Text Box: Beating the Bully Once upon a time not to long ago, but not yesterday either there lived a very little boy named John> John was smaller than every boy in his third grade class. He was even smaller than every girl. AS you might suspect John was not very good at sports. He couldn’t hit the ball in baseball, he couldn’t make a basket in basketball, and he would never ever even try playing football. John spent a lot of time reading in the school library. John was not only smaller he was smarter than every kid in his third grade class. John got all A’s on his report card. This was so long ago they were still giving letter grades instead of pass and fail. If they had measured reading skills in those days which they didn’t he would have been many grades above his grade. The wonderful thing is that John was not unhappy. He didn’t mind being small. He didn’t mind being called Squirt, his nickname. He didn’t mind having no sports ability. He liked who he was. He loved to read and dream. He4 had wonderful parents who taught him to be kind and loving and that he was very important in the eyes of God. John’s life was wonderful . Except for the school bully, Billy. Billy tried to make John miserable. He delighted in tormenting him. Every Wednesday he took John’s lunch money so John had no lunch. Once he pushed him into a mud puddle. Ruined John’s best pair of pants. John told his parents about Billy but they said he had to try to love him. They said that Billy was not happy so he wanted others to be unhappy as well. This, of course, is good advice but hard to take when someone who is three times your size is working at making your life hell. So John spent his recess in the library instead of the playground. Billy was forced to pick on somebody else which of course he did. He made as many kids miserable as possible. You would think the teachers would do something about this bully but they didn’t. They never seemed to notice. Their motto seemed to be let the kids work out their own problems. One very nice day John de4cided to risk going out to the playground. He waited until everybody else had gone and hoped that Billy wouldn’t notice him. When he got there he saw Billy picking on little Margaret and she was about to cry. So john ran over and got between them. “Leave her alone “, he said.” You just leave her alone.” At that point our Bully pulled back and hit John right smack in the eye. It was quite a shiner. But Margaret looked on John as her hero and John felt heroic despite the pain. Like the characters in the books he read he had rescued a damsel