Please Stop Laughing at Me
By: Jodee Blanco, Report By: Madeline Calvert
Summary
Please stop laughing at me, By Jodee Blanco, takes you through the life of her young self. She undergoes torment from all of her peers from her point of view. It starts out as name calling and quickly becomes physical abuse! Whether it was her clothes, or even her friends, she gets bullied in every way imaginable. Even though her parents try to help, there is nothing that stops these bullies from the constant grief they put on her. This book shows you what it is like in the eyes of someone who is bullied and the sadness it can cause them.
Jodee
Jodee is someone who took her experiences getting tormented daily and is now an activist against bullying. She was mature and always longed for friendship. “What a desperate, pathetic fool I was. Time after time, my "friends" had shown me their true colors. Yet, I still wanted to believe they were sorry for causing me pain. p. 128” She was outcasted by her peers through elementary, middle, and even high school in several ways, for several reasons. Even though she was tormented, she had always defended people in need, even though it meant facing the "mean popular crowd".
Jodee giving advice to a bullied adolescent's mother.
Conflict
Jodee has many types of problems in her story. The main type of problem is character vs. character. Jodee was beaten, and constantly verbally harassed by her peers. She tried to solve the conflict by moving schools, going to get professional help, and many others. She finally stopped being bullied after high school but it still has an affect on her.
“As they approached me, Reese dug his hands into his pocket and extracted what looked like a small chunk of cement. He held it up for me to see, then pulled back his arm as if he were pitching a baseball and whipped it at me. I sprang to my right to avoid being hit, but I wasn’t fast enough. I winced as it smashed into my shoulder. How could Reese do that to me? I had helped him feel included in our crowd by finding sugar-free candy for him. Hot tears stung my cheeks. Suddenly, tiny jagged hunks of mortar were being hurled at me from all sides. My hands over my face, I tried to run home, but the assault was too relentless. ‘Please stop, you guys’, I pleaded. My knuckles and wrists were swollen and bloody. Red welts covered my skin. I didn’t know which was worse, the physical or the emotional agony,” pg. 116-117.
Theme
I think that one theme in Please Stop Laughing at Me could be that when something bad happens in your life, and when people make your life almost too hard to live, you have to get through it, and then you can change it into something that is really good and helpful to other people. You can change people’s lives no matter where you come from.
Blanco has written several books about bullying in order to educate people about the matter.
Textual Evidence
I think that the most powerful part of the book was when Jodee got bullied and tormented so severely, that she saw she had no reason to live. That is really powerful because it proves the fact that not only words hurt, but bullying has such a negative effect on kids lives.
“When you’re a victim of any kind of abuse, you can do one of two things. You can learn how to turn your pain into purpose and make a difference in the world, or you can allow it to extinguish the light inside you.” (p. 213) I think that this is the most meaningful quote in the book because through all that Jodee has been through, she chose to remain hopeful and do something great and inspiring with her life.