Speaker electrifies Mount Vernon middle schoolers, tells them to change

Middle school students all over America are wounding each other, and they're a little like the torch-bearing mob in “Beauty and the Beast,” a speaker told an auditorium full of students at Mount Vernon Middle School on Friday afternoon.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but unkind words? They'll break my heart. And there is no surgery,” said Mark Brown, a youth speaker who specializes in talking to junior high students about bullying and has been speaking at Iowa schools all week. Earlier Friday he spoke at West Middle School in Anamosa. On Thursday he was in Solon and Iowa City.

Brown, a native of Jamaica, works for QSP, Inc., a company that helps schools raise money by selling magazine subscriptions. He spends most of his time on the road - 200 speeches a year, 1 million kids, 47 states, six Canadian provinces - and his speech about bullying is honed to a fine point.

He started Friday by outlining the key characters in Disney's “Beauty and the Beast.” He sang, he moved around the room, he made sound effects, and he made fun of himself. The jokes turned serious after he sang aloud a few lines from the song the mob of torch-bearing villagers sing as they prepare to storm the beast's castle:

We don't like

What we don't understand

In fact it scares us

And this monster is mysterious at least

Bring your guns

Bring your knives

Save your children and your wives

We'll save our village and our lives

We'll kill the Beast!

After singing this, Brown stopped and said it aloud. Students often take the same attitude with other students who are different.

“Not every middle school kid has great friends at school,” he said. Many of them have “plastic smiles” and deep pain behind the plastic, because all they get is picked on, and all they want is for someone to extend a hand of kindness, but no one does.

Brown said he was bullied by three sixth-grade girls when he was in grade school - and he's never forgotten it. He recited the names of the three girls.

“How are the people in this room going to feel deep down 38 years from now when they hear your name?” he asked.

Some students are like Gaston, Belle's spurned suitor in Beauty and the Beast: they lead the charge against those who are different, and spread damaging rumors as they go. Others are like the villagers who follow him. Others still are like the Beast, friendless, misunderstood and persecuted.

By a show of hands, the roughly 400 students in the room admitted that each group exists at Mount Vernon Middle School. Brown said everyone fits each description at one time or another.

At the end of the talk, he asked the students to be like Belle, who reached out to someone who was different, even though she took grief for it, and she unlocked the prince that was there all along.

Ben Logan, an eighth grader in the audience, said he's one of the “weird people” in school, and he likes unpopular kids, but he thought Brown's speech was the best summary of middle school politics he'd heard.

“It helps the younger kids understand,” he said.

Lauren Adams, another eighth grader, said students at Mount Vernon Middle School talk about bullying at least once every two weeks, and it's helpful. The problem is, being like Belle isn't always easy. Reaching out to someone who's picked on, can get you picked on.

“I think,” Adams said, “it depends on who you're friends with.”