Nineteen Minutes

I just finished reading the book Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. I chose to read it because I had heard from several people that it is a book every teacher should read. As it turns out, this book was about a school shooting that occurred because a young high school student had been bullied his entire life, and how the victims, their families, the community, and even the shooter deal with the aftermath. It tied in alarmingly well with what we have been talking about in class in regards to cyberbullying and teaching appropriate use of the web. The young man in this book was bullied on many different levels: physically, emotionally, verbally, and eventually an email he had written expressing his feelings for a girl he liked fell into the wrong hands and was sent to every inbox of every student in his entire high school. It is frightening and depressing to realize how little control we have over bullying of all kinds. Students complain about being bullied all the time but so much of it is done "behind closed doors" that teachers and schools can only do so much. And now we have "invented" this whole new way of bullying. Not on the bus or in the halls between classes, but on the computer where it is so easy to hide behind what you are really doing. The combination of our class discussions and reading this book made it all the more evident to me how important it is that we try to reach as many of our students as possible in regards to appropriate Internet use and how one mistake (however innocent it may seem) can change the lives of many people.