Personal Narrative: My Ethical Dilemmas In School

Almost everyone goes through conflicts throughout their lives. Some people experience these conflicts when they are old and some come across their dilemmas when they are young. At a young age I had to choose what the right thing to do was. This choice I had to make has had a big impact on my life and others.

I had faced mine earliest ethical dilemma in the first grade. Most of the time I felt quite happy at school; I liked my teacher and had a lot of friends from different groups. But there was one thing I really didn’t like at all. Every day I saw the same boy in my class tease and bully the same girl during recess. The boy never bothered me, but was very careful to tease the girl where teachers couldn’t see it happen, or during times adult

supervision was scarce. It was the same thing every day: the boy would approach the girl, call her names, and follow her until she was just on the verge of crying. Then he would laugh and walk away saying, “I was just kidding!”
What was hardest for me to deal with was the fact that no one ever said anything to the teachers.

Sometimes he or someone else would try to stick up for the girl, but that only stopped the teasing that day. It would just begin again the next. And every day I struggled with the same thorny question of whether or not to tell on the bully.

I feared that if I went to a teacher it would get out that I was the one who tattled, and I didn’t want the boy to start bullying me instead. I also knew how most of the kids in my class felt about tattletales. There was a very strong code of silence around teasing and bullying. Yet, I hated to watch this poor girl brace herself every day when the recess bell rang.

I decided to talk to one of my best friends from church expecting her to have the right answer and encourage me to stand up for that girl. To my surprise, like everybody else at my school she told me to just ignore her. That night before I went to sleep I decided to read the Bible and see what Jesus had said about this. With a miracle performed by God I turned to the exact verse I needed to reinsure my notion. Proverbs 31:8 says, “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. With this idea in my head I decided to sleep on it before I do something

drastic.
The next morning at school I saw that innocent girl being bullied again and I officially decided to make a change and take a stand for her. With one leap of faith I jumped between the bully and the girl yelling to get the attention of teachers knowing that this could be the end and I could be losing my friends and having everybody hate me. After confronting the bully, all of my friends stood there with their mouths wide open thinking I was the craziest person in the world. Thinking that all my friends would just act normal was just in my imagination. One by one my friends turned on me and said I was tattle tail and none of them wanted to be my friend.
At the end of the day the girl who was bullied for long was so grateful for what I had done for her. In that moment I knew I did the right thing. Even though I was now the person being bullied this experience taught me who were my true friends. I ended up with one true friend that was there for me and I knew that was enough.