They Don't Like Me: Lessons on Bullying and Teasing from a Preschool Classroom

I have read three or four of the books out nowadays about bullying and I liked this one the best. Instead of easy answers ("just tell your child these three things") it opts for a much more time-consuming but more rewarding approach that helps the children explore their own views on bullying in particular and issues of unfair treatment in general. Since the question of how one should think, feel, and behave when faced with unfair treatment is such an important issue for all children and adults, I wish every teacher of young children would read this book, and I wish I had had Ms. Katch for a teacher.

The subtitle of this book, "Lessons on teasing and bullying in a preschool classroom" led me to believe that it would be easy to cull those lessons, allowing me to immediately ease the teasing and bullying I see in my own preschool classroom. This is not a book with easy answers, and as I began to read, I don't believe it was intended to be such. It is a very enjoyable read, fast and easy, about the day to day interactions of the author's own classroom. She utilizes some wonderful methods of interacting with and empowering the children, and for this reason I could easily recommend this book be required reading in a college teacher prep course. But in an effort to go deeper into her understanding of bullying, she digresses from her class to interview her brother (a former teaser, now a social worker) and high school students on their experiences. Quite frankly, reading the high school dialogue became tedious (however brief it was) with all the "Like's" that could have just been assumed by the reader. Overall, I did devour this book and would recommend it to my fellow teachers, (...)