I recently had the enormous pleasure of being interviewed by Beatrice Petelo, an 8th grade student at High Tech Middle School in San Diego, located on a former Naval facility. She wanted to talk to me about my life’s path and decisions as part of an assigned project. And since I was someone trained in journalism who wrote for newspapers overseas, then worked on two U.S. newspaper chain newspapers, then went into entertainment, then veered back into extensive new media news and commentary writing, it was an interesting interview. During the talk, when I mentioned my special national school tour last school year where I drove 49,000 miles and did my show at 260 schools at all levels, she asked about bullying. And, yes, I told her, many of the schools that i visited from Vermont to Louisiana to Washington state requested an anti-bullying message.
She then told me that as a project the students at the school made their own anti-bullying film using kids and staff. AND puppetry.
It is quite fascinating, has a strong message and is GREAT.
And here it is:
P.S. She conducted a GREAT interview.
OF RELATED INTEREST:
My nationally syndicated Cagle Cartoons columns on bullying are HERE and HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.