Gossip may seem like an exciting pastime during lunch or passing period to talk to your friends, but it can have a harmful effect on the learning environment, especially in high school.
The truth is that gossip isn’t fun, and it hurts the people the gossip is about. In addition, it is counterproductive. The majority of people gossip about someone because they have problems with a peer that they have difficulty resolving.
The aforementioned peer may have been a close friend or someone they trusted dearly, so whatever they did has hurt this person, but they are struggling with how to communicate this to their peer.
So, instead of communicating, they tell another friend, who will tell another person, which will transform this scenario into gossip. Granted, maybe the friend did make a mistake and didn’t mean for it to spread. But that still does not excuse spreading rumors as opposed to communication.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help with solving the initial problem of resolving their disputes and strengthening their friendship, but instead makes the situation worse.
As high schoolers, it is our right to talk about whatever we want with our friends. However, at the same time, it is also our responsibility to maintain a conducive environment where we all feel comfortable coming to school and being a community.
The solution? Addressing our concerns openly.
If you have a problem with someone in school, regardless of how big or small the issue is, it is always easiest to resolve it by communicating with them. Instead of spreading rumors of how one person supposedly did something, we should turn our focus to productive and open conversations.
As mature, young adults in an ever-changing time, we must be empathetic. We should turn to our peers and lend a helping hand, not badmouth them. It’s important to place yourself in the shoes of the student someone is gossiping about to consider how you would feel. More often than not, the student feels isolated and hurt.
As a student body, we must work together to avoid any individual student facing the burden of isolation.
At such a big school as Van Nuys High School, building a community is valuable. Our peers are the people we spend four years with during a time of great growth, maturing and development. We should be a community that can depend and rely on one another instead of being a group built upon gossip.
Gossip can be suffocating but friendship is healing. Let’s build a harmonious school community by letting go of activities like gossiping and instead focusing on nourishing our community with the most powerful tool we all own – communication.
