs of it everyday. However, i wouldn't change a thing because it has made me who I am and NO BODY can tell me I am not a good person anymore.