Mobbing

Or what my son learnt at school on Monday...

Monday my 12 year old had 'anti-mobbing' training at school.

A double lesson was taken up and we had to pay for the priviledge (5.60)

Mobbing, in case you're not aware is the term for bullying. I'd never come across it before moving to Germany but I'm informed by my 12 year old that 'mobbing' is also used in the English school system.

Last week the boys had all been joking that they were going to get a lesson in how to more effectively bully others...but that would be mobbing training and this was 'ANTI-mobbing' so surely they would spend the 90 minutes learning about respect for others, why it wasn't a good idea to bully someone else and so on....

No.

Instead it was all about how to react if you were the object of mobbing, what to do if you received verbal abuse, which seemed to consist of the trainer picking on various members of the class and abusing them by calling them names...

They learnt;

- don't stare (I can't believe a German trainer had the nerve to tell a classroom full of German kids not to stare, it's the national passtime! I'm sure they learn it at their mother's knee)
- basic social skills, like offering your hand to be shaken
- group work, by ordering themselves alphabetically and standing on their chairs....
- if threatened hand over your cash
- and my son personally enhanced his vocabulary*

As I said, one part of the course involved the trainer asking for volunteers (and picking on people also) and then standing opposite them giving them abuse, to which they were supposed to show no reaction... the abuse included
- fruchtzwerg (literally fruit gnome, a chewy sweet)
- transa* (transexual)
- bastard* (they pronounce it with the emphasis on the 2nd syllable)
- your mom's a lesbian (oddly this is actually true of the child he gave this abuse to, but my son insists the trainer didn't know...)

The weird thing is that the (to me) whole crux of the matter, i.e. DON'T MOB, wasn't mentioned, at all...

Crazy Germans.